Dune: Awakening to get self-hosted servers, plus they're splitting PvE and PvP

Funcom are finally dealing with some of the wider issues in the MMO Dune: Awakening, which includes expanded self-hosting support and more focus on PvE.

In an announcement on Steam the developers noted that they're trying to balance priorities with the struggling MMO, which has seen player numbers drop pretty sharply from the original release. While the game originally blended the PvE and PvP worlds together, they're now going to be making the PvP a lot more optional. Why? They said "over 80% of our lifetime players exclusively engaging with PvE content" so forcing PvP in some areas appears to have been working against it.

With that in mind they're making PvP much more optional with these major changes coming:

• All PvP zones in Hagga Basin will be disabled across all official Worlds.
• All official Worlds will have separate Deep Desert instances you can choose from:
  • A PvE instance for pure survival and exploration experience with no player combat. There is no PvP in this instance across any of the rows, including Shipwrecks.
  • A PvP instance with the classic high-stakes environment and open-world conflict across rows B through I. To make sure the rewards match the risk, the yield from mining and spice harvesting will be multiplied by 2.5 in PvP areas.

And, in a win for game preservation, they've announced that self-hosted servers are finally coming to the game. You could previously rent some private areas from certain hosting platforms, but this mixed with the bigger public areas. It wasn't the best solution but now they're going to be changing that with full self-hosting. This is great, as Funcom will inevitably move on from the game at some point, so at least everyone who wants to will be able to just host the full thing themselves.

Here's how they explained the changes coming for that:

Self-hosted Servers Are Coming!

We are thrilled to announce that Self-Hosting is coming to Dune: Awakening. Whether you want to host a private server for friends or foster a community with unique rules, the power is moving into your hands.

The initial iteration, which will be available for testing soon, will require a few extra steps to set up and feature a limited range of customization settings. These settings will include resource harvesting rates, adjustable limits on base building pieces, or item durability and base decay options, with more customization settings being rolled out later. All these customization options will also be available on private servers right from the start. We are releasing it early to get feedback on this experimental version and improve it alongside you. More features and improvements will be added throughout the year.

Full instructions on how to set up and customize self-hosted servers will be included in the patch notes when the feature becomes available. Please be advised that the initial setup for this first iteration of the feature is more technical than most other games and requires a computer running Microsoft Windows Pro with Hyper-V in order to run the servers in a Linux Virtual Machine (VM).

We are, of course, still working on future updates. The goal is to work on improving these customization tools along with those releases, but we will talk about that in dune time. We are excited to continue crafting a survival experience that can stand the test of time in the new era of Dune: Awakening.

Thank you for walking this path with us.