Funcom announces Dune: Awakening will feature private servers at launch

Here’s how the game’s MMO style world will work with private servers

Dune: Awakening’s head start begins the day after tomorrow, on June 5^th, with full launch arriving on June 10^th. Today, Funcom is excited to announce that rentable private servers will be available beginning with the head start.

Private servers can be rented from several third-party providers, allowing players to have their own server where they decide who has access, and where certain gameplay settings can be adjusted including allowing free-for-all PvP.

Private servers have been one of the most requested features by the community, but it’s not at all obvious that this is now finally a reality.

After all, Dune: Awakening combines the survival and MMO genres, featuring large-scale multiplayer content, mechanics, and gameplay systems with several hundred players sharing the same, persistent world. It’s one of the things that make Dune: Awakening unique in the survival genre, with a broad set of features that are fundamentally MMO-like including shared spaces where players can engage in social activities, trade, and conflict.

So how do you make that work with a private server model?

Same as with official servers, each private server in Dune: Awakening also belongs to a World consisting of several other private servers rented by other players. While your private server can hold 40+ players concurrently, one World can have several hundred concurrent players. All servers in a World share the same social hubs and a massive, constantly changing Deep Desert where players will meet to both explore and engage in conflict over spice.

That means that what makes Dune: Awakening so unique as a survival game when playing on official servers, is retained also for private servers.

Because Dune: Awakening features this shared, large-scale multiplayer setup, naturally there are certain restrictions in just how much you can customize your private server.

For more information about private servers in Dune: Awakening, read our full announcement.

Dune: Awakening launches on PC in head start on June 5^th and in full June 10^th.