The learning curve does look really brutal but it made me realize I was falling into a gaming rut. I thought I was a decent gamer but it’s just that I’ve been playing the same “base” games with fancier graphics for so long. I’ve been mostly into sandbox games lately because I can vary my goals but with this game I think I’ll really be able to expand into any type of tactic or strategy to scratch that never ending itch.
Oh you’re in luck, with the original CD you can play the remake people have been working on! (requires some files from the original game but has been upgraded)
Dune Legacy - Dune Legacy is an effort by a handful of developers to revitalize the first-ever real-time strategy game. It tries to be as similar as possible to the original gameplay but to integrate user interface features most modern realtime-strategy games have like selecting multiple units.
edit: @gmr_leon@mstdn.social listed below the OpenRA which also has a Dune 2000 rebuild on it if you’re interested.
If you’re going to dive into any RTS I would definitely recommend this one. With any of them you have to familiarize yourself with the units and the interface which can seem like a lot at first till they become like your best friends and you know them by heart. A lot of other RTS’s that have been around are somewhat losing steam for entry-level players and might not be worth the investment. If you want more “hero” types of RTS I would probably recommend something like Stormgate but if you’re interested in military/army battles then BAR is a winner.
I don’t know why I didn’t link the website lol, guess in my head I didn’t want it to come across as sponsored or something and anyone who was super interested would just look at the links in the videos or search it. I’m just very entertained atm so figured I would share the videos that got me to this point. Thank you for the Zer0-K and other references, looked it up and now realizing there’s a whole slew of projects and remakes I’ve missed out on.
You made me pause for a while and contemplate my RTS gaming history. I was never really enthralled with medieval or time period rts’s (even though I’ve definitely sunk a lot of time into some of them like lord of the realms) but C&C I absolutely loved when it first came out. The cool live-action cut scenes, expanding what I was familiar with playing Dune, even had family members that also really got into the series. I slowly drifted away from it, I realize it was because of the excessive never-ending expansions being released and an absolutely bonkers story of a political drama it was. I just couldn’t keep up with all the releases as a broke kid and the characters/story lines did nothing for me.
Old school Blizzard did a great job with Warcraft cinematics for the time, the mystery behind the world you inhabited was left to your imagination at the beginning. They did a banger of a job with the Starcraft lore when it came out as well. I still remember pouring over the game booklet with the origins story before and after getting to finally play it. Human prisoners lost in space like some kind of 30th century Australia stuck in cryo-sleep and only awake to find they can never return home? Fascinating. Zerg Hive mind with specialized broods with their own lore? Baelrog Brood is legendary to me still. Protoss was just so fascinating and everything connecting the universes stories together just seemed mystical. Though I feel like they just completely botched it, Brood wars story was too rushed with a million things going on, SC2 was just abysmal and generic story telling but I do appreciate that something did happen after sc1 as I would be complaining for different reasons if they had just dropped it and moved onto a different game lol. Sorry for the wall of text, was nice to get this fleshed out from my mind though.