Dune: Spice Wars has unlocked enough of its tech tree and constructed enough pylons to make its march out of early access. Publisher Funcom and developer Shiro Games have announced that the full release of the multiplayer 4X RTS is happening on Thursday, September 14th. And I’ve now met my RTS gaming reference quota for this month.
The release from early access into a full game will come with a new content update in tow that brings a sixth faction in the form of House Ecaz. This new faction “wields power like a paint brush” with its unique wrinkle of creating prestigious artwork that apparently gives the faction political clout enough to “stand toe-to-toe with even the Atreides.” Those must be some damn fine paintings, y’all.
For those who don’t recall, Dune: Spice Wars first entered early access in April 2022 and was pretty much out of our overall wheelhouse until it added multiplayer in a June 2022 update. Our Not So Massively writer Tyler took a look at the game at the start of early access, finding it to be a title that serves an extremely small niche of gamer. “[I]f you’re a hardcore fan of both Dune and 4X games, I think you can have some fun here, but if you don’t meet both those criteria, Spice Wars is more likely to frustrate than delight,” he wrote at the time.
With the 1.0 release just around the corner, it's a good time to look back at how #DuneSpiceWars has evolved over the course of it's time in Early Access!
Check out everything that came to the game over the last year and a half here – https://t.co/d68Mjy4oRP pic.twitter.com/e29AsgsGFy
— Dune: Spice Wars (@DuneSpiceWars) September 12, 2023