INTRO:
Relic may have been known for some seminal games, which include the Homeworld titles. However, unwise decisions on the part of its management resulted in its ownership exchanging hands more than a few times. The developer also got into games that are not well received (nor designed). More importantly, it had next to no ownership of the IPs that it developed, causing IPs like Homeworld to be in a state of limbo (especially if they did not have sterling commercial success).
For better or worse, Gearbox bought the rights to the Homeworld IP after Sega sought to offload it. Its first decision with this is to produce a remaster of the first and second mainline games – not a particularly ambitious act. Fortunately, Gearbox contracted out this work to developers who know better, namely Blackbird Interactive, whose core is composed of former Relic staff.
FOREWORD:
Before continuing with the rest of this article, it should be prefaced first that this article would be about comparisons between the first and the second title, and between their original versions and remastered versions. There will also be complaints about persisting problems in the gameplay of either game.
PREMISE:
The stories of either game have already been covered elsewhere (specifically years ago). However, this article would include a recap that is framed by the conclusion of the story in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.
After having discovered that they are descendants of refugees (and despite the efforts of those that try to suppress this), the victorious alliance of Kiith at the end of Deserts of Kharak embarks on a quest to advance themselves to the level of faster-than-light space travel. The means to do so has been provided by the discovery and development of the Hyperspace core. The culmination of their efforts is the Mothership, in which protagonist Karan S’jet is permanently ensconced in.
Some of the writing and voice-overs have been updated to accommodate the prequel. However, this is the most that has been done; certain quirks of the writing and voice-overs have been retained, for better or worse. For example, the narrators still do not refer to the protagonists of the first game as the Kushan, despite the hard canonization that has occurred.
Continuing the recap, the Kushan discover that they are not without ancient enemies. The Taiidani defeated their ancestors in an interstellar war, and have banished them to Kharak, with hyperspace tech forbidden to them. Any attempt to abrogate the banishment would be enforced – harshly.
The enforcement happened after the launch of the Mothership. Kharak was razed, but thanks to fateful circumstances, the Mothership avoided being caught in the onslaught. Thus begins a quest of homecoming and vengeance.
NO MORE TAIIDANI CAMPAIGN IN FIRST GAME:
If the recap above does not make it clear already, the Kushan have been canonized as the protagonists of the first game, and the Taiidani are the antagonists. In the original version of the first game, the player is given the option to play as either the Taiidani or the Kushan; their places in the conflict is merely interchanged in the narrative.
The main issue – and the source of complaints from those who remember the first game fondly – is that the gameplay of the Taiidani campaign would be missing too as a consequence of the omission. The Taiidani does have certain technologies that the Kushan does not have, for example.
To this day, this omission remains a major point of contention between those who argued that canon takes priority and those who wish that the interchangeability of the campaign has been retained.
OTHER MAJOR CHANGES TO THE FIRST GAME:
Fortunately, the other changes to the first game in the Remastered version are much better conceived and received.
The change that is appreciated by most is that strike-craft and corvettes no longer need refueling. This was a tedious gameplay mechanism that severely held back the utility of these vessels, so doing away with them – just like the second game did – made them a bit more reliable (though not by much, due to the retention of another problem that they have; this will be described later).
Interestingly, the only remaining vestige of this system is in one of the missions against the Kadeshi – in which it does not work at all. The Kadeshi strike-craft simply sputter and slow to a crawl when they run out of fuel, and returning to their fuel pods does not appear to refuel them.
Researching new techs now cost resources, just like it does in Homeworld 2. This is in addition to the purchase prices of tech sold by the Bentusi, so the player will want to be careful about spending resources that have been accumulated during the story campaign.
There are other changes to the first game that bring it closer to the build of the second game. The sensor system in the second game has been implemented for the Remastered version of the first game. Likewise, the Remastered version has its camera controls updated. The user interface also shows more information about selected units.
