Coming Home to Homeworld
One game dragged me into the world of strategy and it’s coming back.
FIAT LVX
Once upon a time —
No, no, no good story starts like that.
No shit, there I was —
Better.
No shit, there I was. It was 1999. I’d been out of high school roughly 10 years and was working for DEC/HP/Compaq — whoever it was that owned our desks that week — doing corporate and government level support for Tru64 UNIX on the Alpha, one of the first real 64-bit computing platforms available to business in general. At work, I was babysitter, salesman, software engineer, tea-reader, cynic, and most importantly — the go-to guy for difficult customers in difficult environments. Your 911 system is down on Thursday night and you need someone to get it back up in the next four hours? Not my job unless it’s also 2 AM, federal authorities are breathing down your neck, and you have access to the perennial “but — people are going to die!” phrase.
In which case, I was your guy.
But that was work. Home was — surprisingly not all that different. From ‘89 on, I became a sort of strange fixture in the online topography of the southeast, and not just the southeast — because one of the first things that I discovered (back in the bad old days when 14.4k modems were all the rage) was USENET. You remember USENET — set up by the Department of Defense in the late ‘50s, intended as a largely academic network to share research and findings, pretty much immediately inhabited by college students and computer geeks and scientists, all having huge, sometimes acrimonious, conversations about some of the most intricate problems in the world.
Also, Buffy.
I ran a USENET node on a PC out of my bedroom from high school well into 2001/2002. Forget the local BBS scene, while I was active on FidoNet in the ubiquitous PCBoards, my first love and my true love was given to USENET. That’s where the important people in various fields lived. That’s where the conversations worth having lived. That’s where you could actually piss off Jan Sands and Marvin Minsky and still be part of the community.
That was my jam.
Unsurprisingly, the other half of “my jam” was a growing affection for video games. I’d always been a bit of a videogame geek. Doom and Unreal Tournament and Wolfenstein all left me a bit cold — because the first-person shooter field was simply never going to be my first love, particularly at the time. Despite the fact that technology was slow and the idea of multiplayer was nascent at best, the style of shooter at the time was very much focused on twitch gameplay, rapid response, and the idea of anything more subtle than using a standup wall for cover hadn't even entered the minds of developers yet. Real-time strategy games were still hit and miss; when it came to strategy, turn-based (and hex-based in particular) was the rule of the day. Those were nice. I enjoyed them. But they didn't have the hook that sunk hard into me as a gamer and as a person.
So I played lots of video games. I pirated lots of video games, not to put too fine a point on it. It was that time. It was that place.
And then something came along that changed the way that I thought of games and the thought of what games could do an entirely different way.
Homeworld
It begins.
Asking where hard-core space geeks were in 1999 it’s sort of like asking where they were in 1969; you're not really asking about their life choices during that period, you’re really asking about one event and one thing and where they were when it happened.
For me, I was at home surfing my usual data feeds at the time, a mix of USENET newsgroups and BBS forums, when I saw the first promotions for Homeworld. They were absolutely beautiful. There’s no other way to put it, given the graphics of the time and given the capabilities of graphic artists at the time — which remember, was a whole different beast back then, before the proliferation of materials tools, modeling platforms, and all the rest — this was a wholly and completely unexpected pleasure. Enormous capital ships floating against a nebula-lit backdrop contrasted with the buzzing insect swarms of tiny fighter craft, space split asunder by glowing beams and lances of energy, the incessant chatter of high-speed projectiles fired at a mortal enemy…
There was nothing like it. There was literally nothing like it. The motion of ships was stately rather than “zippy.” Things felt heavy and difficult to move. And most of all, the influence of 3-D was everywhere — formations were described in 3-D and executed in 3-D, it actually mattered which direction that you approached an enemy from in order to do maximum damage. Do you go for the soft belly armor? Do you try to come up from behind and disable their engines so that you can get heavier weapons to bear? These were important questions.
