Dune Awakening’s early meta is an unbalanced, helicopter-infested nightmare, and I never want it to end

The Dune: Awakening community is torn right now. In the Deep Desert, roaming hordes of orniphopters (the Dune equivilent of a plane or helicopter) are dominating the end game and making an already dangerous area even more perilous. The thing is, I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s good for the game in the long run.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Deep Desert is a no-holds-barred open world PvP area that makes up the majority of Dune: Awakening’s end game. It’s a vast, mostly barren, landscape where the best materials can be found. It’s also a place where any player can kill you and snatch any money or materials you have on you.

So the stakes are high. At the moment, the Deep Desert is being patrolled by Assault Orniphopters. They may not be able to crush you to death anymore, but they’re still armed with missiles, allowing pilots to shoot down other orniphopters with relative ease. One can be evaded easily enough, but when eight of them fly towards you, you’re done for.

As you can imagine, there are numerous complaints about these flocks of orniphopters dotted around social media and Dune: Awakening community hubs. Take this Reddit post conveying the sadness tied to the Deep Desert compared to Hagga Basin. Or this one, in which user nowheels64 makes a plea for the lock-on missile launchers that appear in the recent Dune movies. The frustration is real. It’s palpable.

Those annoyed by the Deep Desert all have valid opinions. It is undoubtedly frustrating when you’re on your own, mining materials, and get blown to pieces from some unseen threat on high. Losing all your things is a bummer, there’s no two ways about it.

But I’m going to make an argument that the scurge of orniphopters isn’t inherently a bad thing for the Dune: Awakening end game. The Deep Desert, the Landsraad – it’s all about collaboration with your fellows within the faction you have chosen. Player guilds are attached by the hip to the Landsraad, and objectives assigned each week are so lofty as to practically require group effort. Could one person theoretically farm up 1,000 Adept swords and hand them in on their own? Sure. Is that the intention? Obviously not.

So where does this leave the player, fresh from Hagga Basin? Well, they’re outnumbered and unable to make a real dent in the Landsraad. The only option is to join a guild, to dive headfirst into the social pool of a very community-focused end game.

Dune: Awakening doesn’t force you to do this, to be a social animal, but it’s so obviously the point that the only other thing Funcom could do to emphasise it further is to build a big neon sign that says “join a guild” in the small PvE slice of the Deep Desert.

I appreciate that this isn’t everyone’s bag. In fact, history has taught us it’s not the majority of people’s preferred way to play. Throne and Liberty lost a lot of players who didn’t want to touch the guild zone control mechanics, no matter how cool sieges looked. Dark Fall Online was incredibly PvP focused, and incredibly niche as a result. In World of Warcraft, if you do a War Mode world quest and see another player PvP tagged, a lot of folks will just /wave and go on with their business.

But with a game like Dune: Awakening, the conflict between the factions is so integral to the mechanics, and even the narrative. You’re on Arrakis during the war of assassins, Landsraad bonuses are faction-wide. It’s Atreides vs Harkonnen baby, all the way down into the mud. To shy away from that would be to separate from the source material in a way I’m not convinced Funcom wants to do.

I’m not going to sit here and tell people they’re playing the game wrong: you play the game you pay for however you want. There’s nothing wrong with popping back to Dune: Awakening when a new faction or major story update happens. But in terms of the Deep Desert, I hope this spirit of danger remains. It can be aggravating, yet it’s also a necessary force to push players into the wider faction conflict. And isn’t that what Dune is really all about?