Surprise! Dune: Awakening will have private servers at launch after all, where players can disable taxes and enable 'free-for-all' PvP

Dune: Awakening is out in three days (for deluxe and ultimate edition pre-purchasers) but here's a last minute surprise: the survival MMO will support private servers. Funcom announced today that for Dune: Awakening "rentable private servers will be available from head start launch on June 5th!"

It's worth noting you won't be able to go hog wild with your private server settings as you might in a survival game like Ark, where you can change things like XP multipliers or item durability—though one feature, according to Funcom, will allow private servers to enable "free-for-all PvP." More on that below.

In Dune: Awakening, each server is part of a "world" that contains other servers and shares common areas like trading posts, settlements, and the endgame "deep desert" zone. "This allows us to retain a neighborhood-like feel to the Hagga Basin and provide persistent, freeform building, and other server-demanding mechanics you typically see in survival games," says Funcom.

"We combine this with the large-scale multiplayer mechanics you would expect to find in MMOs where hundreds of players meet each other in social hubs and the Deep Desert to engage in social activities, trade, conflict, and more."

Rather than wall off private servers completely from the rest of the community, "each private server in Dune: Awakening also belongs to a World consisting of several other private servers rented by other players," Funcom says.

Each private server can support "40+ players" and a single world can contain "several hundred concurrent players, all who "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."

So, to be clear, private server players won't mix with official server players at all, only players on other private servers.

Still, to prevent players on a private server from having a massive advantage when mingling and fighting with other private server players in the same world, that limits the customization options to a few features like PvP, taxes, and sandstorms.

Here are the features Funcom says private servers will be able to adjust.

• Security Zones: you can disable security zones entirely, making all parts of Hagga Basin PvP enabled, or you can choose to have pockets of PvP like on official servers
• Taxation: you can disable taxation on your server
• Sandstorms: you can disable sandstorms, making them not appear on your server.

That's not a whole lot to get excited about, but it's good news for people who want to be able to fight other players right from the get-go in Hagga Basin, and the idea of not paying your Dune taxes to the Emperor is a nice one. Sandstorms, at least in the early game, aren't that big of a deal: you just have to take cover for about 30 seconds as they pass through the server.

There won't be an admin control panel or the ability to transfer characters between servers, though Funcom says it "will evaluate this functionality post-launch." However, you can visit other private servers and even claim land on them (if you have the server password), something you can't do while visiting official servers.

If you're interested in renting a Dune: Awakening private server, Funcom says they're available through Gportal, Nitrado, and xRealm. Pricing and amount of player slots varies pretty widely between all three services.