Man, oh man. Sometimes the Universe smiles upon us, or at least smiles in the same general vicinity as us if not directly at us. For me, and while I might say “and me alone” I know that’s not even remotely true, this is one of those times.

It was recently brought to my attention through Massively Overpowered that PvX sandbox Dune: Awakening was moving away from its originally preferred infrastructure to a more flexible, more traditional design. What does that mean? Dune was designed with an open world PvE area called Hagga Basin. Here, players could engage in limited PvP combat in very specific, very occasional areas. The Deep Desert, however, was originally conceived as a PvP zone. After launch, Funcom made concessions that diminished the PvP areas, allowing greater PvE activities in the Deep Desert. Because the servers were set up, Funcom swore that it was impossible for traditional sandbox game features like self-hosting to work; the Deep Desert was a communal server farm not tied to a specific set of Hagga Basin servers. Players would join a server instance for Hagga, but would be able to mingle with more players in the Deep Desert in their server cluster. Because the Deep Desert PvP was so integral to the spirit of the game, it overrode any other considerations that the player-base was asking for.

What changed? Basically, Funcom has admitted that the original reason for this server split — encouraging PvE players to engage in PvP using the “carrot and stick” model — wasn’t working out the way they hoped it would. According to their April 2026 Developer’s Update post, “…80% of [their] lifetime players [were] exclusively engaging with PvE content…” means, to me at least, that despite Funcom’s original insistence that PvP was the end-game activity that players of Dune: Awakening should be working towards, the majority of players decided to kick back in their bases with a cup of water saying “nah, fuck that.”

It’s funny this dropped today because earlier this morning, another post from MO resulted in a bit of back and forth between the site’s Mastodon account and a contemporary of mine, Kevin Brill. This thread kind of focused on why companies were still trying to “bring back the quote-glory days-unquote of Ultima Online” by beating the chests over their oPvP designs. As the MO post briefly links, oPvP almost sunk UO as players were abandoning the game in droves because of griefing and non-consensual PvP. This game that MO was talking about, Profane, isn’t the only one to attempt invoking half-histories in a bid to market their product by making their targeted demographics feel “underserved” by the current trends in the gaming landscape. I’m sure that some/many/most/all of the developers of Profane and other PvP centric games want the game they are making, and want others like them to want it too, but if Dune: Awakening, a very successful title by all accounts, has to eat crow and admit in a noncommittal way that their insistence that PvP was the way the game had to be to the point where they designed their server infrastructure around it was good on paper but completely missing the mark in practice, what chance do other games have?

We continue to fuck around and find out. Naturally, as this is my blog and these are my thoughts, I can’t help but bring this back around to Star Citizen because that’s my primary game right now as well as where most of my mind-share resides. CIG wants Star Citizen to be a PvP-centric game despite their repeated and emphatic statements that it’s actually a PvE and PvP game. They don’t have a problem tells us that, sure, while players can avoid PvP encounters, the “game is designed to punish them for it”, emphasis mine, by making tasks take longer or outcomes reduced compared to similar time frames or outcomes when engaged through PvP. They call it “risk versus reward” which in itself means that greater risk reaps greater reward, but it also means that no risk means no reward, and while we could go on a tangent about how different segments of the community define “risk”, we’ll just call a spade a spade and say that CIG wants Star Citizen to be a PvP game full stop.

Players see through this; I suppose it’s the fault of the developers to include PvE at all if what they really want to make is a PvP game because once PvE players arrive and find a groove, it really doesn’t matter how hard the design tries to push them into PvP. They’ll refuse. They’ll hunker down. They’ll leave. UO learned it, other games that tried to either split the difference or go whole-hog into PvP learned it, and now Dune: Awakening is learning it too. We’ll never know how much time and effort Funcom could have saved by reading the room and sticking with the PvP-optional design that currently rules the roost in the MMO space. Instead, they’re spending more money to reverse their decisions they were so sure would resonate with everyone.

Now sure, there are PvP-centric MMOs out there which are doing OK. There’s a spate of in-development PvP-dominant titles which seem to be chugging along with what we can only assume is a stable if not overwhelming number of supporters. EVE Online is, of course, the bright spot that I believe CIG is trying to emulate, but it’s doing so much in the way that I’m sure Profane is trying to emulate Ultima Online. Copying a leading game’s mindset has to be trickier than it sounds because the MMO landscape is littered with titles which tried to appeal to a nostalgic sense of when “games were real and unafraid” which never actually existed. Like many appeals of that sort, though, it’s either half the picture, like in the case of UO, or are simply trying to appeal to a completely different demographic than the ones playing MMOs. In truth, PvP isn’t happening in the MMO space. It’s been happening in the lobby shooter space with games like Call of Duty, the Halo series, PUBG, Fortnite, Overwatch, RUST, and the venerable Counter-Strike. That market is now morphing gently into extraction shooters which promise real PvPvE activities. No one gets into ARC Raiders or Marathon without understanding that there is no stark demarcation between PvE and PvP except random happenstance. MMOs like Dune: Awakening and others are trying to appeal to two different camps and are failing both.

I’ve since come to terms with Star Citizen’s two-faced nature in this regard. I’ve been lucky — knock on wood — that I haven’t had any PvP encounters in months. I still would rather this game be more about the “Citizen” aspect of the name than not, and as I passed through Reddit recently, I know that I’m not alone in this as most of the posts in the /r/StarCitizen sub are people complaining about some aspect of PvP (or if the posts are about something else they eventually devolve into complaints about PvP). CIG is sticking with its guns because at this point they’re out of bennies; they can’t afford to do an about-face again to retool their design decisions. I’m sure the decision to de-PvP-ify Dune: Awakening is going to sting Funcom, but personally I appreciate the fact that they’re making the change at all. I stopped playing Dune: Awakening many months ago because I had gone too hard at launch and was burnt out. I didn’t have any plans to play again soon, if ever, but with this announcement I’m thinking that once they nail down the self-hosted servers I’m going to give it another shot. While I do wish that CIG would either own up and admit to their actual focus just to clear the air and set real expectations, or realize what Funcom has realized, I suppose it remains to be seen what their decisions are going to manifest for them. Will they be able to pull of another EVE Online as I’m sure they hope they can, will they go the way of Crowfall who stood by their decision to promote PvP with begrudging side of PvE until it helped strangle them to death, or will they join Funcom several months after launch if they find that most of their players aren’t engaging with one another the way that the design assumed they would? I wish we didn’t have to wait for the chips to fall to get that answer because the odds that a game as large and as divisive as Star Citizen could weather such a reckoning when so many other lesser, quieter titles could not is not a bet I want to take right now.