Early Access can seem like the prescience of Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, the saviour, prophet, and eventually emperor in Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels. As a game releases into Early Access, you can see the possibilities ahead of it, the design decisions it might and might not incorporate, the vague outline of the finished work. As Early Access progresses, the possibility space narrows; the outline solidifies.
Dune: Spice Wars reviewDeveloper: Shiro GamesPublisher: Funcom, Shiro GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam)
But if there is one theme to take away from Herbert’s work, it is that seeing the possibilities does not necessarily enable one to make the most of them. Paul rose to be the messianic leader of the Fremen, the indigenous people of Arrakis’ deserts living under the boot of House Harkonnen and the imperial House Corrino that licenced their occupation, but his rise was irrevocably tied to billions of deaths across thousands of planets.
The extremes aren’t quite so dramatic in the case of Dune: Spice Wars, but it’s hard not to wonder what it could have done differently. The Early Access release in April 2022 already offered a polished and intriguing foundation – a moreish 4X gameplay loop hooked around just enough of Herbert’s lore to suggest that in time Spice Wars could do justice to the depth and strangeness of his work. The full release maintains the compulsive gameplay and polish, but proves those grander hopes largely unrealised.
Admittedly, Herbert grappled with many complex ideas: not only Paul’s legacy as a failed leader, but the implications of prescience and prophecy for free will and human progress. The impact of Paul’s and his predecessors’ terraforming programme on Fremen culture and way of life. The interdependency of ecosystems as Dune’s giant sandworms, unable to survive outside the desert, were revealed to be the source of its most precious commodity – the Spice Melange, which enables the Spacing Guild’s Navigators to chart safe passage between the stars by enhancing their prescience. The fragility of monopolies as the Guild, and by extension the entire Landsraad council of the galactic great houses, were brought to kneel by Paul’s control of Dune. The exploitation of ideology and religion, cloak-and-dagger politicking, extreme mental and physical self-discipline, Bene Gesserit mind-reading premised on a kind of philosophical behaviourism, Ixian machinery that flirted with the ban on advanced technology, Tleilaxu cloning and gene splicing, and many other strange concepts and “big” themes. All set in a world where shareholder democracy and neo-feudalism have driven capitalism to its logical end point: a ritualistic obsession with buying shares in a single, all-encompassing corporation, the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM).