Today’s Dune: Awakening patch has removed the ability to damage other players in PvP by ramming them with your vehicle, killing the popular PvP tactic.
Tactic is perhaps too strong a word. Hordes of players in Dune: Awakening’s Deep Desert end game zone were tracking solos down in orniphopters. If they found them in an orniphopter of their own, they’d shoot them down with missiles.
The real problem emerged if they were on foot. Prior to the patch, if you were hit by a orniphopter you’d be knocked down into a revive state. These pilots then waited for you to self-revive, then crushed you again, leading to a loop of roadkillification.
This trend didn’t go down particularly well, with creative director Joel Bylos popping onto Reddit to say the team were working on a fix. This appears to be that fix, and it’s going down well among the community. Ciyeelo on Reddit responded with: “Thank fucking god because so-called beta testers Guild with 🤓 10k hours of game play was abusing this Day 3 of the early release.”
Others still desired additional changes. A popular sentiment is that the vehicles themselves should take damage when taking major bumps. As Illustrious-Hawk-898 puts it: “Being able to ride a buggy off the rim of the Hagga Rift to the bottom, and not taking damage; or flying a thopter into a wall at 160km are some of the most immersion breaking aspects of this game”.
So what does this mean for the future of Dune: Awakening? Well, big groups of orniphopter gangs will likely still remain a powerful threat. Even if they can’t ram you, five of them rushing you all at once is a little insurmountable. However this change should allow players to line up shots with Lasguns and Rocket Launchers a little easier, especially once more players get their hands on the tier six materials required to create them.
These twists and turns are to be expected in a large PvP setting like the one present in Dune: Awakening’s end game. If it sounds like something you’re interested in, why not check out Eurogamer’s Dune: Awakening review! It covers the end game, describing it as a “weekly political boxing match that I’ve found endlessly captivating”.