A reply someone sent to me a while ago that annoyed me enough to respond. The vibe I got was: “Dune Spice Wars is just a palette swap of Northgard” with the implication that the devs are lazy and greedy for developing a game that is extremely similar to their previous game (asset flipping, I guess).

I hadn’t played Northgard at the time, but did watch the trailer. Northgard was on sale recently, so I gave it a shot after having played a bunch of Spice Wars.

Because this has bitten me in the ass a few times on hexbear, here’s a short list of things I’m not arguing in this post: Game Publishers aren’t using DLCs or low effort new games games as low labour sources of profit. Obviously, this is the case. Artist and programmer hours down, IP rent up is endemic to the games industry. The devs are “good”. I actually have no idea, I just think this particular charge was unwarranted. Dune: Spice Wars or Northgard are good. Idk, I’ve enjoyed at least one of them These are the two most different games, nay, nouns in human history. They are not. Idk why, but in my region of the world “completely different” gets used for “actually very similar, but legally distinct”. Comes up a lot in these sort of nitpicky nerd circles Devs are always right, publishers/critics are always wrong

Here is a short list of ways in which the two games are similar: Same engine Same genre (so, trad RTS, selecting units, giving them orders, building up an economy to ensure a healthy supply of units to defeat opponents in a roughly similar situation to you) Region-based mechanics (building limits, buffs, privileged starting zone etc) Diplomacy mechanics Variety of victory conditions rather than hunting down every last power plant

Having now played at least some of both, these games feel substantially more different than many other pairs of games from similar devs that don’t get targeted like this. The main differences I’ve found: What players spend a lot of their time doing. Northgard heavily preferences micromanaging of the core unit (peasants), whereas Dune feels more like a trad RTS with Northgard characteristics. Northgard feels more like a village building game that also happens to be an RTS. Personally, I find the removal of peasant micromanagement a substantial improvement and one of the more annoying aspects of Northgard (especially annoying because it takes up a lot of the game) Mechanics present in Northgard are tightened and simplified substantially in Dune. This makes sense as Dune comes after Northgard and the devs have had time to hone down what worked in Northgard. For instance, scurrying around with scouts and trade relationships in Northgard is now just a single interface in Dune where you can manage your relationships etc. This does make relationships with other factions in Dune a little bit simpler, it’s not necessarily “better”. Different resources. Obviously, the relationship with these and things you actually do can change with a button, but neither are just “Money” and “population”. They both have these, but Dune Spice Wars isn’t being accused of being a palette swap of Age of Empires or Act of Aggression. No permanent Alliances: My experience with Northgard’s diplomacy was everything generally felt more permanent, whereas Dune has much more ebb and flow (as well as a limited set of hostile actions you can perform on allies). There can also only be one winner per match (two minds about this personally, I like allying with my friends and stomping on the computer, but it does change the diplomacy part of the game a lot). Less factions, greater faction differentiation. Given Northgard’s bread and butter was making lots of small DLCs with minor player factions, I feel like making a different game with both less factions but more content per faction is important.

Beyond those, there are a lot of smaller changes that it would be weird to go over. There’s a couple of mechanics that are sorta tacked on (e.g. the Landsraad council/influence stuff) that are different, but I hope you get the idea.

I have played a lot of different RTSes and I would say that mechanically these two games are more different than C&C and Tiberian Sun, or C&C and Red Alert (two pairs from the pre-DLC times), Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 (an example from another developer), Medal of Honour 1 and Call of Duty 1 (a pair of games from different developers with two different engines) etc.

I don’t really know why this annoyed me so much that I had to make a post. It might be touching on an extreme anti-DLC reaction that seems to want every single game to be entirely new despite most studios not having the resources to hire a network engineer every time they want to make a new game. The idea that a group of artists might commission a game engine (big, expensive, requires network engineers etc) and then write stories in that game engine (small, cheap, within reach for a group of artists) and not starve is apparently obscene.