Dune MMORPG: Some Ideas
By ahoodedfigure 20 Comments
Dune as a somewhat traditional massively multi-player online RPG
My Cyclic Interest in Dune
Every once in a while I enter this strange world where I imagine I will be able to get the hard-sought Dune license and make my own game taking place in Frank Herbert's universe. Every once in a while, in other words, I have delusions of grandeur. Ah, but what a grand game it would be. Come walk with me, and I will show you the crazed architecture in my mind that gets built every once in a while as I proceed to freak myself out with how much Dune knowledge I've retained over the years. All this, and it took me three attempts to even finish the first book-- my secret was to skim the parts that dragged :).
Speaking of that, if you find you don't understand some of the terms, there's a wikia online linked below which has definitions, although a lot of the definitions are obscured because of all the stuff written about Dune after Herbert's death. Makes things more confusing if you ask me, so if you don't know what a thing is just make a definition up, since they're often archetypes of science fiction tropes anyway.
The State of the Franchise
Just the other day I was prowling the web to make sure a Dune MMORPG wasn't already in the works. There was a clever Second Life area based on the books, but of course that's just a place to sit around and talk to people. You can't actually be eaten by a sandworm or cause a nuclear explosion by shooting some dude with your laser gun who happens to be wearing a force field. Other than that, I've found I'm not the only one who thought of an MMORPG in the Dune universe, and after having come up with some of my basic ideas, I found that someone else was thinking along similar lines. Specifically it was about the interrelationship of the houses and factions, and how they HAD to work together in order to make the spaceships run on time, even while they're trying to stab each other in the back. There are those other Real-Time Strategy games, the forerunner to the venerable Command and Conquer series, some of which had interesting cutscenes that sort of evoked David Lynch's version of the book. All of the established properties**, though, don't really hit the mark that I feel like a big Dune game could.
Basic Mechanics
Players accept missions for little pay or recognition for the chance to slowly gain favor and prestige with the groups they work for. They could work as guards for the Spacing Guild, making sure no one starts fighting while being transported from world to world. They could help smuggle minor technological components from Richese to the Imperial City at Kaitain (if caught, the Emperor will disavow any knowledge of your actions, of course), or working as a Spice miner. Every completed mission helps show your loyalty to a given faction. As their favor increases, you will begin to gain advantages that that faction can give you: cheaper space transport, cheaper Spice (which could give you powers of prescience or other in-game advantages but will kill you if you don't keep taking it), access to advanced tech, that sort of thing. Working with the Bene Tleilaxu will mean you will be able to get the Dune version of resurrection a lot cheaper, with some safeguards against them tampering with your body (a justification for less recovery time).
(And as far as retaining the character's memories when they're born again, they're just put through rigorous training programs which approximate the stuff they learned from before, again a justification for recovery time since the new ghola isn't familiar with its old role right away. You could even roleplay a change in personality after resurrection, if you wanted to.)
You can level in several factions at once, but only specialists get all the resources of a given faction, and only generalists will have the ability to play fully on their own without, at least, NPC assistance. If you try to please all factions at once, you will achieve a sort of diplomatic status, allowing you to explore the universe fully, which would be focused on the people who like to tour online worlds without being killed (like me), even if they don't get the game play depth they might otherwise have access to. Folks like the Suk Doctors, Mentats and Bene Gesserit NEED to have access to several groups to be of much use, the Doctors just for trust's sake, Mentats for knowledge, the Bene Gesserit for skullduggery. And yes, males could serve the Bene Gesserit too.
Betrayal
Since a player will likely create several characters, they will often want to benefit one of their characters more than the others. The subterfuge takes on an interesting meta-gaming tangent, where a player will create a character, build up a relationship with others, only to betray them at some point, hindering their immediate chances at a house (until they can find someone else with the same amount of resources), and bringing the stolen victory back home.
This backstabbing wouldn't be allowed in all environments, though, so players who want to create minor houses without the intrigue could still do that, although there would be other ways to sabotage each other there. And I think the mechanic works to distance players a bit from the idea behind it. So if there is betrayal they know it's part of the game, and don't have to get the game-quitting displeasure of someone actually running away with your company funds.
