TJS
Legendary Pubber
- Joined
- May 5, 2018
- Messages
- 3,650
- Reaction score
- 8,960
Because I think that considering game design through the prism of a setting like Dune can open up new ways to approach gaming. What's cool about Dune and how can we make that gameable?Then just play generic sci-fi and screw the details?
If I buy any adaptation, or licensed setting, then authenticity remains absolutely key to me. Moreover, the challenge of game design is to make any given setting viable as a gaming tool and premise. Some games are more successful than others in that respect, but if an authentic design wasn't the key in certain adaptations, then we wouldn't have seen the actual game design developments found in Ghostbusters or Pendragon, for example. We'd all just be playing D&D, old school. Admittedly, that is all that some gamers play….
I think Vampire is a good example of what I'm talking about actually. White Wolf didn't sit down and adapt Anne Rice, instead they took a lot of the themes from Ann Rice and thought through how to build a game around that that.I don't think that Dune actually needs that much twisting to make it a viable gaming experience myself. No more than The One Ring, for example, or even titles like Pendragon or Vampire. Indeed, we were unfortunate to see the last version of the Dune game pulled so early before it got any truction in the type of gameplay it was trying to achieve. According to one of the developers, there was an unpublished campaign that was "perfect" - which we never got to see.
And as Tristram said upthread there's Fading Suns, which I'd completely forgotten about, not having played it in years, which captures a lot of the feeling of Dune.
But I believe I was thinking of something more planet bound.