In Homeworld 2, the resources in the map are automatically collected when the player decides to complete the mission (by achieving the last mission objective). This change is retroactively implemented in the Remastered version of the first game too, but without a notification. (That said, the player ends missions in the first game by having the fleet hyper-jump away after having completed objectives. This does not happen automatically.)
Another retroactive update is the implementation of formation types that were in the second game into the first game.
NO MORE COLLISIONS BETWEEN SHIPS IN FIRST GAME:
There are people who would want the representation of space in video games to be as believable as possible. For better or worse, their concept of believability is that the expected risks and dangers in space travel should be implemented. Thus, the original version of Homeworld had collisions between ships, and these are unpleasant.
This would not have been an issue if units have competent pathfinding scripts, but they do not. Therefore, collisions are a significant source of frustration because ships on the same side may have paths that crossed, and they would crash into each other.
The second game implemented rubber-banding physics to prevent collisions. This has been implemented in the Remastered version of the first game too.
(Collision damage is still there, but since collisions are so rare now, this rarely occurs in turn.)
SALVAGE CORVETTES IN FIRST GAME:
The Salvage Corvettes are entertaining units to use in the original version of the first game. The Remastered version does not change this circumstance, but some balances have been introduced.
To recap, Salvage Corvettes allow their owning player to capture enemy vessels, other than motherships. They latch onto their victims, which also gradually disable them; movement goes first, followed by weapons as more of them latch on. Eventually, after the last corvette is attached, the victim is hauled to the mothership for forcible take-over.
In the Remastered version, they cannot capture strike-craft, which is understandable because chasing the latter down is not feasible in the first place. They cannot capture very large capital ships either, such as the Hiigaran Mobile Shipyard in multiplayer (though these are scripted to be mothership-class vessels anyway, which render them immune to capturing).
The number of Salvage Corvettes that are needed to capture large capital ships (e.g. destroyers and larger) has also been increased by one in the Remastered version. This is just as well, because Salvage Corvettes can shut down such units quite readily. Salvage Corvettes are also slower in Remastered, thus increasing their vulnerability.
These go some way towards toning down the hilarious potency of these units. Still, certain major advantages remain, such as the disabling effect from corvettes that have managed to latch on.
SLIGHTLY MORE CONTROL OVER DRONE FRIGATES IN FIRST GAME:
In the first game, drone frigates released armed drones that follow their parent ship around to shoot at any encroaching enemy strike-craft. However, in the original version of the game, they deploy drones as soon as they build them, instead of storing them so that they can deployed en masse.
In the Remastered version of the game, the player is given the option to have them deploy or recall their drones. However, for whatever reason, the order to have them do so has a cooldown timer. Perhaps this is there to prevent the player from abusing this feature.
MORE RESOURCES IN STORY CAMPAIGNS:
As a reminder, the story campaigns of both games have the player retain any surviving fleet assets from one mission to another. This meant that people who are skilled at management would be rewarded with reliable fleets for meeting the next challenge. However, this also meant that players that did poorly would eventually find themselves being stymied by too many casualties and would have to restart the campaigns and do better next time.
This can be especially frustrating to players who are new to games with full 3D environs and real-time strategy (RTS) military management and are having trouble learning. It was little wonder that even among RTS titles – which are already a niche in video games – the Homeworld titles were particularly daunting to the inexperienced.
Blackbird Interactive has attempted to solve this problem through several means. For one, Deserts of Kharak (and the original version of Homeworld 2) lets the player choose a preset fleet to begin a mission with instead of retaining the fleet from the conclusion of the previous mission. This diminished the appeal of the fleet-retention feature, however.
Hence, in the Remastered versions of both games, the in-map amount of resources have been increased, especially those that are closest to the player’s starting location. Indeed, there are objects that contain resources that CPU-controlled enemy resourcing cannot take (or is not scripted to try to take). This gives the less-than-skilled player more leeway in making up for losses due to poor decisions.
