Dune: Spice Wars To Go Into Early Access

It is hard to say why I am excited about Dune: Spice Wars, especially since I have the books with uncracked spines on my bookshelf. I did not like the first film, and as much as many seem to think the Dickensian man-child is a “thirst trap,” no. It is strange to be excited for Shiro Games‘ return to where the RTS genre really began, back in the 80s. They are taking a bit of a twist on the whole thing, bringing elements of 4X and opting for the cartoonish art style to keep your eyes from glazing over looking at so much sand.

It was only the other day that the teams over at Shiro Games and Funcom put together a FAQ in a Steam post, detailing the reasons behind some decisions. They explained that the reason behind the cartoonish style was to aid your tired eyes from becoming bored with photo-realism. I’ll say it now, I am a fan of that.

Our constant push for photo-realism has always aged poorly as the decades go on, the PS3 and 4 eras are testaments to this. However, the post is a little longer than a paragraph or two about how to keep you interested and keep a style that isn’t too out of place. It also includes discussions of price, why they want to add 4X, will house Ordos return, procedural generation, and the game’s early access release.

To quickfire most of those questions, we’ll find out about price closer to the early access release. They wanted to slow down the RTS (similar to Northgard) a bit by adding 4X elements. House Ordos will not return at release, they want to stick to the books first and they went for procedural generation because deserts are easy to generate. Instead of a typical release of something big like this, it is an external media tie-in game that is going into early access, which I don’t think has been done before. We used to have tie-in games flowing out of us in the mid-00s, but we never had early access, and when it came along, tie-in games died off for the most part.

Responding to the question of why they went with early access, Shiro and Funcom said, “We had [a] very good experiences with Early Access on our previous games. We were able to balance things better with player feedback[,] and we changed our release schedule to fit player expectations on several instances.” That is the bright side of the early access model, being able to shirk early criticism for “it is in early access,” despite it being a flaw to some. They go on to state, “Our goal is to have a very good game on day one, but we still want the opportunity to tweak or change systems and add content depending on what the community feels.”

The thing is, that’s not where we end. The purpose of the question for the House of Ordos, who were previously in Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty/The Battle for Arrakis, is to highlight that there will be more than the initial two houses of Atreides and Harkonnen and two others to start. Further houses are being added in early access. The question of multiplayer also came up, “and it will be a major update during the Early Access.” Alongside that, they made a strange decision to openly say that there will be no campaign at the initial launch, but will also be added in further months throughout early access.

At this point, it is looking to be a Dune-flavored skirmish mode with slower RTS gameplay, akin to a reskinning mod for your favorite RTS games. I will say, I am not angry with that decision, but I am confused as to why there was such a quick announcement and push to market within a year. I could be wrong, nonetheless, it is a strange decision for such a beloved franchise to push it out as quickly as it seems the attempted timeline is suggesting. We’ll find out later this year, when Dune: Spice Wars releases on Steam in Early Access, with the potential to release on later platforms too.