But beyond the game mechanics there was something else that Homeworld had that other games had missed, and that was the ability to tell a story, to weave a narrative, that was understated and subtle and whose dark elements were up front and accessible but left you with the feeling that the characters involved were devoted and competent enough to take on the challenge. Couple that with the musical score by some of the most surprising people in the industry, then or now, and…
You know what? Thanks to the power of the modern Internet, I can let you experience a little bit of what that was like.
That’s a Let’s Play of the original Homeworld, from starting up the game, to configuring your ships, through the first two missions, played by someone with the good sense not to talk over the exposition that truly set the stage for what was to come. Very, very few games manage to capture and encapsulate the mood of the game so rapidly and so readily, and provided to the player in ways which are still experimental, as Homeworld.
It also sets up that Karan S’jet became, at that moment and every moment since: my ideal, the person to whom I look up to, and the person I aspire to be.
That’s right, in the Homeworld universe I would be perfectly happy to volunteer to have my entire neurology slaved to that of a giant manufactory mothership, to see and know the experience of deep exploratory space as though it were on my skin, to create the vessels which can carry my fragile, tiny compatriots out into a hostile universe with nothing more than the force of my will, to be responsible for the preservation of what remains not only of my species but of my culture.
That’s some big stuff. That’s some tremendous set up — and we get that in Homeworld within 10 minutes of starting to play.
The graphics look dated now. That kind of low poly modeling has seen its day. Computers have advanced so much that Homeworld could probably (and does) run on your average Android tablet. At the time — they were completely mind blowing. You could circle around each of these ships, zoom in to watch their details as they went about their business — and many of them had much smaller animations that played while they were up to things. You could pull back and get a strategic view of the battle and an actual grasp of the battlefield. You could even — and this still is surprisingly rare even after almost 20 years of software and hardware development — pull back and see things unfold in a proper 3-D space.
In many ways the graphics are still amazing in the way that they serve to communicate about the world and the things happening in it. They do the job.
The above first 45 minutes then sets us up for what I have referred to as “the most powerful scene in all of video gaming history.” And I know that’s a strong statement. I know that’s a strong statement, but the combination of art, of voice acting, of writing… There has been no equal in the years since.
Think of it.
You've just left the debris of one of the earliest FTL vehicles your species has created. You are about to set out on a grand quest to discover your homeworld, the place that you come from. You are currently riding in the greatest — if unfinished — product of all of your research, all of your industrial might, all of everything that you understand about the universe, and you’re ready to go home. The ship that you were about to meet up with as part of your trials — destroyed. Hostiles have swept out and around that debris and clearly tried to destroy you and everyone with you, at the end of which you have avoided destruction through sheer luck and tenacity. So you turn around to head back to the dock where you were made, to try and figure out what’s going on, and then this happens:
Slow. Deliberate. With just a hint of cruelty — because there is no way for you to save that first tray, 100,000 of the last of your people are going to die while you watch and while you try to figure out exactly what’s going on. You come back to see your world burning, your friends dead, and it’s not a scene of ass-kicking violence; Adagio for Strings is lamenting in the background as though the game itself is mourning for the millions of lives lost. Your goal is to simply capture one of the ships that’s attacking those few cryo-trays, consciously murdering the last of your people, and then to kill the rest of those so bold as to try to murder you.
When you're done with the immediate task, the scene doesn't end. You don’t go on to your next mission. You have to finish cleaning up what you can right there — there’s no easy way out. You have to deliberately go out and grab each of those cryo-trays, bring them back to the mothership, and wait for them to be taken in and properly preserved, because they are the last of your people and the act of securing them is meaningful in the context of the story.
That is some powerful stuff. That goes beyond most of what had been basic understandings in videogame design up until the release of Homeworld. Moments like that, extended scenes like that, experiences crafted by the game like that are part and parcel of why Homeworld was such a linchpin game for my personal experience. It brought home that games could be much broader in terms of their literary aspirations. It made clear that with cutting-edge technology of the time stories could be told on a vast scale that could drive the imagination to ever greater heights. Ironically, looking back on it from nearly 20 years later, it also demonstrates that you don’t need cutting-edge technology to evoke that kind of vision or to drive that kind of broad story. After all, Homeworld did it with minimally animated cut scenes, very dryly delivered (and better for it) voice acting, and extremely low poly gameplay. Even now, the game has something to teach us about storytelling.
