I see no reason why it wouldn't be. Proton has a pretty good track record with 4x games, the only reason it wouldn't work is if the developers went out of their way to implement anti-cheat or intrusive DRM.
This looks pretty cool but I've always thought if Dune got a 4X treatment it should get a full galactic setting, not just Arrakis. After all, only a fraction of the first book is really set on Arrakis* (spoilers) and so much of the politics that makes the series interesting happens off-world.
Nonetheless, I'm excited about the prospect of a new Dune strategy game.
* the collapse of House Atreides, Paul's exodus and the Fremen uprising
Between Stellaris and Endless Space, I'm not sure how much creativity would be available to a new space-based 4X game. Spice Wars is interesting to me because the setting and mechanics look pretty novel for a genre that can admittedly get samey.
Well I don't know about Endless Space but Stellaris is very focused on exploration and economic growth. I think that a good thematic Dune treatment would be well served by focusing on politics and plotting - after all, the book is much more about courtly intrigue than space warfare.
I think you mean the other classic Dune game, which was an RTS. This Dune game the parent comment refers to was a mix between realtime simulation, RPG and point-and-click adventure. You had to converse with family members, travel to Fremen Sietches, etc.
Indeed, I stand corrected. Also, TIL that Dune and Dune II were both released in the same year (1992) by two different studios with different genres, with the latter eclipsing the former, despite the former apparently being quite good for what it aimed to be.
Both studios were operating under different parts of Virgin.
Virgin Interactive owned Cryo, commissioned Dune, then later cancelled it. Virgin Entertainment kept funding the project, and Cryo kept working on it. Virgin Games engaged Westwood in the states, and the two projects continued in parallel. Don't adjust your set, there really is three different Virgins in the picture.
When they figured out they'd paid for & delivered on the game they though they cancelled, they just went ahead and released both. It's a good part of why Westwood's very next step was to get off the Dune IP (the other part being the cost).
Only a handful of other worlds are described beyond a very rudimentary amount of detail though, no? So there would have to be an extreme amount of extrapolating.
The Dune Encyclopedia was not based on any inside information from Frank Herbert. It was essentially an officially licensed fanwork -- much of the information in the Encyclopedia was wild speculation on the part of the authors.
> I remember being told that it was compiled from his notes but I guess that was mistaken.
You may be confusing the Dune Encyclopedia with Brian Herbert's novels, which he claims are based on his father's notes (but probably aren't).
Frank Herbert actually wrote a foreword to the Dune Encyclopedia, in which he noted that:
"I must confess that I found it fascinating to re-enter here some of the sources on which the Chronicles are built. As the first 'Dune fan,' I give this encyclopedia my delighted approval, although I hold my own counsel on some of the issues still to be explored as the Chronicles unfold."
It's very possible - in fact that Brian Herbert "fact" does ring a bell. Very unlikely to be true, given his books go off on a totally different, more Warhammer 40K-like direction.
That's basically the opposite of a problem. Star Wars was able to grew into the ultimate franchise starting with just a desert, a forest, a swamp, a cloud city, and a space station.
Whoever [0] has the rights to Dune should be a good shepherd, announce a contest for new stories set in the Dune universe.
[0] Brian Herbert. Maybe finally he can let go of his ambition to finish Dune. Or maybe he meant it in the mortal kombat sense?
They did. Dune 7 come out as Hunters of Dune in 2006.
It's ... ok. (No, it's really not, but no point in dwelling on it. It's just not the same Dune. Frank wrote each book because he had very specific ideas, experiences, concepts, thoughts, problems in his mind. Brian wrote it to "finish" the saga. I very much recommend this amazing talk about the context of the original books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDCgKdmly4 ... and I think there's simply no point in "finishing" Dune, because it's like StarWars or StarTrek, there's no end to it. Just as there's always a new/old/forgotten/prodigal Skywalker, there's always an Atreides somewhere :))
But yeah, space operas deserve the whole space in 4X games. Maybe a mix of king of the hill and 4X, with arakis in the center would also be cool to explore (no idea if it would work). Or a 4X with both planetary (arakis) and interplanetary layers (other planets). With different units, tech trees, unique resources to both layers... Who knows what could work.