MANY COMPLAINTS ABOUT FIRST GAME:
Unfortunately, for all the improvements to the first game that were applied during its remastering, there are many problems that it retained.
OCCASIONAL INSTABILITY:
The first of these complaints is its instability. The game is not conducive to Alt-Tab shifts; doing this too many times would eventually render the game unstable, especially when attempting to quit the game. Hard crashes during gameplay are rare, fortunately.
SMALL TEXT IN MAIN MENU USER INTERFACE:
One of the enduring complaints about the older Homeworld games is that the font that is used for screens in the main menu and branching menus are rather small. There is no way to scale the text sizes; considering that Deserts of Kharak does have such a feature, this omission in the remaster of the first game is a noticeable oversight.
Fortunately, in-game UI can be scaled; this changes the font size too.
SELECTION U.I. DOES NOT SHOW ALL SHIPS IN A LARGE HOMOGENEOUS FLEET:
If the player selects a group of mixed types of vessels, the game displays their status as icons with multiplier numbers. This is serviceable and its limitation, e.g. health bars for individual ships is replaced with an aggregate bar, is understandable.
What is not as understandable is how the game presents the statuses of groups that are composed of the exact same ship model. The game presents their icons with their health bars, but only shows up to 20 of them; if the group contains more than 20 units, the others will not show up.
There appears to be an arrow to let the player go to the next “page” of icons, but the arrow is small. There does not appear to be any shortcut key for this either.
LAUNCH U.I. DOES NOT SHOW ALL SHIPS:
The same issue also happens for the launch screen of carriers and the Mothership. The difference here is that the arrow to scroll to the next page appears to be missing, or unclear. Thus, the player is not readily able to select which units to launch. The only workaround is to load a carrier with only one type of unit, and then launch all of them when the player needs the service of these units.
STRIKE-CRAFT ARE STILL UNRELIABLY FRAGILE AND ARE STILL RESOURCE DRAINS:
The Remastered version of the first game retains a problem of the original version: strike-craft are built and deployed individually. Strike-craft do not have much in the way of hit-points; solid hits from just about any weaponry would quickly dispatch them.
Their nimbleness could have saved them; indeed, bigger vessels have trouble tracking strike-craft that are flying at full speeds. However, the behavior scripting of strike-craft is just not sophisticated enough for them to make full use of their mobility.
Consequently, the player can expect strike-craft to be taken out quite quickly if they are subjected to things that are hard-counters against them. When this happens, there is little to no time to have them withdraw and minimize losses (especially considering that commands to have them withdraw causes them to slow down below combat speed).
(By the way, the second game solved this problem by implementing strike-craft as squadrons with individual members that move together. As long as one member survives, the entire unit can be restored after docking with carriers or the mothership.)
SLOW DOCKING & LAUNCHING:
The first game also has the problem of slow docking procedures. Ships have to queue up to enter carriers or the Mothership. In the case of moving Carriers, this becomes next to impossible. Launching is also a slow process. Therefore, docking during combat is just not feasible, thus reducing the usefulness of strike-craft and corvettes.
The second game did away with this; strike-craft and corvettes can go into carriers at considerable speeds and be spat out just as fast. They also automatically distribute themselves among carriers or the Mothership, if there are several of them nearby.
MISSION-BREAKING BUGS:
The worst problems are those that break the scripting in the story missions. These can occur for mission objectives that involve Salvage Corvettes or ships that come into physical contact with other ships. For example, the Salvage Corvettes may simply fail to latch onto what they are supposed to latch onto, or they latch onto them and nothing happens. The player would have to reload an earlier game-save and attempt the objective again.
COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE SECOND REMASTERED TITLE:
Before moving on to the complaints about the second game, it should be mentioned first that its story campaign, unit designs, unit behavior scripting and resourcing mechanisms are much better conceived than those of the first game. Indeed, one could say that (the now very much near-defunct) Relic learned a lot of lessons from the first game. However, it did not learn everything.
