Boy, that escalated quickly. Less than a day after Dune: Awakening‘s PvE patch went into public testing, changes that turn the “entire southern half” of the Deep Desert into a PvE area have been hotfixed into the full game.
This promised change arrives alongside the first of the scout ornithopter balancing tweaks Funcom talked about in their recent AMA, and a couple of other fixes. However, there’s a bunch of stuff put into testing yesterday which hasn’t yet made the jump to public release.
As outlined in the notes for hotfix 1.1.0.17, the biggest thing it does is change the Deep Desert so that the entire southern half of it is made up of PvE areas – a pretty hefty scaling back of the PvP zones it comprised on release. This is in line with what creative director Joel Bylos said in a recent post addressing PvE and PvP concerns.
To ensure the area retains plenty of “Risk vs Reward” for competitive players, the PvP-filled northern part of it contains the densest deposits of valuable resources, the largest spice fields, and most of the control points.
Funcom have made some further balancing tweaks in light of the change, writing: “The lower half of the Deep Desert now offers PvE loot that is balanced toward shared loot and PvE activities. You may find better loot in the more dangerous PvP area located further north on the map. In the PvE area, for example, each player gets their own loot and can expect to receive one schematic. In the PvP area, loot is distributed on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, with higher quantities of everything. Players can expect to find 2–6 schematics there, which are among the rarest.”
If you want to max out the number of schemactics you grab each week, you’ll also need to visit Imperial Testing Stations in both PvE and PvP areas. If you’re a bit taken aback by how quickly these changes have jumped from testing into the full game, like some players on Reddit and Discord, Funcom have made clear they’ll make further adjustments based on player feedback if needs be. By putting these changes live for everyone, they’re bound to get plenty.
Outside of that, the devs have started making tweaks to balance Ornithopters with this hotfix. Equipping a rocket launcher to your bird will now slow it down by 20% if it’s a Scout Ornithopter, and 10% if it’s an Assault one.
We’ll have to see how this pretty huge shift in DA’s endgame area plays out. It’s proven pretty polarising so far, so it’ll be interesting to see whether folks come around to it.
