Dune: Awakening is testing a way to play Arrakis without BattlEye running

Funcom has pushed patch 1.5.15.0 to Dune: Awakening's Public Test Client, and buried in a list of stability fixes is a change a lot of PC players have been asking about since the survival game launched: you will be able to run it without BattlEye.

What changed

The patch adds an option to launch the game without the BattlEye anti-cheat software installed or enabled, aimed at single-player and at private or self-hosted servers that do not need it. The caveat is spelled out in the notes: BattlEye is still required on multiplayer servers that have it enabled, and trying to connect to one from a client without it will throw an error.

That matters more than it might sound. Dune: Awakening added a full single-player mode with its 1.5 update alongside the console launch on September 22, and kernel-level anti-cheat is a recurring complaint among players on Linux, on Steam Deck and anyone who would rather not have it resident for a game they are playing alone.

The rest of the patch

Elsewhere, the speed penalty for gliding with a scout ornithopter carrying a rocket pod module drops from 20 percent to 10 percent - Funcom says that figure is not final and will be tuned during testing for both the scout and assault ornithopters. A crash when using the Base Reconstruction Tool to place a large base is fixed, the shielded enemy in the new player experience now gives you more time to line up a Heavy Attack before hitting back, and there is another round of fixes for reported Story and Journey progression problems, plus general game and server stability work.

Funcom has been patching steadily since the console release - a 1.5.3.4 hotfix on September 24 cleaned up login errors on consoles, missing building sets and save-file problems on Windows - so there is a reasonable chance this reaches live players before long.