Has the spice run out on Arakis?: where did the Dune strategies (and all other strategies) disappear?

Dune by Dany Villeneuve, the main fantasy film of the year, has died down in cinemas. In honor of this, we recall the Dune 2 strategy, which 30 years ago marked the beginning of the gaming series and the whole genre, and today there is no trace left, and the new generation of gamers do not even understand what it is about.

Dune 2 is the video game equivalent of the fashion rapper's first, now forgotten album, once written from the heart..

No, there has not been and never will be in our universe a better literary basis for real-time strategy than Frank Herbert's Dune.

The points:

1. Bright setting ✓
   A distant sandy planet with giant worms.
2. Future ✓
   You can use fantastic equipment, tanks, blasters.
3. Fractions ✓
   The Atreides, Harkonnen and desert dwellers are already written in the novel, there is no need to invent anything.
4. The most important thing - resource ✓
   In the center of the plot of the novel is a precious spice, a drug with supernatural properties. It was logical to somehow describe its collection through the gameplay - spice harvesters and, in fact, all the strategic gameplay associated with the separation of military and economic parts came from here.

God Emperor Dune

The first Dune, released in 1992 and tied to a David Lynch film, combined strategy and quest, was unfriendly, with a cumbersome interface and bugs (choosing an option in the dialogue that was not provided by the developers could break the game).

Dune 1992, released in the same 2, is nominally a sequel to it due to the confusion with the rights, but in fact it is a completely different game from new developers (Westwood Studios). According to the authors, they inspired by Apple's Mac interface, where a lot of actions in a complex file system were carried out with a mouse, not a keyboard. It was in Dune 2 that all the foundations of the RTS genre were laid: building a base, collecting resources, commanding units. This is where I spent my childhood, painfully squeezing the flat controller of the then-fashionable Dendy console, launching scouts diagonally across the map and staggering rocket launchers and tanks to cover each other.

Interestingly, in 1992 it was impossible to encircle the detachment with a green frame: you could only control one fighter, personally. There were no contextual commands either: first they chose who to walk with, then - in a separate menu - what to do, then they clicked on a building or an enemy to perform an action. Already 30 years ago, game journalists scolded Dune for not very convenient controls (please focus on this point, we will return to it at the very end of the article).

The very name of the genre was born while working on Dune 2: game designer Brett Sperry coined the term "real time strategy" to emphasize the difference with turn-based games.

Children of Dune

Then the story usually begins about the development of the series and the flowering of the genre it launched, but in our case everything is exactly the opposite: at the beginning of the XNUMXs, the series will die, and after it, ten years later, the genre will actually cease to exist.

It would be logical after the game design breakthrough and commercial success of Dune 2 to focus on sequels and strengthening the brand's reputation. Indeed, several steps have been taken in this direction. The most successful project is Dune 2000, not even 2000 at all, but 1998; besides him, there were a couple more emphatically ugly 3D strategies. All this is pampering by the standards of today's game superseries, and in the 90s it was much more confident to occupy your niche in the market.

The reason for this apathy is Westwood's desire to go beyond the narrow limits of someone else's license and make something of their own. Command & Conquer turned out to be something of its own with the Earth instead of Arrakis and green Tiberium crystals instead of spice. The series was so successful that Westwood signed a contract with Electronic Arts, becoming part of the gaming mega-corporation.

This is where the strategic Dune story officially ends. Command & Conquer sold well, did not require deductions for a literary license - Dune simply became useless to anyone. A stupid, but very peppy plot about the war criminal Kane brought money no worse than the grandiose epic of Frank Herbert.

The Command and Conquer series lasted 15 years, reaching a peak in the early 2s and then gradually fading away. One of the reasons for its death is the competition with Warcraft from Blizzard. Shamelessly borrowing the concept of Dune XNUMX, the future authors of Overwatch in a proprietary manner made a clone that was superior to the original in every way.

It was in Warcraft that it became possible to circle units with a rubber frame, in Starcraft the three races significantly differed from each other in terms of gameplay, and in Warcraft 3 there was a great scenario and a powerful RPG element. Finally, the main reason Blizzard's strategies have managed to survive C&C is esports. Having achieved the status of a religion in South Korea, Starcraft for many years became the main esports discipline on the planet - Command & Conquer could not come close to such a status even in its best years.

As a result, under the wing of EA, a dozen different C&C games were released, the last of which was the disastrous Tyberian Twilight, after which the series finally died out.

Prophecy of Dune

Here one could be glad for Blizzard, which has no competitors left, but along with competitors, the genre itself died out.

Her latest strategy game, the Warcraft 3 remake, is widely regarded as the worst game of 2020. Specifically, this failure is an ordinary hack, it cannot be considered a representation of the death of the genre, but it is definitely one of the symptoms of big, systemic problems.

At the beginning of the 11s, a dozen strategies from major studios were released a year, now there are barely a couple. Relic with Company of Heroes and Creative Assembly with Total War have occupied their niches and work for narrow audiences without competing with each other. Released 2 years ago, Starcraft XNUMX is still afloat due to eSports championships, without any development. There is no new grand strategy and is not expected. It would seem that it's time to release Dune 3 in the wake of the film's popularity, but this is out of the question, just as there was, for example, no big game based on the perfect strategy adaptation of Game of Thrones. The genre has blossomed.

The reason for this is his heirs, who took the throne from the forefather, who had not yet had time to go to the grave, Dota 2 и League of Legends.

This brings us back to the beginning of the article and the thought that Dune 2 had awkward controls. It's boring to give orders personally to each soldier. It is better to encircle them with a rubber frame and send them all into battle at once - but it's also boring! Better let the soldiers themselves, without your commands, automatically run at each other in a continuous stream, and you control only one, the most useful fighter, tearing through the armies of bots.

Like a strangled baby of Shai-Hulud, burping the poison of revelation before dying, the dying Dune 2 became the prophetess of a new genre that still does not lose popularity. Dota 2 mobs are exactly the same soldiers from 1992, which once could not be framed.

The Dune saga must continue, albeit in a heavily altered, mutated form.

The spice must flow.

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