Ephemera
The environments themselves would have several different spots on each world that would be of interest. People who can't get over their habit of hunting down monsters and taking stuff from their corpses could hunt on a variety of worlds who have whole forests dedicated to sport hunting, and you can still sell these things or exchange them for minor quests, but this is NOT to be central to the game play. It's only a mini-game for people who have been conditioned by other online RPGs to expect that sort of thing.
Minor Houses, if they manage to be founded, actually get to set up private meeting places where resources can be stored without risk of theft (mostly) and can avoid some of the listening devices that would otherwise thwart well-laid plans. That might mean actually making mission plans part of the game mechanic, where a percentage of what you're going to do is revealed ahead of time, forcing players to put energy into hiding what they're going to do, which takes away from the mission's general effectiveness.
Buffs, which so many people like to use, would be strategic in nature. One thing I've tended to dislike about what online RPGs I've played is that they force you to keep track of how many support spells you've cast. In a sense they're kind of nice though, because they add some urgency to the battle, and you know you have to keep things going for everyone to be able to get the edge over the competition and survive. In Dune there aren't spells, so what I think might fit is strategies that get laid out before a mission is begun. There might be several stages to a mission, and players will have to plan out where they want to allocate their resources so that they will be protected by anti-snooping devices at this stage, while in a later stage they might be guarded by a few remote-controlled poison drones. These are, in effect, buffs, but they're managed ahead of time so you don't have to worry about the Dune equivalent of recasting. There would still be tools you could use mid-battle that might change the course of a mission, but you wouldn't have to depend upon these things to succeed all the time.
Finally, I thought it would be neat to have a mechanic where the lead players and the lead organizations tend to be targeted. In games like EVE Online this happens naturally, with real betrayals, real embezzling, real teaming up against the dominant groups and individuals. I wouldn't dream of duplicating that*, but instead I think it would be cool if the game itself sort of made you NOT want to be too well-noticed. Minor houses that achieve the most notoriety might be graduated to Major Houses, allowing them a lot more resources, but also making them and their planetary keeps subject to NPC attacks, as well as their locations being broadcast for everyone to find out and attack. Once they're defeated they lose their House status, though they still get to retain some of what they had earned. Then some other group gets promoted, with priority given to those who haven't been promoted before.
The same with individuals: a player who achieves some top ranking will be considered to be a possible Kwisatz Haderach, or however you spell it, and they'll have a rough time of it for as long as their current body is alive. When killed, they'll retain some interesting optional powers, but the Bene Tleilax will prevent this status from happening again during the next incarnation, similar to the way fallen Major Houses work.
End Notes
As an aside, it seems like Peter Berg will be trying to restart the franchise for the big screen. I'm actually sort of fond of the Lynch version, and would love to see a tighter version of Lynch's original theatrical release WITHOUT the internal monologues, just to make things weirder. But I'm always happy to see someone give that unfilmable book another go :)
Whew, now I feel better. No more Dune for me for a while :) Thanks to Leeto for the accidental encouragement. A couple of footnotes below to address some concerns a friend of mine brought up after reading the article, then the links.
* ("I wouldn't dream of doing it" because I don't see much of a point in improving upon a general system that EVE has done so well in developing. I also think that if I was going to design an MMORPG I might try to avoid griefing, and might make more of an escapist game where you get to side step a common tendency of human beings online, which is to mess things up for others. Thinking about a free-form betrayal system, I imagined it being too chaotic to yield the stately pace that I imagined these conspracies unfolding, sort of betraying the immersiveness of the game I had in my head)
** (I didn't feel like mentioning Cryo's games here, as the FPS and adventure/strategy games, while having interesting takes on Dune, still concentrate mostly on Dune the planet. I chose to mention the RTSs by name just as a footnote. Mentioning the other games didn't feel like it was adding a whole lot to what I was saying, since I was trying to get on to what a Dune game could accomplish if it didn't concentrate on Arrakis. I still think their adventure is probably the Dune game I consider to be the most intriguing in terms of atmosphere and creativity, but I'm enamored with Cryo's body of work in general).
LINKS:
Here's a light version of the Dune board game, free to print and play
A collection of informal data on what kind of MMORPG Dune aficionados would like
A well-made page that focuses on David Lynch's version, as well as Jodorowsky's version that never was
Brian Herbert's official site for the novels
Dune Wikia
Many Dune collectibles and resources