Dune: Awakening Deep Desert PvP Gets a Reality Check as Funcom Weighs Balance Changes

Funcom has finally given Dune: Awakening players a peek behind the curtain on deep desert PvP, and the short version is simple: the studio knows the current meta is rough around the edges, but it is not about to slam the emergency brake on ornithopters. During a Reddit AMA, senior game director Viljar Sommerbakk and creative director Joel Bylos fielded a barrage of complaints about the deep desert, where air power has become the elephant in the room. The discussion, which lands as Dune: Awakening continues its post-launch life in 2026, painted a picture of a team that is listening, testing, and—admittedly—still connecting the dots.

The three goals behind the deep desert shake-up

Sommerbakk did not pretend to have a magic wand. Instead, he laid out three overarching goals for PvP combat in the deep desert:

• Players should make meaningful decisions about what they bring with them and how they outfit their vehicles.

• Once PvP kicks off, the experience should be reliable, responsive, and clearly understood—the kind of foundation that shapes moment-to-moment decisions in a fight.

• Ground combat needs to feel dependable, which means Funcom is still working on movement desyncs, rubber banding, and ability activation reliability.

Those goals sound sensible on paper, but the devil is in the details. Players have been crying foul over a meta that often feels less like a knife fight in the sand and more like a missile swap meet in the sky. Ornithopters rule the roost, and even after Funcom patched out the ability for ornithopters to goomba stomp players on the ground—a fix that some players have politely called half-assed—air power still dominates. In many fights, pilots trade missiles in the air instead of engaging on the surface with swords, shields, and skills. That is not exactly the Dune fantasy many players signed up for.

No ornithopter-free zones, no rocket-launcher removal

One idea that Funcom is not considering, according to Bylos, is deep desert zones restricted to ground combat. Establishing ornithopter-free zones is not the plan, he said. Instead, the studio wants its adjustments and balancing to drive combat toward the core vision: people competing over points of interest in the Deep Desert. Bylos admitted that the current balance between vehicles and on-foot combat is not tuned to the team's liking, and he said multiple changes are in the pipeline above and beyond the bugs Funcom intends to fix.

Funcom also is not planning to remove rocket launchers from scout ornithopters, another common PvP complaint. The plan is more nuanced: a scout ornithopter's speed and maneuverability will be impacted by its loadout. Specifics were not provided, but the message is clear enough—players will likely have to choose between going heavy or going fast, not both. That should make the assault ornithopter a better choice when a player specifically wants to engage in combat, while still leaving some offensive capability available to the scout for those who want it.

What Funcom is doing	What Funcom is not doing
✅ Tuning vehicle and on-foot balance	❌ Creating ornithopter-free deep desert zones
✅ Making scout ornithopter loadouts affect speed and maneuverability	❌ Removing rocket launchers from scout ornithopters
✅ Fixing movement desyncs, rubber banding, and ability activation	❌ Promising a quick, concrete fix for every PvP complaint
✅ Testing a quality-of-life-heavy patch	❌ Going silent on the deep desert meta

Bylos acknowledged that he was not being very concrete in his answers, but he explained that the team is still planning and watching how people are playing and finding the right points to address. In other words, Funcom is not sitting on its hands, but it is also not going to spill the beans before the changes are ready for prime time. For a live-service game, that is a tough balancing act—players want certainty, but developers need room to test. The deep desert meta is still up in the air, and that phrase is doing double duty here.

Sandwalking is coming, and it will not look ridiculous

Not every AMA nugget was about PvP. One player said they wanted to be a proper desert wanderer, and Sommerbakk responded with a line that should delight Fremen role-players: We will do walking without rhythm. That is sandwalking—the Fremen ability to cross Arrakis without attracting the attention of sandworms. Bylos told PC Gamer in 2024 that Dune: Awakening actually had sandwalking at one point but cut it because it looked ridiculous and made players walk really slowly. Apparently, Funcom has figured out a way to make it not suck.

For Dune fans, sandwalking is not just a novelty emote. It is one of the most iconic bits of Arrakis survival lore, and its absence was a noticeable gap in the game's desert fantasy. If Funcom can make it feel useful rather than silly, it could be a small but meaningful win for immersion. It also shows the studio is willing to revisit ideas that were previously shelved—always a good sign for a game that plans to live for years.

A quality-of-life patch is on the horizon

On the more immediate side, executive producer Scott Junior said the studio is currently testing a patch with a lot of quality-of-life updates and hopes to have it ready for early July. When the patch gets closer to being publicly testable, Funcom will release the full patch notes. Junior said the patch contains too many changes to list in the AMA, but players will be seeing it soon.

That is welcome news for a community that has been dealing with bugs, balance quirks, and the usual growing pains of a multiplayer survival game. Quality-of-life changes rarely make for flashy headlines, but they often do more for player retention than a shiny new weapon. In the case of Dune: Awakening, smoother systems and fewer frustrations could matter just as much as any ornithopter nerf.

The bottom line

Funcom is not promising a silver bullet for deep desert PvP. What it is promising is a direction: meaningful loadout choices, reliable combat, better ground-game reliability, and a willingness to keep tuning until vehicles and infantry share the sand more fairly. The studio is clearly watching the playerbase, even if it is not ready to lay all its cards on the table. For now, Dune: Awakening fans should keep an eye on the early July patch, keep testing the deep desert, and keep the feedback coming. The spice must flow—but so must the patch notes.