‘We have people working on fixing the goomba stomping’—Dune: Awakening’s PvP is getting dominated by packs of rabid ornithopter pilots squishing their enemies

Dune: Awakening’s PvP meta has evolved—on the sand-blasted lands of Arrakis, one weapon has been dominating all others. That weapon is ‘let’s repeatedly try and squish someone with our ornithopters like we’re the world’s most inefficient flock of seagulls fighting over a single chip’.

As observed by Bombe18 on the game’s subreddit, vehicles in Dune: Awakening don’t take any damage when they whomp into stuff, which makes anything airborne a supremely effective weapon when you have an ornithopter and your enemy doesn’t.

Dune developpers, I agree to have a defeat in PVP. But been crushed by orni that do not take any damage. No. from r/duneawakening

What ensues in the video above is an unfortunate, but hilarious moment as one streamer is pursued from the air by a pair of horrifying metal dragonflies content on squishing him with their landing gear. English clearly isn’t Bombe18’s first language, but the sheer horror in the thread title is funny enough that I’ll be sharing it mostly unedited:

“Dune developers, I agree to have a defeat in PVP. But been crushed by orni that do not take any damage. No.” You can disagree if you want, but that’s a pretty compelling argument, right there.

This whole debacle comes from the fact that, in Dune: Awakening, repairing vehicles is meant to be a slow fight against entropy. Big-budget items like the ornithopter can take hours to assemble. As such, they only slowly degrade via general use (or, you know, being shot at with rockets). Each repair lowers a vehicle part’s overall durability, meaning all vehicles decay eventually.

The design intent seems to be avoiding frustration from disconnects, crashes, and the like—players work hard to get their ornithopters, so Dune: Awakening’s devs don’t want them losing their vehicles to a mid-flight power cut or server crash. Fair do’s.

The unanticipated consequence being that players, being made of flesh and blood, do take damage from the vehicles colliding into them. Joel Bylos, creative director of Dune: Awakening, stepped in and replied to the thread, writing: “Yeah sorry about this. We have people working on fixing the goomba stomping ASAP.”

While there’s a little part of my heart that’s sad these airborne terrors won’t be stalking Arrakis and gently squashing their enemies into a paste, that’s probably for the best. Contending with the sandworms was already bad enough.