Being endlessly staggered by a human opponent isn't a heck of a lot of fun.
The Dune: Awakening beta weekend has come to an end, and along with sandworms, speeders, and spice, there’s another topic on everyone’s mind: stunlock.
We learned over the weekend that Paul Atreides didn’t need to spend all that time training to master the slow blade: he could have just repeatedly slashed his knife around in front of him and conquered Arrakis in a matter of minutes.
That’s because there’s a bit of an exploit in Dune: Awakening’s PvP. Instead of holding the mouse button to perform a slow blade attack, you can just spam a quick knife attack at your PvP opponent, and if they’re at zero stamina they’ll be staggered. Use the brief stagger window to keep slashing, and they’ll be completely unable to defend themselves or escape. Button-mashing FTW, even if they’ve got their protective shield up which, lore-wise, is supposed to defend you against anything moving quickly. It’s… not great.
There are a few clips of this exploit making the rounds, and one of them was even shown to several of Funcom’s developers at the end of a 4-hour livestream this weekend. The clip shows streamer Tyler1 fighting Shroud, both using knives with Holtzmann shields activated. Shroud, out of stamina, is perpetually staggered and Tyler1 keeps spamming knife attacks. It takes a good long while, but the helpless Shroud is eventually killed.
Dune: Awakening’s world director Jeff Gagné and lead producer Ole Andreas Haley were quick to address the exploit and comment on if the exploit will be fixed in the June 10 release.
“It will. We already have a version, internally, that has some of this [problem] already covered,” they said. “The [beta] is a few versions old compared to what we have.”
You can see the clip here at 4:04:16 in the livestream. You can also see it from Shroud’s perspective in the clip below:
“We got this covered,” Gagné added. “It’s not like ‘Oh my god, we haven’t thought about it.’ It’s already going away.”
Weirdly, I’ve seen some players defending the exploit, saying it’s Shroud’s fault for not managing his stamina, but I’m still glad it’s getting a fix. I don’t care how careless you are in a fight, being slowly spammed to death with a knife while you’re helplessly stunlocked isn’t good PvP, no matter if someone was playing recklessly. Combat just shouldn’t work that way, doubly so since the lore says fast-moving blades won’t get through your shield anyway.
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