Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Unlock instant access to exclusive member features. Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. After spending the better part of a year sanding down the edges of Dune: Awakening's PvP system, Funcom has finally decided to throw in the towel. In a new developer update for April, Funcom said it's become clear that it needs to "rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game," and so it's disabling all PvP zones in Hagga Basin and adding separate PvP and PvE instances for endgame players. Effectively mandatory PvP in Dune: Awakening's Deep Desert endgame zone—basically, if you want to get the really cool stuff, you have to risk getting ganked by other players—has been one of the most persistent complaints about the game. Funcom said in June 2025, just a couple weeks after Dune: Awakening launched, that its goal "is not to force PvE players to interact with a PvP system that they may have no interest in," and just days later it split the Deep Desert in half, leaving the northern half PvP-enabled, while the southern portion was made PvE only. But that didn't stop complaints, and after more tweaking and tuning through multiple subsequent updates, Funcom has seen enough. "With over 80% of our lifetime players exclusively engaging with PvE content, the convergence of PvE and PvP, particularly in the Deep Desert, didn’t align with our objectives and remained a significant topic of discussion," Funcom wrote in today's update. "Combining our goals, the in-game data, and the results of player surveys, made it clear that we needed to rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game. While PvP conflict is an important aspect of Dune: Awakening for some, it must be optional and incentivized rather than required for progression."