There's actually an awful lot of conversations going on in the background of the first book - loads between House Harkonnen, conversations between Lady Jessica and the Reverend Mother, and with Leto and his entourage. There's also a ton of in-Sietch conversations between the members of Sietch Tabr. The warfare on Arrakis doesn't feature all that much compared to culture and politics!
I do think there's a lot of space to explore (pun not intended) with 4X games - "conquer everything with guns" is pretty overdone by this point. I'm really interested in what games can do outside of violence where the options haven't been explored as much.
A galactic scaled version of Crusader Kings would probably do the best job of simulating the focus of the books. It would need a pretty deep new negotiation/trade discussion mechanic though.
Anyone ever play Outpost 2? I loved the story and world of that game! Something about this game’s slow unit speed, inhospitable environment, emphasis on survival and infrastructure, and the narrator’s voice in the demo video remind me of Outpost 2.
I adored the original Outpost, I had no idea there was a semi-related sequel!
Between that and Alpha Centauri, I was spoiled by "last ditch effort by humanity to survive by colonizing another star system" games. I wish I could play something similar from modern times.
Surviving Mars, and Ad Aspera were both fun to play, but unfortunately neither held my attention for long.
To my fellow frontend people: I promise you can code your fancy scroll effects without resorting to scrolljacking. The inertia on this JS scrolling feels just wrong when using a macOS trackpad (and the spacebar PgDown is broken).
It's scrolling too fast and very jittery on mobile as well. Very bad UX. But hey at least the title animation is smooth and cool, who cares about the actual content?
On Firefox for Android I can't even read half of the paragraphs. As they should been rendering, I arrive to other part of the landing page. It's a pity it has this awful promo site.
It is especially unfortunate as you can get buttery smooth scroll animations without scrolljacking: schedule the events with requestAnimationFrame, throttle to 60FPS, and avoid layout thrashing[0].
I did two “scroll a page’s worth of content” and nothing changed except the title text got more faint and the words separated from one another. So I stopped reading.
It’s less effort to come to HN and complain about shit UX than it is to fight the UX to get to the content.
I'm getting sick of the "animate page elements with scrolling" trend. It's not clever anymore, and more than half of the time it's done wrong and interferes with browsing.
That was my first thought, I'm worried it will not use the full potential of the source material. In the world of Dune wars were won by intrique more than with troops and this feels like a mobile game.
I wish we had a cRPG placed in the Dune's universe, with visuals to match Villeneuve's Dune or Jodorowsky's wonderfull hallucinations.
Looks like a developer accidentally deployed some of their development tools to production, where of course they don't work but don't hurt anything either.
I didn't like the RTS part all that much. There's very little challenge there apart from making sure to send many Fremen and equipping them with the best weapons you can capture.
I recall deliberately trying to lose in the RTS section section and not managing to. You can either fall behind on Spice shipments and get annihilated by the Emperor (until you somehow could beat him) or lose Paul directly, but AFAIK there's no way to lose in the RTS itself.
That did give me enough time to explore the map in an Ornihopter - best part of the game IMHO.
Both Dune and Dune II were released in 1992, Dune was interactive adventure from Cryo, Dune II was RTS from Westwood. Dune II was also re-released as Dune 2000 for Windows.
Dune was not bad, but personally I love Dune II a lot. It was the first RTS I played, and it had such a huge influence on this genre for the years to come.
Annoyingly, neither Dune (1) nor Dune 2 seems likely to get a legal rerelease. I can't find the details atm, but apparently GOG made quite a serious try to get the rights, only to hit a brick wall with the Herbert estate which claimed to be uninterested in rereleasing old licensed games. Then it approved the rerelease of the 1979 Dune boardgame from Avalon Hill https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/9/20797781/dune-board-game-ga... . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think the social media team for this game is likely to be fielding a lot of questions about where the Westwood Dune II rerelease is.
The likely framework being used is the heaps.io framework (since the devs previously used it in their other commercial games). It's a pretty full featured framework.
