use for spying, and they’ll have unit
powers as well, so they’ll be more
important to the player.”
Shiro’s ideas for a campaign
mode are also still open based on
what players want. “We have ideas
to do different types of campaigns:
some very narrative driven, some
more open and systems based. It
could take very different forms. The
campaign is somewhere we have
room for more literary stuff.”
There are other plans for instilling
Arrakis with more life, like rebel war
bands crossing the sands to attack
your villages and even bigger coriolis
sandstorms, like the one Paul
Atreides escapes in after fleeing the
Harkonnen. Vidal wants players in
Spice Wars to feel less in control on
the untamed Arrakis than they do in
a game like Civilization. There are
likewise plans to deepen existing
mechanics, like adding more
proximity bonuses between buildings
to give their placement on the map a
bit more meaning.
“We’re also looking at the late
game right now,” he says. “It works,
but it’s a bit too bland for our taste.
We want to add something, maybe
starports and starships, though
they’d be in the air. Something you
unlock in maybe the last third of the
game, and that opens up more
options that are unique to the
endgame. We wanted to have that
for Early Access, but there’s only so
much time in the day.”GET REAL-TIME
Despite playing with the same
balance of exploration, expansion,
exploitation and extermination as
Civilization or Total War, Spice Wars
is a more focused game, with supply
limits keeping your armies small and
water ever in
demand. Their
objectives of
domination may
be the same but
the scale and
stakes feel more
intimate, even if
the universe is
ostensibly on the
line here.
“We wanted to keep those very
interactive and visual aspects of an
RTS, where what you build matters
and it’s there and can be attacked and
destroyed,” Vidal says. “Stellaris, for
example, is very abstract, and most
people actually play from the map
view and don’t ever go into the
planetary systems, because you don’t
need to. We didn’t want that for this
game. That led to a lot of decisions
[focused on] making things look real
and placed in the world.”
After the scale of Total War’s
combat, I did like zooming in on mysmall units of Fremen warriors and
micromanaging them in battle,
watching them chew through
Harkonnen soldiers and level up.
Likewise there was a real tension
sending them across a sandy
wasteland and watching their supply
meters ticking down the longer they
stay outside my territory. Single units
in Total War are meaningless, but I
was heartbroken when two of my
veterans were swallowed up by a
sandworm while running for the
rocky safety of a settlement. Spice
Wars is already able to tell some of
these small stories effectively, even
without a campaign.
“If I want to talk about it with my
friends who play
the game
afterwards, that’s
a good sign,”
Vidal says.
“That’s true for
many games, but
especially for 4X
games. It must
tell stories, even
if there’s no
direct narration.”
A year from now I hope Spice
Wars is weaving in scripted narration,
too, and using characters to give each
faction rather more life. In Herbert’s
original novel, Muad’Dib says, “There
is no escape – we pay for the violence
of our ancestors.” I’m not saying that
quote alone is justification for Spice
Wars stealing Old World’s
generational heir system and
complex relationships, but, well, is
Dune truly Dune without knife duels
settling everything from the fate of
the universe to petty grudges?ABOVE: Spice Wars
looks quite nice
despite being one
big desert.“WE HAVE IDEAS
TO DO DIFFERENT
TYPES OF
CAMPAIGNS”Dune: Spice Wars
COVER FEATURE