I was somewhat familiar with the Dune stories before playing this game on PC many years ago, but that part of it wasn't really necessary to enjoy the game. What made this game so interesting wasn't the lore or the story, which was a relative non-issue as far as playing the game was concerned.
What made this game awesome was the fact that I had never played a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game before getting this one and it remains one of my favorite genres overall to this day.
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The little-known and little-played game called Herzog Zwei is largely credited with creating the genre but Westwood Studios and Blizzard would throw their hats into the ring in the late 80's and early 90's that kind of solidified the game type as a permanent genre.
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While it looks really simplistic today (and it should seeing as how it is 30 years old) this game was truly revolutionary for its time. It was necessary to gather spice as a resource, build up your fortress and create defenses as well as a forward-moving army all at the same time. Not only did you have to deal with the constant threat of an enemy attack but you also had the sand worms to contend with that would occasionally pop up and swallow your spice collectors or various other units.
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Combat was relatively simplistic but just like in all games that would follow certain units had certain advantages over other units based on things like speed, type of damage dealt, and amount of damage that they could sustain. Of course the heavier units like siege tanks would take considerably more resources and time to create so you had to be a little bit careful with what units you would decide to use and for the most part, forward advances needed to be planned with an overwhelming force at your control.
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One thing I really liked about this game which was not followed up on in a majority of RTS games that would come in the future was the conquest map where you could decide which area to go after next. Sometimes the areas would be dramatically more difficult than the level you played before and you would need to go back to a save point and perhaps try a different territory until you were a bit better at the game.
At the start of the game you chose 1 of 3 houses to play as and of course your overall objective is to eliminate the other two. You would gain and lose territory based on if you spread yourself too thin and therefore, left yourself open to attack. As far as I know there aren't many other RTS games that approached the game in a semi open-world way like this. Even some of the greats in the RTS world like Starcraft would have a rather linear storyline even though at times you were given some level of choice as to what you were going to do next. It was more of an illusion of choice than an actual one though.
I was obsessed with video games in the late 80's and early 90's and this game was one of the only ones that my father took an interest in. He loved it as well and was actually becoming a bit of a problem because we only had one computer and he was using it when I wanted to. Prior to this game and any game since then, my father would feign interest for the sake of keeping the kids quiet, but he never really wanted to play. This remains the only game that I am aware of that my Dad ever completed. That's pretty special in my mind.
I wouldn't really recommend that anyone go back and play this game today because it is pretty boring by today's standards. We didn't really have any standards back in 1992 and this was a completely different kind of game that as far as I know, nothing like it had ever existed before.
Great titles like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Command and Conquer might not have happened if it weren't for the success of Dune 2. With the success of the recent film I was hopeful they would do a reboot of this game with modern graphics but sadly, this was never even discussed.
RTS remains one of my favorite game genres and it is disappointing to me that not many of them are made anymore. The best one right now remains Starcraft 2 even though it is more than 10 years old. I guess there just must not be very much money in this type of game and the fact that it isn't really very playable on consoles means there is too limited a market for them.