It is Heaps, yes. Both Heaps and Haxe were created by the same creator (who also owns Shiro Games). Although, I would advise against Heaps for people who are new to game development as it is relatively undocumented.
This is the first I've heard of it. Hearing it described as both an MMO and Conan Exiles Plus feels weird to me, though, as they're very different genres.
The original submission is also from Funcom (it's mentioned in the legalese when signing up in for the newsletter), so perhaps they scaled things down?
That looks surprisingly bad for a 2022 game. The characters are a matter of taste I guess, but rendering soldiers that are larger than buildings, poor perspectives etc. I love Dune but hope they put in a lot more work.
ok ok, criticisms of the website aside, I'm reading the Dune novels at the moment and I'm totally enraptured by the story and the world. I completely welcome another re-imagining of the world its really great seeing how the characters are portrayed, and another RTS is very welcome in the market, in my opinion.
Ehh... I started reading the Dune novels after loving the movies, and they have honestly have been disappointing.
Some parts of the first book dealing with environmentalism are great, but the rest is kinda meh. My main problem is that the Dune Universe seems too small: almost all important events in the Universe happen to the same couple of main characters, and almost everything that happens to them is very important to the Universe.
There's a part in Dune Messiah when someone mentions a certain event happens to a very large number of people; they could have made that number 100x larger or 100x smaller and the result would be exactly the same.
I read that God Emperor is good, so I'm trying to decide whether to start the third book or just cut my losses and abandon the series.
Both Children and God Emperor completely change the ideas of the narrative, and grow far larger than the first two books. They are definitely worth reading. The last two (four if you count Brian Herbert’s extensions) are of diminishing worth, even though Miles Teg is amazing and carries the novels alone.
I'm assuming this is a movie tie-in, so it's odd that the depiction of the worms is closer to the three-lobed mouth of the original novel cover art and 1984 movie than the round mouth of the new movie.
Anyway, I do think that 4X RTS is a bit of a tired genre for Dune, and probably won't live up to the original.
I also think it's a waste. Why just another story of exploiting a land's natural resources, mining, subjugating villages, and sending spice off to a distant empire. Sure, it fits so well into the 4X genre it's an easy, thoughtless adaptation. But what about a game told from the Freman's perspective? How about a game of repelling the imperialist invaders? Or a naturalist tale of trying to turn the desert green?
There hasn't been any 4X RTS games in Dune setting? Dune 2/Dune 2000/Emperor Battle for Dune weren't 4X. 4X means more games like Master of Orion and Civilization rather than Starcraft.
This doesn't seem to be a movie tie in. The character and vehicle design look different. It's likely a "well-timed" adaptation of the novel, similar to the recent graphic novel that was released in 2020, which emphasized completely different parts from the movie and had very different visions for things like the ornithopters and even the race of the cast.
[Legendary][1] is listed on the game's site footer. Since it's the production company behind Denis Villeneuve's Dune adaptation, it's at least blessed if not co-produced, albeit not seemingly with any canonical story relationships or obvious
This doesn't necessarily mean it's a tie-in. Just that who-ever current owns the adaptation rights wants bang for their buck. Typically that does mean a tie-in, but I think the Dune universe doesn't really need it to sell it, any more than Lego Batman need be canon.
It seems at least inspired by the movie in certain ways. For example, Baron Harkonnen is hairless as seen in the movie, not red-haired as described in the books.
>> Or a naturalist tale of trying to turn the desert green?
What about a naturalist tale of keeping the desert as it is, and resisting the urge to destroy it for the supposed benefit of the humans? I recently read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (highly recommended), and I'm reminded of the start of the ninth chapter:
"This would be good country," a tourist says to me, "if only you had some water."
He's from Cleveland, Ohio.
"If we had water here," I reply, "this country wound not be what it is. It would be like Ohio, wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. Instead of this lovely barren desert we would have only another blooming garden state, like New Jersey. You see what I mean?"
"If you had more water more people could live here."
"Yes sir. And where then would people go when they wanted to see something besides people?"
