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Notes -
For those of you of a certain age, I hope that you were blessed enough to have the necessary computer hardware to enjoy the videogame Homeworld when it was released in 1999.
The premise is as follows: your species (the Kushan) inhabit a dying desert world. An expedition to the incredibly harsh desert uncovers the wreckage of a starship… You know what, just watch the opening cinematic - again if it's been a few years.
The original game included not just a beefy manual but essentially an entire lore preamble novella that was excellent. A labor of love from those who love SciFi. The single-player campaign had an unbelievably compelling story, atmospheric music and other sound design, and a cool wrinkle where your fleet persists from mission to mission, making choices and mistakes have consequences. It was also difficult. I'm ashamed to admit that 10-year-old me was unable to make it to the final mission before my cousin took his disc back home, though this wasn't helped by some challenges around pacing and the inadequate hardware of my parent's PC.
While I revere the single-player campaign, the multiplayer component had an extremely devout following. The game's engine rendered and calculated each mass driver's shots, from the tiny stream of rounds from a fighter to the massive 4-pixel slugs being slung from lumbering heavy cruisers. Ship AI was bizarrely strong, with fleet formations and tactic parameters leading to wildly different results, and a lot of emergent gameplay from weak rear armor, the use of the Z-Axis for positioning, and, of course, streaming a dozen fighters into kamikaze attacks on motherships as their fuel and armor deteriorated.
The sequel, Homeworld 2, was visually stunning but probably only OK. My main concern was around the story being stupid-i-fied. The hyperspace cores of the first game were made into lightly mythical machines produced by an ancient race. The dilution of what was at first fairly hard sci-fi was unpleasant, but the addition of a much better UX and advances in the depth of combat were salves on the wound.
The game went through IP hell before being purchased and re-issued by Gearbox. If you haven't purchased and experienced the Remaster, they are totally worth it. Anyway, I've tarried long enough (without even mentioning the reportedly excellent Cataclysm, which I haven't played!).
Homeworld 3 was released a few weeks ago. It's not a stretch to day I've been waiting almost 21 years for the game. I committed the cardinal sin of purchasing the collector's edition during a pre-order campaign through some now-defunct crowdfunding site.
And holy fuck, what a disappointment.
There are a lot of complaints about regressions in gameplay and AI. Frankly I'm unconcerned with those - I think the Dev team is going to improve them, and the community is weirdly diverse in its opinions on what makes good gameplay. A famous mod that easily quintupled the complexity of the game was still considered not complex enough, and meanwhile the rest of us are struggling to micro some of the basic unit types in a fast-paced game. I personally think it will end up being excellent after a few patches which is the nature of modern videogame development.
The story, however, is unforgivably bad. Without spoilers, what I can say is that the writers took a galactic-spanning setting, with trillions of people across light-years, and somehow shoe-horned in some idiotic human interest story. They then double down on the mysticism of Homeworld 2 and the hyperspace cores. The cutscenes are no longer beautifully painted vignettes and top-tier voice acting. Instead, they're crappy Unreal Engine renders where the audio and video aren't even synced properly. There are only 3 real characters, who act like children, and the whole premise is just profoundly weak.
It's not a stretch to say that I could have written something superior, especially in the age of the LLM, in just a couple of hours. It's a violation of the series' ethos and appeal, made even more baffling since many of the original staff for the first two games are at the new developer. And before you ask - it's not even particularly woke, though the big bad justifies their behavior with some level of "I was abused", and opinions differ as to what happened. It's just Stupid.
Perhaps a group of fans will create something better with the release of mod tools. I wouldn't mind hammering at it with a mix of AI tools to give myself some catharsis. I'm still enjoying playing the game, actually, and I'm looking forward to playing MP with some friends.
In any case - rant over. For those who were previous fans, you know a little about what you're getting into.
That sucks, there's nothing worse than hacks getting a hold of a treasured IP and making scholck sold mostly on presales. I learned my lesson on Diablo 3, and now everything (except Nintendo) gets at least 3 months of release before I'll consider buying it.
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Thanks for the warning. Homeworld 2 had turned me off enough, I guess I'll put this along with the X series as having jumped the shark.
It's an excellent (though probably no-longer canon) piece, mixing a bit of cosmic horror with some fun new mechanics and giving the Bentusi a lot better a characterization and sendoff than Cataclysm 2 did, imo, avoiding a lot of the weird chosen-oneisms in favor of Alien-style truckers in deep shit. The Beast is a shocking and chilling monster, and the fight against it never feels either unfair or canned.
The shield mechanics in particular were a blast: Sentinel fighters could link into powerful geometric shields that, when fully upgraded, can block everything but fightercraft... at the cost of the Sentinel itself becoming a sitting duck, and individual panels of the shield being vulnerable to sustained fire even from attacks it can block. They were seldom things that turned the tide of battle, especially in multiplayer, but the possibility an opponent might have picked up enough of them made a lot of other mechanics work very well, without mandating annoying micromanagement.
(The last boss of the campaign missions do end up being a bit of a gimmick, as a downside, though it was still pretty fun the first time, imo.)
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Oh man I remember playing that game over the summer between semesters in 2004. What a great game, I just don't recall if it was 1 or 2. The 3D gameplay was wild at the time, I think it still is compared to a lot of current 4x space fighting which is very flat.
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Literally Yes, if I remember correctly.
Choral arrangement of "Adagio for Strings" was some baller shit.
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