Dune Awakening will have a smart fix for the age old problem of faction imbalance: a third faction dedicated to levelling the playing field

Faction imbalance is a problem as old as MMOs themselves, one must only look at World of Warcraft servers being dominated by either the Alliance or Horde as an example of how players love flocking to the faction leading the pack. Dune Awakening is no different, though according to creative director Joel Bylos, the team has a solution in the works to combat it: a third faction.

In a press Q&A earlier this month, I asked Joel about how the team hopes to fight this problem, to which he responded with the following: “That’s a great question. Oh my god. It’s the eternal question I would say. In our beta, we see a 7:1 ratio between Atreides and Harkonnen. We’ve got all kinds of cool stuff we’re going to do to try and change those ratios.”

Bylos elaborates: “We have a third faction in mind that we would like to introduce to the game, that I don’t know if we’ll be adding to the game at launch, or slightly after launch. I think the approach we’re taking with the third faction will ensure a level of balance in the other factions. That’s sort of our goal, to design around this happening.”

“I mean it’s always a difficult thing, right? We’ll have to see where we end up. I think the other thing we can do is kind of interesting. We haven’t gone too far down this path yet, but we can always try to population balance by connecting different maps to different deep deserts, and figure out how players actually play together. So if there’s huge faction imbalances we can incentivize both sides to change. There are arbitrary mechanics in the game, you can switch factions.”

He concluded with a fun quote from the closed beta Discord: “Harkonnen have the best drip.”

This raises all kinds of interesting questions, the most pressing being: who would this faction be? Well, there are two main forces that stand out. The first would be some kind of Fremen faction, though it’s been established that they have largely been wiped out from the region Dune Awakening takes place in. I’d rather place my bet on some kind of imperial faction, one interested in keeping both Atreides and Harkonnen at roughly the same level of power, so neither find themselves in a position of power against the emperor himself. That’s just me though: speculate away!

What do you think of this third faction idea? Let us know below!