"I see what you mean. Still, I wouldn't want to live here. So dry and desolate. Nice for pictures but my God I'm glad I don't have to live here."
"I'm glad too, sir. We're in perfect agreement. You wouldn't want to live here, I wouldn't want to live in Cleveland. We're both satisfied with the arrangement as it is. Why change it?"
"Agreed."
We shake hands and the tourist from Ohio goes away pleased, as I am pleased, each of us thinking he has taught the other something new.
What about a naturalist tale about restricting the spread of development and conserving nature as it is?
What about a naturalist tale that doesn't indulge in either sort of fetishism, the sort of fetishism that observes an artificial distinction drawn between "nature" and "development" and assumes uncritically that must be all there is? You've just inverted the sign, without noticing that the figures don't add up in the first place.
Like all life, we modify our environment in accord with our needs, and by itself there's no more harm in that than when beavers or wasps or crows or spiders or any other animals do it. The problem isn't that we're so good at improving our environment for ourselves, but that we suck so bad at avoiding damage to the ecologies we so modify. We can improve upon the latter without forswearing the former, which is good, because we might as well try to forswear breathing.
My point was not so much about the distinction between nature and development, although I think the distinction is far from artifictial (depending perhaps on what one means by "nature" and "development"). Rather, I was reacting to the seemingly common view that deserts are somehow worse than e.g. forests and that a naturalist would want to turn a desert green.
As far as your second point, that it is possible to improve our environment in ways that are reasonably ecologically-friendly, I generally agree. What constitutes environmental improvement vs damage will vary considerably from person to person however, and some things we may collectively view as improvements are much easier to implement than to reverse, so in fragile ecosystems (e.g. much of the desert in southwest US) we should think very carefully about whether our improvements are really a good idea.
Sure! And how great if a game could explore those kinds of tensions. We could have moral, social, and political questions as well. But in terms of novel adaptation, at least in the first book, turning parts of Arrakis green was one of the Freman dreams.
In the context of the source material (the books by Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson), the 'greening' of Dune/Arrakis is a very broad plot theme. So, the comment is not one of 'green washing' but in keeping with themes of the series.
Full disclosure: Haven't read all the books, nor am I looking to after reading a bunch during the pandemic.
For this particular topic you should definitely read more of the books before commenting on the theme of the series. The GP is more thematically correct.
I've only read the first of the Dune books, and I do (somehat vaugely) recall the Freemen project to green Arrakis. My comment was intended less as a comment on the greening project in the context of Dune and more as a challenge to the idea that turning a desert green is a 'naturalist tale'. To me it sounds more like the tale of a property developer or industrial agriculturalist.
While true, it's also of course true that much of the desert in the world right now is man-made, a result of desertification due to human activity. The Sahara has virtually wiped out the Sahel. Some of this is natural (though, of course, it's debatable whether we want to simply allow "natural" processes) but a lot of it human driven. The Gobi is even worse. Even processes that take place at a breakneck pace are still barely noticeable in a human life, so most people are the prototypical boiled frogs.
And indeed, we learn that Herbert's inspiration for Dune was encroaching desertification in Oregon (largely caused by humans) and the geoengineering efforts to create a green belt to stem the tide.
Good point! I was mainly thinking of the desert of southern Utah and neighboring states, the subject of the book I quoted, and with which I have personal experience. That region is not free from its own human-caused environmental issues of course, but my understanding is that they are mainly different from the particular problems resulting in desertification in Oregon.
I guess a general point that may be worth making is that it's often useful to think in terms of protecting fragile ecosystems, be they desert or the victim of desertification.
I must admit that I have only read the first book in the Dune series. I've heard that the first is by far the best of the series, and my reading list is long enough as it is, but I shall consider reading more of the series.
Anyway, my point was more about ecological conservation in general, and not much about Dune in particular.
I don't think the first book is notably better than the sequels. They're all quite interesting if you're into the wide-ranging categories of thought Herbert pursued (and was generally ahead of his time on).
They licensed the IP from Herbert Properties LLC, it would have been a waste to not use it in games, Duke Leto and Paul action figures, Dune Lego series etc. At least from a business perspective.
Your sentiment put words to my feelings as I watched the gameplay trailer. As soon as the narrator shifted to the theme of exploitation and politics, with no reference to the indigenous population, I recoiled from the whole idea of it. The sorts of motivations these games ask you to align yourself with feel foreign and unwelcome compared to how I felt about them 25 years ago.
I had the same uneasy reation when the trailer showed how you can "rally local villages or force them into submission." Hopefully roleplaying colonialism will eventually feel as gross as roleplaying something like racism.
Part of the appeal of games is harmlessly doing things that shouldn't/can't be done in real life. I think the millions of 'people' I've 'killed' across various bloodsport-themed FPSes over the last couple decades is a greater evil if we're talking about shoehorning IRL morals into consequence-free virtual spaces. And if you disagree, why? Is mass murder not worse?
Maybe I'm just oversensitive to moralizing in video games, but this line of argument was no less tired over a decade ago.
I think it’s because we all know murder is wrong and the FPS genre wouldn’t exist as we know it without that factor.
In contrast, colonialism and racism, unfortunately, still garners support.
There is no support for video games glorifying rape. There shouldn’t be support for video games glorifying colonialism or racism.
I consider them indigenous, though you’re correct that they weren’t always there. They were, to the best of my knowledge, the first people to inhabit that place. Much as, where I’m from, Native Americans weren’t always here, but are accepted as the first people.
The Dune wiki, for what it’s worth, describes them as a Native people:
I always disagree with opinions that 10+ year old games shouldn't be remade or have a successor because they're "tired" or have "been done".
It's just a viewpoint that's incredibly out of touch with the actual game playing audience. The vast, vast majority of players don't know about and will not touch something that old. A game like Dune II that's nearly 30 years old might as well be buried in an ancient tomb, from a standpoint of its accessibility and likelihood to be discovered.
As to the other criticism, against "rally local villages or force them into submission"... this just sounds like you could play as either an Atreides (woke good guys, joining up with locals to fight imperials) or Harkonnen (evil colonialist) archetype. You know, choosing sides and having agency, the thing games exist for. You could shift the theme more, but this is presumably trying to somewhat follow the story of Dune.
IMO, the demo video communicates to me a bland rehash & reskin (which really means I am not their target audience). I also didn't hear the word "water" mentioned once in the video, which is the second most vital resource on Arrakis. The author went into great detail about the native's water collection and storage system, and the symbolism behind it. So, I'm left to assume this is just a cash grab, or no one at the game studio has read the books.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadNonetheless, I'm excited about the prospect of a new Dune strategy game.
* the collapse of House Atreides, Paul's exodus and the Fremen uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(video_game)
I've been waiting for this remake. This was one of my favorites back in the day.
The Dune-themed RTS games from Westwood were cool too.
Although it was indeed a great game and am also looking forward to see how this turns out.
I think you mean the other classic Dune game, which was an RTS. This Dune game the parent comment refers to was a mix between realtime simulation, RPG and point-and-click adventure. You had to converse with family members, travel to Fremen Sietches, etc.
I agree neither game was 4X, though.
Virgin Interactive owned Cryo, commissioned Dune, then later cancelled it. Virgin Entertainment kept funding the project, and Cryo kept working on it. Virgin Games engaged Westwood in the states, and the two projects continued in parallel. Don't adjust your set, there really is three different Virgins in the picture.
When they figured out they'd paid for & delivered on the game they though they cancelled, they just went ahead and released both. It's a good part of why Westwood's very next step was to get off the Dune IP (the other part being the cost).
You may be confusing the Dune Encyclopedia with Brian Herbert's novels, which he claims are based on his father's notes (but probably aren't).
Frank Herbert actually wrote a foreword to the Dune Encyclopedia, in which he noted that:
"I must confess that I found it fascinating to re-enter here some of the sources on which the Chronicles are built. As the first 'Dune fan,' I give this encyclopedia my delighted approval, although I hold my own counsel on some of the issues still to be explored as the Chronicles unfold."
Whoever [0] has the rights to Dune should be a good shepherd, announce a contest for new stories set in the Dune universe.