That’s what game design really is under the hood, of course: telling a story. Not just telling a story; it has to be a story in which a controllable agent within the architecture of the narrative is connected to the viewer or viewers, because after all, a context of narrative in which you don’t control any agency isn't a game. It’s a CG animation, or it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure Story Book. Giving the player or players agency within the context of the narrative is what makes a game game-like. As someone much smarter than me said about games:
A game is a series of interesting decisions.
While we're on the topic of interesting decisions, consider what the competition in the real-time strategy domain was in the year that Homeworld was released.
Yes, the major competition for a game about hard choices, terrible events, slow and deliberately paced gameplay, was a game that pretended to be about those things, with gameplay that was really about running around as fast as you could, clicking the mouse about as fast as you could, and avoiding as much contact with the story as you could. Yet that was the game that had the obsessive fan base very early on and continues to this very day.
There’s something about that which is both disheartening and simultaneously utterly expected. StarCraft, at heart, is a game about micromanaging a whole pile of extremely small decisions all at once, with an immediate sense of feedback on whether you were successful or failed. There’s no need to build up an overarching plot because the issues of that plot don't matter to the player, even in the single-player campaign. StarCraft found its niche early on with a highly competitive, highly active multiplayer community and that’s pretty much what they've stayed with in the ensuing 20 years. While lore has grown up around in about the interaction between the Zerg, Protoss, and Terran species/factions, for the most part none of it matters at a real level to the biggest fans. To them, the only important aspects are whether multiplayer competition is completely balanced or asymmetrical — and woe betide anyone that suggests that it should be the latter.
Homeworld, too, had a multiplayer aspect, and like the rest of the game the multiplayer aspect exhibited a strange compulsion on me. Not that I was ever going to be one of the best and brightest of competitive Homeworld players — not even in my most delusional states could I imagine that — but the multiplayer in Homeworld made extensive use of the fact that each battlefield was a 3-D environment, and that movement and resource collection in the full space provided to you, opened a myriad of means of approach to your enemy — and a myriad of ways to advantageously avoid engagement.
One of my favorite multiplayer maps was called “Tree of Life”, and featured what was effectively a four branched nebula system connected in the middle to another four branched nebula system, extending both up and down in the cylindrical space of map. The default starting areas were out at the tips of the limbs, and if you simply consumed your way up (or down) toward the core you were inevitably going to run into the other players who were consuming resources in the same way.
Unless you were smart. Unless you realized that in 3-D space you could go anywhere, including laterally to the next branch. Or vertically to the next segment down below, without coming anywhere near the core. This is where the strategy kicked in: moving toward the core gave you easy access to dense resources but there was an extremely high probability that you were going to run into other people and lose ships, thus losing resources in the bargain, or you could develop more slowly and in secret and prepare for an assault on whoever ended up in the core — hopefully weakened by other players — and take success for yourself.
Multiplayer games of Homeworld were not fast. That was one of the appeals to me; the game rewarded a thinker’s pace, it rewarded careful consideration of where you would allocate your resources and how long it would take to get them there. Unlike many of the games in the real-time strategy niche before and since, logistics had a true and powerful effect on the immediate battlefield. If you were good with logistics, if you were good with the actual strategy of waging war in space, then Homeworld very well could reward you with great wins.
Homeworld: Cataclysm
Infection is a Hell of a thing.
Then came the year 2000, widely considered by many to be a mistake of calendrical proportions. For Homeworld fans like myself, however, it was a great year. It might even have been considered an incredible, awesome year.
This was the year that Homeworld: Cataclysm came out.
