Last night I had an idea (I’ve had many). The inspiration was a game called Midwinter. It was designed by Mike Singleton and released in 1989. He was the first to revolutionise gaming, tactical gaming. When games (for the most) all focussed on one part, he made it an open challenge and it played on the Commodore Amiga. You could do almost anything, walk to a place, drive a truck to a base, swim to a base. You name it, you could do it. We stepped a little away from that. There is a foundation to do it, but not open enough. I thought of throwing fuel on the fire and make it more challenging. To do this I turned to the war on Arrakis. It is (for the most part) really open. Consider where you and your skills decide on the abilities your troops and the enemy troops have. In the first part of the game you are an Harkonen officer. A starter, a milk mouth. You start as a soldier and you are part of the managing forces from Harkonen. So you start as a land trooper. Consider the last two Dune movies (which should be part of the design). You attack and subdue Fremen. You oversee the miners, you fight the fremen, you fly the ornithopters and you get to do this over and over again. The game is set up in time slices. As you do better and better the dials of the Harkonen are set higher and higher. When all the slices are done, when all the tasks are done, the Harkonen are set. If you score well enough you get medals awarded to you by an officer or even the Baron. The challenge is to defeat your own achievements.
And the setting is that as a Caladeen (the home world of Paul Atreides) you will have to do really good to defeat the forces you enabled. The second scenario is two fold, you have to create an alliance with the Fremen (or you cannot get to stage three). You get small stages in the beginning then larger stages and the challenge is to beat yourself. The system is set by what you achieve. In stage two the Harkonen might be seen as NPC’s. Their powers are set to values you achieved in stage one. In stage three you reset YOUR values, but they are supported by the Caladeen and their presence becomes available by what you achieved in stage two.
This is all I have for now, but the idea is that this has not been done before. Also the setting is supposed to be smooth. You can walk in the imperial palace (stage 2) and then walk up to an ornithopter and fly off, but you get to deal with Harkonen troops and Harkonen saboteurs and depending on how well you did, they become more than a nuisance. Unlike Dune: Awakening it is
not multiplayer, that is an important difference. Here you create the levels of your opponent.
The setting does not need to styled by Dune. But that was the setting I had. You could do this as a re-write of the game Knights of the sky where you get to start in the German airforce and after that can choose French or British airforces. Knights of the sky was not high defined graphics. But now you can to this in Unreal Engine 5 on a PS5 and get the whole battlefield on your computer. The setting of gaming like this is almost the same. You get to set the power of the opposing forces (NPC’s) with THEIR quirkiness but with the fighting powers of you. Go look at the history of gaming. It has not been done before. Old games setting the taste of the new game. But with a larger defining edge. As I see it, it will give a larger timeline because as you get into Stage three of the first game, you might want to redo stage one and make the game harder to beat. A game that you can replay over and over again, because as you upgrade the scores of one opponent, your challenge will be greater. How are those spice truffles?
Perhaps over time I will write more, consider that you have to train a mentat (Piter de Vries/Thufir Hawat), a troop trainer (Glossu Rabban/Gurney Halleck) and so on. There is more thinking to do, because the need for training Piter de Vries or Thufir Hawat sets a taste to the game, but we do not see them in the movies to that degree. So how to go about it? It could be that the palace has a strategic room and as you do troop management, it sets the properties on how you are directed playing the game, so as these two are added later in the game, the troops will be according to what you decided on in the strategic room. I do not have all the answers yet, but as you can see, so far the gaming industry has done nothing of a kind and they had decades to get their ideas straight.
Well that is enough for today, Saturday starts in 4 minutes.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 