[0] Brian Herbert. Maybe finally he can let go of his ambition to finish Dune. Or maybe he meant it in the mortal kombat sense?
It's ... ok. (No, it's really not, but no point in dwelling on it. It's just not the same Dune. Frank wrote each book because he had very specific ideas, experiences, concepts, thoughts, problems in his mind. Brian wrote it to "finish" the saga. I very much recommend this amazing talk about the context of the original books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDCgKdmly4 ... and I think there's simply no point in "finishing" Dune, because it's like StarWars or StarTrek, there's no end to it. Just as there's always a new/old/forgotten/prodigal Skywalker, there's always an Atreides somewhere :))
Oh great! I've been looking for the opportunity to name a planet/city in a new world Boaty McBoatface!
But yeah, space operas deserve the whole space in 4X games. Maybe a mix of king of the hill and 4X, with arakis in the center would also be cool to explore (no idea if it would work). Or a 4X with both planetary (arakis) and interplanetary layers (other planets). With different units, tech trees, unique resources to both layers... Who knows what could work.
I do think there's a lot of space to explore (pun not intended) with 4X games - "conquer everything with guns" is pretty overdone by this point. I'm really interested in what games can do outside of violence where the options haven't been explored as much.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=dune+nintendo+game
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II
Between that and Alpha Centauri, I was spoiled by "last ditch effort by humanity to survive by colonizing another star system" games. I wish I could play something similar from modern times.
Surviving Mars, and Ad Aspera were both fun to play, but unfortunately neither held my attention for long.
It's available at GoG btw though some things are best kept in your memory IMO, or there's just no time for games anymore.
https://www.gog.com/game/outpost_2_divided_destiny
Indeed the custom scroll reimplementation feels sluggish. In general, it is unlikely to surpass the native browser support.
[0] https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a and https://csstriggers.com/
And there must be some code running all the time because even when I put the YouTube trailer in fullscreen it kept stuttering when playing
It’s less effort to come to HN and complain about shit UX than it is to fight the UX to get to the content.
I'm getting sick of the "animate page elements with scrolling" trend. It's not clever anymore, and more than half of the time it's done wrong and interferes with browsing.
Hopefully the game has a higher frame rate.
But I dislike that my autoscroll is disabled, and smooth-scrolling is forced against my wishes on my computer with an integrated GPU.
1. Grotesque fingers in my face - distracting and offputting
2. Scrolljacking
Looks like a developer accidentally deployed some of their development tools to production, where of course they don't work but don't hurt anything either.
I'm hoping this decade will be a resurgence for 4x RTS games.
What I really loved about this game was the shifting gameplay from strong story-driven 1st person adventure to map-based RTS.
Obviously, this is my personal recollection from 30 years ago.
Ideally it would be someone like David Gaider doing the story.
I recall deliberately trying to lose in the RTS section section and not managing to. You can either fall behind on Spice shipments and get annihilated by the Emperor (until you somehow could beat him) or lose Paul directly, but AFAIK there's no way to lose in the RTS itself.
That did give me enough time to explore the map in an Ornihopter - best part of the game IMHO.
Dune was not bad, but personally I love Dune II a lot. It was the first RTS I played, and it had such a huge influence on this genre for the years to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20h7pfLeSaE
and another from the same author covering every Dune computer game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISKhMNI_XQ
.
Some parts of the first book dealing with environmentalism are great, but the rest is kinda meh. My main problem is that the Dune Universe seems too small: almost all important events in the Universe happen to the same couple of main characters, and almost everything that happens to them is very important to the Universe.
There's a part in Dune Messiah when someone mentions a certain event happens to a very large number of people; they could have made that number 100x larger or 100x smaller and the result would be exactly the same.
I read that God Emperor is good, so I'm trying to decide whether to start the third book or just cut my losses and abandon the series.
Anyway, I do think that 4X RTS is a bit of a tired genre for Dune, and probably won't live up to the original.