Homeworld: Cataclysm was the kind of game that you expect to follow up a successful introduction — except it was good. Some of the core mechanics changed, and some of those changes were in no way something that we, as players, wanted but were considered necessary to open up access to the game for less hard-core audiences. I wasn't exactly sure at the time where these less hard-core audiences were going to be coming from considering that the audience for real-time strategy games in general was pretty selective and for 3-D space combat real-time strategy games, you weren't talking about tens of millions of people. Things like removing fuel requirements for small craft were considered “dumbing down” the game for an audience that was never going to show up. Combining resource collectors and salvage frigates into a single unit, gated by a research upgrade, was not taken well by some number of players.
Interestingly, while the fuel removal bugged me a little, overall I really enjoyed the changes to units and development within the game itself. The ships themselves had more moving parts and shifting pieces, the Command Ship was able to add modules on to change its capabilities during the course of the campaign, and overall I really enjoyed the direction that the story moved into. No longer were we piloting the mothership; that story was done. Now we simply have an experimental mining vessel, capable of creating its own support fleet, that finds itself in a situation that it was never intended for against an enemy that no one expected.
And oh, what an enemy the Beast Fleet was.
The screams of assimilated crewman. The slow buildup to the horror of discovery. The voice out of nowhere that announces its consciousness.
If the background music were a little more prominent and a little more well-chosen, there’s a good chance that I would put this as the most emotionally moving moment in my personal videogame history — as is, it’s only #2.
As you can see in that video, while the engine using Homeworld hadn’t changed in the shift to Cataclysm, the model quality had, and the rendering capabilities certainly had, and the UI had a bit of a once over as well. Overall, it came across as a more polished game experience and justly so. In a real sense, this is the game that solidified the reputations of Relic and Barking Dog Studios.
On the multiplayer side, the big change was the addition of the Beast Fleet, in play, which was a mix and hodgepodge of Turanic raiders and more familiar Hiigaran vessels, infected with the techno-organic Beast virus. While playing with the Beast Fleet, you still needed to do research, you still needed to acquire resources to manufacture your own ships, but a number of your platforms could fire the “Beast Beam,” an electromagnetic pulse that leapt from small craft to small craft and cause the targeted ships to become part of your own fleet. If someone came after you with an early game rush of fighters, they were in for a terrible surprise, as your core ship could easily Beast Beam the entire flight into becoming your own personal honor guard.
Needless to say, I played a lot of Beast Fleet.
Cataclysm was probably the high point of the Homeworld series, both in popularity and in gameplay. It maintained and expanded the multiplayer possibilities, added asymmetrical fleets, and truly dug down even further into the lore of the setting which is where a lot of the excitement of the game actually resides. While the soundtrack is not nearly on the same level of quality as the first, it still captures the mood in mode of gameplay at any given turn.
Playing Cataclysm reveals more of what’s going on in the galaxy unrelated to the Beast Fleet, and some of it will come as a significant surprise to everyone, in character and out.
Homeworld 2
Do we Really Have to?
Well, it was pretty!
Homeworld 2 was released in 2003 by a small player in the videogame production market — you may not have heard of them — Sierra Entertainment. That’s right, Relic managed to get in bed with a really large, fairly powerful (at the time), deeply penetrating distributor for what was intended to be the grand relaunch/buildup of one of their most beloved videogame series. Homeworld 2 promised players vastly larger fleets than were present in Cataclysm, moving back toward the mothership-hosted mega-fleets of the original, with the added complexity from more ships, more weapon types, more types of engagement, and the ability to board enemy frigates and other vessels and capture them on site.
Those were the promises.
Overall, and perhaps surprisingly, the promises were actually carried out. We got all of those things — including an increased focus on larger warships, even prettier graphics and combat scenes, multiple types of weapon and vehicle. All of those things happened. What also happened was an increased focus on rock-paper-scissors-style gameplay, where one type of ship directly counters another type of ship instead of having vehicles which have strengths and weaknesses which are approached by a number of other ships as possible counters. The decrease in interest in fighter combat ended up removing a lot of the verticality that had been a hallmark of Homeworld conflict since the first; capital ships tended to stay oriented flat to the plane of the map and were very difficult to force to orient otherwise, even if it would be in your best interest. Fighters/bombers were still active participants on the battlefield, but the presence of flak frigates (and their relative cheapness), which were direct and hard counters to fighters but weak against literally everything else, made fighter deployment a crapshoot.