FRIGATES & CAPITAL SHIPS DRIFT DURING COMBAT:
In the first game, frigates and larger capital ships stay quite still when they are in combat and when their enemies are in range. Although this is serviceable gameplay-wise, there were complaints that the ships were not visually impressive when they are so static.
In the second game, there are a lot more secondary animations, such as coolant fumes spurting out of the exhaust vanes of Ion Cannon frigates. Most of these animations are of no consequence to the gameplay, i.e. they are merely cosmetic.
The other secondary animations do carry more consequence. This is the drifting of frigates and larger ships while they do battle. They fire their thrusters in very short bursts, causing them to shift their positions slightly. This does not contribute to their evasion maneuvers, however; frigates and larger ships are easy targets.
However, there is no rubber-banding mechanism in place. This means that their drifts do eventually accumulate in terms of total distance moved from where they were. This can lead to problems, such as drifting into minefields or out of zones with scripts, such as the dust fields in the fifth mission.
Of course, in most occasions of actual gameplay, this will not cause much trouble. It would take a long time for the drifts to add up, and most battles will not last that long.
DESTROYERS DRIFT THE MOST:
For better or worse, the destroyers – especially those of the Hiigarans – drift the most. This is because of their need to use broadsides to bring their firepower to bear. Again, this would not be too much of a problem during battles. The problem though, is that they drift outside of battle too.
If the player leaves them on their own long enough, they appear to have a tendency to drift down to the bottom edges of the map, relative to the default axes of orientation that are used for the gameplay. They might even drift outside of the operational zone.
This takes a long while to happen of course; the destroyers reach the bottom of the map after about an hour of drifting. Actual gameplay would not involve destroyers being idle for more than a real-time hour. However, if the player is dilly-dallying in order to exploit mission scripting that is event-triggered, this becomes a nuisance.
MARINE AND INFILTRATOR FRIGATES STILL NEAR-USELESS:
The marine and infiltrator frigates are implemented in the second game as replacements for the (perhaps overpowered) salvage corvettes. Where the corvettes can outright disable enemy ships and haul them away from the battle, the frigates cannot do that so reliably.
The frigates can immobilize their target, of course, but they cannot completely shut down the latter’s weapons. This means that they can still be shot at while they are trying to capture their target, which is a significant possibility because the process takes so long.
Worst of all, the capturing process strictly observes unit caps. This means that even if the frigates complete the capturing process, their target might not even change ownership and would continue as if nothing happened.
COMPLAINTS ABOUT BOTH REMASTERED GAMES:
Then, there are the problems that persisted to this day in both games, despite the remastering. The following sections are elaborations on the significant ones.
NOT ALL IN-GAME MENUS HAVE TOGGLE INPUTS:
The research menu in either game can be brought up and closed with repeated entries of the control input to bring it up. The same cannot be said for the other menus, e.g. the Build and Launch menus. This is because repeated entries of the control input for these other menus are used for cycling through the ships that have production capabilities.
This would have been a minor problem, if not for the issue about skipping voice-overs.
UNINTENTIONAL VOICE-OVER SKIPS:
Voice-overs can happen during gameplay, outside of in-game cutscenes. If the player presses the “Esc” button to close menus while voice-overs are being played, the game perceives this as an input to skip the voice-over that is being played.
BUGS IN VOICE-OVERS:
The first game, in particular, has some glitches that are triggered by voice-over skips. The missions that involve the Bentus ship popping up to offer trade are particular examples; if the player skips any voice-over, voice-overs that occur later in the mission would be automatically skipped too.
CONFLICTED DESIGNS ABOUT FLEET LIMIT:
In the story campaign of the first game, the player is allowed to expand the fleet through the use of Salvage Corvettes. Indeed, some of the screenshots in this review would show the immense fleet that a player could build up, simply by capturing enemy vessels whenever the opportunity arises. This makes most scenarios rather trivial, especially after the player has achieved a critical mass of super-heavy critical ships that can deliver enough firepower to obliterate anything under ten seconds.
