Remember back when Funcom told players that it wasn’t going to hook Dune Awakening players up with private servers until quite a ways past the launch? Well, scratch all that and reverse it because it’s happening. As in, this week.
“Today, just about 72 hours before the floodgates open, we can finally share with you that rentable private servers will be available from head start launch on June 5th,” the studio announced this morning. “We’ve previously communicated that private servers are for post-launch, but we’re happy to share that progress has been faster than expected. We do, however, want to manage expectations about how private servers work in Dune: Awakening. As you know, this is not your typical survival game.”
That’s, you know, because it’s pretty much still an MMORPG with persistence and hundreds of MMOs in hubs and zones. Anyhow, Funcom has a plan because it does “not want to remove the large-scale multiplayer aspects of the game as that is such a crucial part of the Dune: Awakening experience” and the devs “knew [they] had to come up with a solution that retained the fundamental MMO-like features that make Dune: Awakening so unique[.]”
In other words, you’re not going to have survivalbox-esque control over these servers if you rent one. You’ll rent a private server for Hagga Basin through third-party outlets (Gportal, Nitrado, xRealm), but it’ll basically be connected to a world with other private servers, and you’ll see players from those servers in your social hubs and the Deep Desert map, which are provided by the server host. You’ll also be able to tweak the security zones, taxation, and sandstorms for Hagga Basin. Further, you can move between pservers, though it sounds like full transfers aren’t in yet.
“[I]f you want a PvP free-for-all Hagga Basin without those pesky taxes and sandstorms, while also being able to invite select other people or even open up completely for strangers to come visit and claim land on your home turf – now you can,” the company says. That’s probably not what you had in mind, though, eh.
Source: Steam