And so it went on down the line for players of the Homeworld series who really, really wanted to be excited about Homeworld 2. For every step forward (and there were steps forward), there were two steps back and sometimes two steps to the side.
Oh yes, Homeworld 2 introduced a new mechanic for setting the difficulty of single player campaign missions. Instead of allowing you to set the difficulty based on what you wanted to play that moment, the system attempted to create suitable opponents based on the ships that you had brought to the battle — which sounds wonderful, until you realize that all of the ships in Homeworld 2 could be scrapped for their resource value and that resource value stored in the mothership. If you wanted a cakewalk — and most players want to cakewalk, even if they spend the next 20 years of their lives bitching about how easy the game was because of something they chose to do — all you needed to do was resource salvage your entire fleet except for your mothership, pack it up, and drive to the next mission, whereupon the artificial intelligence would, intelligently, build an opposing force based on the idea that you have only a single mothership. Then you would simply begin to build/rebuild your fleet from scratch with all the resources in your hold. This wouldn't have been necessary or possible if Homeworld 2 hadn’t simultaneously introduced a limit on the number of ships of a given class that you can command at a given time — conveniently the total amount of resource units available in your fleet as a whole was beneath that of how much your mothership could carry.
Take this as a warning, young game designers. Unintended consequences can come out of your best intention.
Even with all the mechanical changes, Homeworld 2 might have been a hit despite itself if it hadn't been for the fact that the lore of the setting took a serious hit with this release. The actual meaning of the original mothership is changed from an accomplishment of a group of exiles who worked very hard and discovered hidden knowledge about where they came from, focusing all the effort of their societies to returning to the stars and their home, into a story about a bunch of guys who found a magic item (the Core of their FTL drive), and then end up in possession of one of the three most powerful items in the cosmos which is required to save the world. In a strange sense, it took the intensely human story of Homeworld and made it an almost boring traditional fantasy with some spaceships thrown in just for fun. Along the way, the magic Hiigarans run into the ancient wizard — scratch that — ancient merchants, the Bentusi, who lived just long enough to tell the Hiigarans of their magical fate and their quest, and the fact that the Progenitors were the original forgers of the magic items they now seek, before wandering off to conveniently be killed to the last, thus allowing our protagonists to go up against the Big Bad and –
You know, I just can't finish this. Seriously. I want to. I should. I just can’t.
With all the darkness in the dynamic and the implicit political infighting and struggle of Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm, to have this as the story of Homeworld 2 was mildly insulting, at the time, and now it feels significantly insulting. There’s something about having it all together in one place that just makes the skin crawl in the mind quail and wail for what could have been.
But it sure was pretty. Let’s look at some of it.
As you can see, extremely pretty. In this transfer the visuals are a little obscured which appears to be an effort of the designers of the game engine to give things a little more depth by the introduction of some mist. Utterly unnecessary, of course — the models and motion are more than sufficient when coupled with the fact that the camera can be swung around in 3-D to create a proper feeling of depth. That’s going just one step too far, of gilding the lily, is pretty much a core element of Homeworld 2 across the board.
And that’s sad. And moreover, unnecessary, because as a result the Homeworld franchise sat in a box on multiple publishers’ shelves up until extremely recently.
And then things blew right up.
Shipbreakers
Is it Homeworld or is it something that looks just like it?
Before we talk about Shipbreakers, we have to talk about the somewhat rocky road that the Homeworld franchise has been going through for the last decade or so.
In 2003, Relic released the source code for Homeworld to the game community — not quite open-source, as you had to actually register with them as a developer to acquire the code and poke around it. Unsurprisingly, a number of people did, leading to even so much as a Linux port. That’s a pretty impressive piece of work for what is essentially a near-open-source project.
