![]() ![]() Resource scarcity was not an issue in Homeworld 2, and this led to missions devolving into epic engagements of attrition with the enemy. The best way to beat the campaign is to employ salvage corvettes to capture enemy vessels and convert them into player units, in keeping with the narrative of scarcity and privation in the face of the massive numerical advantage of the enemy.īoth the campaigns of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 contained this element – of narrative informing gameplay conditions and hence gameplay choices – but Homeworld was probably the better campaign. The campaign was cleverly constructed to emphasise this principle, not least in the use of salvage as an important mechanic. This narrative compulsion is also exacerbated by gameplay requirements, at least in the first Homeworld campaign – where resource scarcity and fleet persistence between missions ensured that the player had to play conservatively to ensure that as much of their fleet survived each mission to make it to the next. ![]() Amidst the epic battles with clouds of fighters and capital ships slugging it out in the pastel beauty of the Homeworld cosmos, I found that I had the compulsion to play conservatively, in order to protect the Kushan people. Later on, as the player builds up a fleet and marshals huge capital ships and cruisers to bear on the enemy, you are still keenly aware that each loss of a ship is the loss of a significant proportion of the species’ people. By creating this moral and emotional impact through spare storytelling, the game turns the simple act of rescuing trays to succeed in a mission into an almost moral imperative. ![]() But every time a pallet is destroyed, the player is told that 100,000 Kushan colonists have perished. The mission requires that 4 out of 6 pallets are returned to ensure success. The player finds that floating cryo-trays containing the cryogenically frozen would-be colonists for the expedition have survived the bombardment, and the mission is a race to collect the cryo-trays and return them to the safety of the mothership before the enemy finds and destroys them. Adagio for Strings plays as the player surveys this almost existential ruin, keenly aware that the mothership is the last remnant of the Kushan species and culture. But what this narrative structure does is provide the structure for gameplay moments that feel positively gravid with operatic importance.Ī powerful example of that sort of feeling is in an early Homeworld mission, in which the mothership of the player-led Kushan species, built as an exploratory vessel to search for that species’ lost homeworld of Hiigara, returns back to their current planet to find it a burning, lifeless cinder, bombarded to oblivion by in a seemingly capricious act by a previously unknown antagonist. And the characters and plotlines, such as they are, are paper-thin abstractions, like the bare-bones elements for a coherent campaign than fully-fleshed elements for any literary purpose. Honestly, it isn’t a particularly novel premise for a space opera. The narrative scaffolding of the campaign is a by-the-numbers space opera, with galactic empires, generations-long interstellar voyages, enigmatic alien civilisations, ancient relics from progenitor races long vanished, and a central quest for a lost home planet. Homeworld, in its day, was feted for its innovative three dimensional approach to real time strategy, but also for its involved lore and sweeping galactic scope. 1999’s Homeworld and 2003’s Homeworld 2 were very different games, but Gearbox has done an admirable job in modernising their UIs, graphics, and controls to make them seem like a game in two parts. ![]() The collection is made up of the remastered versions of two distinct games with four years in between their respective releases. Homeworld Remastered embodies the space opera genre at its most sweeping and epic, even if its story and characters are a little half-baked, and some of its gameplay mechanics are a bit unbalanced. ![]()
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