When confronted with a new MMO where the best blueprints and resources are hidden in a sprawling and deadly PvP zone, a lot of players have one important question: “So, what if I’m not into PvP?”
Rest assured, you’ll still be able to visit the ‘deep desert’ endgame zone of Dune: Awakening. According to Funcom, as shown in today’s livestream, while the deep desert is almost entirely PvP, there is a sizeable PvE-only area where you won’t have to worry about fighting other players.
“Behind the shield wall, there’s also PvE elements here,” creative director Joel Bylos said on the livestream while showing footage of a guild of players flying in ornithopters across the initial area of Dune: Awakening’s deep desert. “So there are things like shipwrecks that you can raid, there are ecolabs behind [the shield wall],” he said.
“I know people are really worried about doing PvP,” Bylos said. “There is a whole section here, it’s 24 kilometers long where you can actually go and do the PvE part.”
The deep desert is where you’ll find the biggest spice deposits to harvest, as well as control points to claim and fight over and new blueprints to build from or sell. Every week a massive sandstorm completely rewrites the geography and shuffles up the locations—even player bases built in the deep desert get erased on a weekly basis. It’s not a friendly place, but at least there’s a pocket of space where on top of everything else, you don’t have to worry about getting ganked by guilds.
Dune: Awakening executive producer Scott Junior also talked about PvE in the deep desert during the livestream. “It was important for us [to include a PvE zone], so that people that are scared of PvP or reluctant to get engaged with it, that they had a place in the deep desert that they would go to without instantly getting killed” by other players, Junior said.
You can watch the full livestream here: Bylos’ comments about deep desert PvE start at around 1:19:40, Juniors start about 1:16:00.