In 2004, Relic was bought by THQ — a company well known for producing excellent games of their own, and there was much rejoicing and expectation of big things, including the possible resurrection of Homeworld as a franchise an ongoing concern. Three years after, in 2007, Blackbird Interactive, made up of several Relic founders and Homeworld developers, spun off to pursue their own project, a space real-time strategy game without the Homeworld name or the franchise license.
That game became known as Hardware: Shipbreakers.
THQ went bankrupt in 2013, put up all their IP for auction, and Gearbox came away with the rights to Homeworld for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.35 million, which is in no sense a small amount of money. However, that left Hardware: Shipbreakers hanging out in a sort of strange space, because as anyone could see from the above video, from the font choices, to the design choices, even down to the UI — everything in Shipbreakers reeks of Homeworld.
For a while, BI were saying that Shipbreakers was going to be a Free2Play game supported by a fistful of investors and even went so far as to begin “preorders,” including a $100 founders’ opportunity with additional merchandise and early access. That stirred up some interesting feeling among the remnants of the Homeworld fan base, some of whom were happy for the opportunity to be involved in a further development of the franchise and some of whom were taken aback at what was the perceived opportunism of BI at a time when the IP was in some doubt.
Which brings us to today, where Hardware: Shipbreakers is no more. Not because the project as a whole has gone away but because BI and Gearbox have apparently come to an agreement to do a more traditional game release and release Shipbreakers as a part of the Homeworld franchise — as originally conceived, a prequel, theoretically set on Hiigara and focusing on the time before the unification of the Hiigaran nations and social groups to back the mothership project.
BI has gone so far as to refund all of the people who invested in their original “preorder” — which in itself has engendered some questionable responses and concern from the fan base.
There hasn't been a lot of news released about Shipbreakers in the last several months, but what there is has largely come out through their Facebook page. The company website for Homeworld: Shipbreakers is still extremely sparse. What the actual state of affairs is, or even anything about the game beyond visual styling and an extremely small video of prospective gameplay which includes some rather yellow looking construction equipment driving around in a desert — unknown.
A total shame. Shipbreakers has the potential to be an extremely interesting addition to the Homeworld setting, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to pick it up for myself and experience what BI has to offer.
Homeworld: Remastered
Because there’s no way to keep Karan S’jet down.
You didn't think Gearbox would drop $1.25 million and then not carry through on doing something with the franchise, did you?
I ask because some people did wonder just that. Gearbox has an inconsistent fan base, and by that I mean that they have people that really, really love everything they do, and other people that really, really hate everything they do — and both groups cling to their position no matter what Gearbox actually does. Release a sequel to a well loved and well respected game that delivers “that and more”, which is exactly what they promised? People got extremely hot under the collar regarding Borderlands 2, despite Gearbox being extremely upfront and direct about what they found interesting, desirable, and worthwhile to expand upon from the original Borderlands. In many ways, because they are a company who is not shy about sharing their ideas in a very brazen way, they end up catching the back end of a lot of people’s emotional whiplash.
So — Homeworld: Remastered. This was just announced a few days ago, which really just means that the only responses to the announcement are extremely polarized, totally in favor or totally against. (For the record, I’m in favor.) It’s an interesting presentation that they have on their website telling us why it’s remastered and not just “rereleased.”
As a savvy game consumer, I already expected that the models would be increased to be more modern, both in terms of polys and the resolution on textures — but I was absolutely not expecting that they would go not just for HD, but UHD (ultra high-definition), and full bore 4K — which is well beyond the displays of pretty much everyone, even the most hard-core aficionados, that I know. Gearbox is claiming that having access to the original source audio and they've created a new mix of effects and music, which both fills me with concern and excitement as the original Homeworld soundtrack still stands as one of the greatest pieces of cinematic music ever created. They're also claiming that multiplayer will be integrated into a single server system, which is absolutely sensible as there’s no reason to split the community up for such a niche online experience. They're also claiming to include Homeworld Classic and Homeworld 2 Classic:
This collection also includes archival versions of Homeworld Classic and Homeworld 2 Classic, preserving the purest form of the original releases with compatibility for modern operating systems.