Captured ships are considered to be the equivalents of counterparts in the player’s fleet, so they count towards the limits on vessel types. Unfortunately, the game does not clearly delineate which vessel is equivalent to another; the most that the player could do is to assume equivalency based on the roles of the ships.
For whatever reason, this limitation is also in the story campaign of Homeworld 2; this has been so since the original game, in fact. Indeed, it was and still is not worthwhile trying to capture enemy vessels; the process takes a long while and the capturing frigates have to stay with their victims. Such frigates are tougher than other frigates, of course, but not durable enough to withstand enemy fire while capturing enemy vessels.
CANNOT RETIRE CAPITAL SHIPS UPON CAPTURE:
In the story campaigns of both games, the player would be retiring ships, usually to recover some of the resources that have gone into their making. However, scrapping ships is only available to ships that have been made by the Mothership or the carriers, or captured vessels that have transitioned into the next map.
In other words, captured vessels cannot be retired within the same map. In multiplayer, such a limitation would have been understandable; this would prevent resource-rushing strategies of the sort that simultaneously advances the player while stalling the opponent.
ACTUAL CURRENT HITPOINTS ARE STILL A NUISANCE TO SEE:
The user interface shows the total default hitpoints of every unit. However, it does not show the exact number of hitpoints that a unit has at any time. By default, their staying power is represented as a health meter instead.
Although the health meter is serviceable for second-to-second gameplay, it is not so useful for players who plan meticulously, e.g. assigning just enough units to eliminate a target.
In order to see the actual current number of hitpoints that something has, the player has to hover the tip of the mouse cursor exactly at the horizontal middle of the health bar. This causes a tooltip with small font to appear.
MINES ARE NOT USEFUL IN EITHER GAME:
Theoretically, the player could seed locations with mines; asteroid fields are particularly great targets, because this will deny the fields to the enemy (or at least maul their resource collectors if they try to harvest the field anyway).
In practice though, this is not feasible. This is the case even in the second game, in which mines are proximity-driven drones that fly towards encroaching enemies.
The reason is that minelayer corvettes just take too long to release their mines. Furthermore, the mines have to be spaced specific distances apart, i.e. the player has no control over the density of the mine distribution.
STILL POINTLESS FEATURE OF SELECTING SUBSYSTEMS WHEN SELECTING UNITS:
The feature to target subsystems on enemy ships for destruction is useful. The convenience of targeting damaged subsystems on player-owned ships for repairs is also similarly useful.
What is not as useful is that selection of subsystems is still present when the player is trying to select a capital ship in the actual game view. This is especially a problem for Hiigaran carriers, whose subsystems populate the top of their hulls, which are what the player would be looking at when trying to select the carriers. One misplaced click would have the player selecting a subsystem instead, which does nothing much.
(The player can choose to do that to select a subsystem before having it recycled. However, this is better done by selecting the carrier and going through its menus instead.)
Ultimately, the work-around for this issue is to bring up the Sensor view and select the icons for the ships instead.
BATTLES CONTINUE IN CUTSCENES:
At the time, watching space ships do things while story exposition is happening would have been entertaining, when gameplay efficacy was not a pervasive major concern. Unfortunately, in this day and age, the cutscenes in the story missions of both games are aggravating in this matter, especially to players that want to micromanage units in order to minimize losses. Consequently, wiser players would just do a game-save reload after watching a cutscene, skipping it thereafter in order to manage the battles.
OCCASIONALLY SLUGGISH CAMERA:
The camera’s need to use the position of units as datum results in the camera being sluggish some of the time, especially if it is using multiple units as datum. Panning the camera sometimes breaks the sluggishness, but not always. The player’s work-around is to select a single unit, center the camera on it and then pan away to free the camera movement.
MULTIPLAYER & SKIRMISHES:
Amusingly, the multiplayer and skirmish modes of Homeworld Remastered lump the content from both games together. The players can play as the Kushan, Taiidan, Hiigaran and/or Vagyr within the same match.