I also think it's a waste. Why just another story of exploiting a land's natural resources, mining, subjugating villages, and sending spice off to a distant empire. Sure, it fits so well into the 4X genre it's an easy, thoughtless adaptation. But what about a game told from the Freman's perspective? How about a game of repelling the imperialist invaders? Or a naturalist tale of trying to turn the desert green?
The same game publisher, Funcom, is working on an open world game per Polygon: https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/27/18243384/dune-funcom-video...
[1]: https://www.legendary.com
That's an interesting premise, and a nice third way between the obvious and tired approaches of Imperialist Exploiter 2000 and Mujahideen Simulator.
What about a naturalist tale of keeping the desert as it is, and resisting the urge to destroy it for the supposed benefit of the humans? I recently read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (highly recommended), and I'm reminded of the start of the ninth chapter:
What about a naturalist tale about restricting the spread of development and conserving nature as it is?Like all life, we modify our environment in accord with our needs, and by itself there's no more harm in that than when beavers or wasps or crows or spiders or any other animals do it. The problem isn't that we're so good at improving our environment for ourselves, but that we suck so bad at avoiding damage to the ecologies we so modify. We can improve upon the latter without forswearing the former, which is good, because we might as well try to forswear breathing.
As far as your second point, that it is possible to improve our environment in ways that are reasonably ecologically-friendly, I generally agree. What constitutes environmental improvement vs damage will vary considerably from person to person however, and some things we may collectively view as improvements are much easier to implement than to reverse, so in fragile ecosystems (e.g. much of the desert in southwest US) we should think very carefully about whether our improvements are really a good idea.
Full disclosure: Haven't read all the books, nor am I looking to after reading a bunch during the pandemic.
And indeed, we learn that Herbert's inspiration for Dune was encroaching desertification in Oregon (largely caused by humans) and the geoengineering efforts to create a green belt to stem the tide.
I guess a general point that may be worth making is that it's often useful to think in terms of protecting fragile ecosystems, be they desert or the victim of desertification.
This is a huge plot point of a bunch of the later dune books. Based on the comments here, almost no one has actually read them.
Anyway, my point was more about ecological conservation in general, and not much about Dune in particular.
Well, in the Dune source material it was terraformed into desert from a green planet. So, you know, returning it to green is perfectly fine.
Part of the appeal of games is harmlessly doing things that shouldn't/can't be done in real life. I think the millions of 'people' I've 'killed' across various bloodsport-themed FPSes over the last couple decades is a greater evil if we're talking about shoehorning IRL morals into consequence-free virtual spaces. And if you disagree, why? Is mass murder not worse?
Maybe I'm just oversensitive to moralizing in video games, but this line of argument was no less tired over a decade ago.
https://i.imgur.com/3e1obaF.jpeg
There is no support for video games glorifying rape. There shouldn’t be support for video games glorifying colonialism or racism.
And how far do you stretch this notion, can we still play games about ancient Rome for example?
The Dune wiki, for what it’s worth, describes them as a Native people:
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Fremen/DE
It was something of a catastrophe in the gameplay/technicals but captures the spirit fairly well.
I recall planting green plants all over the planet, in one of the original games.
It's just a viewpoint that's incredibly out of touch with the actual game playing audience. The vast, vast majority of players don't know about and will not touch something that old. A game like Dune II that's nearly 30 years old might as well be buried in an ancient tomb, from a standpoint of its accessibility and likelihood to be discovered.
As to the other criticism, against "rally local villages or force them into submission"... this just sounds like you could play as either an Atreides (woke good guys, joining up with locals to fight imperials) or Harkonnen (evil colonialist) archetype. You know, choosing sides and having agency, the thing games exist for. You could shift the theme more, but this is presumably trying to somewhat follow the story of Dune.
I'll better go play the best Dune game ever made, Dune (1992). [1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(video_game)
IMO, the demo video communicates to me a bland rehash & reskin (which really means I am not their target audience). I also didn't hear the word "water" mentioned once in the video, which is the second most vital resource on Arrakis. The author went into great detail about the native's water collection and storage system, and the symbolism behind it. So, I'm left to assume this is just a cash grab, or no one at the game studio has read the books.