I’m not exactly sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, the games are certainly worthy of being considered as standalone pieces of art, and I have no doubt that there will be tournaments and private groups who are devoted to the strategic mastery of the Classic versions. I’m just not sure what the intent there is. It might be as simple as, “well, we’re rebuilding the internal architecture anyway — we might as well include the lowest resolution and lowest overhead versions possible since we have to work with them regardless.”
I’m also nervous about the conspicuous absence of Homeworld: Cataclysm. I’ve already gushed at extreme length about how much I enjoyed that game both as a visual experience and a story experience, so to see it left out of this discussion concerns me. Personally, I would much rather see Homeworld 2 left out of a Homeworld: Remastered project then I would be willing to give up Cataclysm. Maybe my concern is unfounded. Maybe they are considering Cataclysm part of Homeworld, since it was released as a standalone expansion pack, and we will have the great pleasure of experiencing the onset of the Beast Fleet one more time. I hope so. I may actually have to go out of my way and see if I can get in touch with someone out at Gearbox and ask them a few questions about exactly that.
Let’s talk about their Collector’s Edition survey.
I love Collector’s Editions. That’s not to say that I buy every one that comes up, but for a game that I’m interested in in that fills a niche that I really haven’t had filled, I think of Collector’s Editions not so much as a way to get “extra merchandise” connected to a franchise but as a way to say directly to the developers “thank you, I appreciate that you are making something so excellently targeted to me; please take some extra money.” In that sense, I think that the availability of CE versions of games is an excellent means of feedback.
In this case, Gearbox has up for vote what physical items that they should include with Homeworld: Remastered. Really, it comes down to a choice between a 6 inch diecast zinc alloy mothership on a stand for $75, or a 12 inch, hand decorated, molded ABS resin mothership with LED lights and a power cable. For $100.
Is this a question? Is this something I should have to debate for more than six and half microseconds? Is this something that every red blooded Homeworld fan does not immediately and consciously hunger for at the very thought of?
No. Of course it’s the 12 inch, hand decorated, molded ABS resin mothership with LED lights. And a power cable. No one has to think about that. Not a single person on earth has to give that a thought. Give it to me and give it to me now, dammit. I want it.
Now.
Bringing it Home(world)
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Karan S’jet.
So where does that leave us?
As a community of fans and game enthusiasts, it’s a pretty impressive place to be. The game itself has been ported to multiple platforms and been embraced by thousands of people over the last 20 years. There are fanfics of Homeworld back story and front story — some of them involving getting naked with Karan S’jet — and there’s no way that can be a bad thing. There’s at least one game coming down the pipe which contains entirely new content for a beloved franchise, and it looks as though it has some potential if it ever sees airtime. We also have a remastered version announced from a company with a history of actually being able to release games, which is fairly reassuring when it comes to whether or not they will be able to actually produce.
The immediate future for the fandom is looking pretty rosy.
For myself, I continued to embrace the things that Homeworld as a franchise and as a product has taught me over the last 20 years.
- Good story matters.
- Make use of the tools that you have and build the tools that you don’t.
- A little darkness in a story does not make it unsellable.
- Neither does an element of hope and, ultimately, even an upbeat ending.
- Religious motifs can be dealt with in a serious, adult, mature manner without resorting to outright parody.
- When you do resort to outright parody — I’m looking at you Homeworld 2 — it’s both obvious and is aggressively detrimental to the story.
- Yes is always appropriate as background music in a videogame.
- Don’t be afraid of decompressing a story; if it takes a little bit to experience, that will not destroy your ability to reach the audience.
- Karan S’jet is extremely hot.
That’s not a bad bundle of things to come away with for a writer or for a game designer.
I hope they've helped you as much as they've helped me.