Not all of the units are well-balanced against each other, especially across games. The first game’s Salvage Corvettes, in particular, raised much ire among players who are more familiar with the second game. The second game’s Marine and Infiltrator Frigates are next to useless in comparison, due to their capturing process that requires them to stay still.
Perhaps the most notable imbalance is in the designs of the strike-craft across the games. The first game’s strike-craft are nowhere as good as those in the second, which are more survivable mainly due to their make-up as squadrons instead of individual vessels. Indeed, the most efficient counters against squadrons of strike-craft still remain the Hiigaran flak frigate.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
As their name suggests already, the Remastered versions of the game feature updated graphics. The game engine is still very much the same, but its previous visual drivers have been switched out with software that can render impressive solar glare, passable normal mapping and such other aesthetics. The most noticeable improvements are in the rendering of smoke and space dust. This is nothing new to players who have been following latter-day games (and pursuing the latest hardware and software), of course.
The polygonal models for the ships and other objects have not been changed much. Indeed, their noticeably blocky shapes would be recognizable to those who remember the original versions of the game.
Perhaps the most impressive improvement is the replacement of the cutscenes that play before the start of any mission and at the end of the campaigns. These are similar in quality to those that can be seen in Deserts of Kharak.
SOUND DESIGNS:
The Remastered versions of the game also re-touched some of the sound assets of the game.
Some of the noises in the original games have been remixed. Explosions are particular examples; they have more reverb and are thus more gratuitous to listen to (never mind the oddity that sounds can be heard in the void of space).
Otherwise, most of the sound effects remain the same, such as the recognizable warbling whenever ships make hyperspace jumps. The zings and whines of ion beam weaponry and thumps of mass drivers have also been retained.
The music tracks have mostly been retained from the original versions of the game. There may have been resampling to make the music sound crisper.
VOICE-OVERS:
The Homeworld games – perhaps with the exception of Cataclysm – have been criticized for having characters that have very subdued expressions of emotions. However, perhaps in defiance of these complaints, this has become the norm in the presentation of the stories, and explained away with the (perhaps flimsy) excuse that they are the consequence of the stoicism of the cultures in Homeworld lore and the other (even flimsier) excuse, which is that the characters are not confirmed to be human.
Thus, the player will be hearing sometimes monotonous voice-overs. On the other hand, the pauses between lines are noticeable, suggesting the audio designers have considered means of injecting gravitas into cutscenes in their editions.
If there are any notable differences in the voice-overs, it is that everyone sounds a lot older now. The voice-over for Karan S’Jet, a.k.a. Fleet Command, is especially noticeable in this matter.
SUMMARY:
It is easy to dismiss the Remastered versions of the mainline Homeworld games as return-making cash-grabs after Gearbox has purchased the rights to them. After all, these versions occurred when there were a lot of remastering happening, one year after the launch of the PS4 and Xbox ONE.
(These games may not have been and are still not made for the console platforms of course. However, that was the time when there is a perception among the cynical that remastered games are there to exploit nostalgia.)
However, Gearbox’s people are aware of their own limitations – namely that few of them have extant experience working on RTS games, much less those that take place in space and all its multi-axial motions. Thus, and fortunately, they contracted Blackbird Interactive for the remastering.
Of course, there would still be doubts whether this was the right move. After all, the Remastered versions of the game still retain a lot of problems, especially with the ease of managing units. The first game, in particular, retains plenty of its less-good designs.
Still, there is some silver lining to be had. The Homeworld IP was very much mothballed; it was close to being shelved when Sega apparently exhibited no interest in having another Homeworld, even though it wanted the rest of Relic’s other IPs. Although Gearbox may not be the most ideal of proprietors (especially considering that the most that it would do to fund the next game is organize a Fig campaign), that there is still interest for the Homeworld games on the development side of the games industry would be a relief to fans of the series.