No (yet) campaign and at least 5 factions: the authors of the Dune Spice Wars strategy answer questions

As for modifications and consoles, nothing has been decided yet.

Shiro Games, with the support of Funcom, is developing the Dune Spice Wars strategy based on the books by Frank Herbert. A month after the announcement, the developers published a list of answers to questions that had accumulated from the fan community.

The partners explained what to expect from the game, what content will appear in the early version of Dune and what is planned to be added after the release. Here are the most interesting of the developers’ answers.

Dune is a mixture of real time strategy and 4X strategy in the spirit of Civilization. The gameplay is in real time, the pace of the game is slower than in a regular RTS. You can pause the game or speed up the time at any time.

There is a base building, but not like in strategies like Age of Empires. The player does not choose a place on the ground where the next building will be located, but attaches it to an existing base through a special interface.

Dune will have more than four factions… Four factions will become available at the time of release in early access, before the release of a full release, a fifth will be added to them. After the release of the game, factions will continue to be added.

Maps are procedurally generated, they have several changing parameters: size, activity of worms, wind strength. For some time, the deserts will perform the functions of the seas from other games – it will not be possible to overcome them immediately. Sometimes maps can show recognizable “points of interest”.

Unusual graphic style chosen due to the monotonous visuals of the game… Most of the time, players will see approximately the same rocks and sand, thanks to a slightly cartoonish graphical style, they were able to make them less monotonous.

Multiplayer and campaign will be – but then… Both are planned to be added before leaving Early Access, but at first, players will have to fight only with artificial intelligence.

And one more thing

• The developers got to know all the Dune games and played all the board games, but were not really inspired by any of these projects. However, somehow they still could influence Dune.
• Dune is built from the ground up and is not based on any of the previous Funcom and Shiro Games titles.
• When creating virtual deserts, the developers consulted with a geologist: he helped to understand what things can be found in deserts.
• House Ordos is unlikely to appear in the game for the foreseeable future. It was not mentioned in Frank Herbert’s books, and the developers are going to introduce houses from books into Dune in the first place.
• Maybe at some point Dune will get mod support.
• Right now, the developers have no plans for DLC.
• The question of releasing Dune on consoles will be taken later, the game will appear on PC first.
• The game will definitely get Russian localization.

Dune: Spice Wars is scheduled to be released in Early Access before the end of 2022.