Gearbox announces Homeworld remakes.

[sofa king]

http://themittani.com/news/gearbox-announces-homeworld-remakes

Gearbox, developer of the Borderlands and Brothers in Arms franchises (among others), has announced their intention to develop and release high-quality remakes of Homeworld and Homeworld 2.

Homeworld, like the FreeSpace series, is a franchise that a lot of EVE players have fond memories of. The original game, released in 1999, was awarded "Game of the Year" by dozens of publications. It's a space RTS; a revolutionary game with truly three-dimensional battles and a sense of scale and beauty that was unmatched at the time.
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Homeworld is still a game that I periodically loaded up and played all the way through Windows XP. It is, in my opinion, the greatest single-player RTS game I have ever played, and that achievement is exponentially multiplied by the fact that it was first released in 1999. It had a popular multiplayer component that I never really tried, but those who did swore by it.

Homeworld was, in essence, a wonderfully refined and tweaked remake itself, of the TV show Battlestar Galactica (we're talking the Lorne Greene version, here) but with a somber theatricality that was never a thought in the original show.

The truly epic missions near the end of the single-player game suffered from in-program lag that as far as I know could never be fixed, but which should be easily dealt with now.

As an added bonus, when you beat the game you got to hear what might be the last great song from the prog band Yes.

So hell yeah, I want to see Homeworld remade. However, I will add a cautionary note that while the Homeworld: Cataclysm expansion was also truly great, Homeworld 2 was an enormous disappointment to me. This game is easy to emulate imperfectly, and even easier to screw up.

But I can hope!

[uriel1972]

1. Will keep a cautious eye on this...nt

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

2. *winces*

Gearbox? Aliens: Colonial Marines Gearbox? Duke Nukem Forever Gearbox?

They don't have the best track record with other studios' IPs.

Hell, Borderlands and Borderlands 2 weren't compelling enough for me to keep playing them to completion.

Crap.


I agree with the first post in the comments section in your link:

"Update the graphics, THEN DO NOTHING ELSE AND LEAVE IT EXACTLY AS IT IS."

[Posteritatis]

3. The noises I've been hearing imply that's precisely what they want to do

I think they also plan on doing additional, new Homeworld games which will, of course, be fractal disasters, but they seemed set on an edition that was straight-up "make the original games run on modern computers and look nice."

[Posteritatis]

4. Am I the only person who liked Homeworld: Cataclysm?

How off-the-radar that game got baffles me. The Acolytes were entirely too much fun to use in it.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

5. Nope. I actually liked Cataclysm better than Homeworld.

Blasphemy, I know.

[sofa king]

6. Not going to argue with either of you.

Instead I'll point out that by giving the mothership upgradeable weapons and systems, and better mobility, it improved the gameplay of Cataclysm over the original--which has never happened since, in any game, ever.

In the meantime, the original Homeworld team is working on what looks to me to be a spiritual prequel to Homeworld:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/29/homeworld-creators-dive-into-new-3d-rts-hardware-shipbreakers/

The thing I noticed off the bat there is that the flying vehicles had the same vector-tails that were so pretty and useful in Homeworld.

Anyway, yeah, I fully agree with others above who say play it as straight as you can: update the textures, and change nothing else. Especially you guys, Gearbox: if you're going to re-make one of the greatest games ever, the most important thing you can do is keep your own fingerprints off of it.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

7. Totally agreed on the upgrades.

I loved the story, too. An enemy that could subvert your own ships? Yeah...

By the end I had nothing but destroyers and dreadnoughts, plus one or two flights of the Acolyte fighters for the EMP burst so my ION BEAM FIGHTERS could tear the Beast apart.

The one thing that Homeworld 2 had going for it was the superb graphical engine. It was so gorgeous.

[Posteritatis]

8. I went the opposite extreme when I was playing Cataclysm...

A handful of warships, the carriers, and a skyblotting herd of Acolytes. Hit and runs with their missiles was pretty much my favorite thing in any RTS ever.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

9. I may have to dig out Cataclysm and see if I can get it to run on Win 7.

The mission where you had to protect the convoy from the Beast cruise missiles was... *shudders*...

...I manged to save every convoy once, though. By sheer luck.

[Posteritatis]

10. Ugh, I'd managed to purge that mission from my brain... (nt)

[NuclearDem]

14. Some of my best gaming memories were in Cataclysm multi

So, yeah, quite enjoyed it.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

11. Well lookie here:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/04/hardware-shipbreakers-secures-homeworld-license-gearbox-fundin/

Gearbox Software announced at PAX that it has granted Hardware: Shipbreakers developer Blackbird Interactive the official Homeworld license, allowing its creators to release the game under the new title Homeworld: Shipbreakers.

[Posteritatis]

12. ! (nt)

[sofa king]

13. Oh, neat!

So it really was a prequel, they just didn't have the rights to the name, yet. That means that this video:

Might have been intended to have a dual-use as be a video about the first contact between Northern and Southern clans on Kharak after discovery of the Khar-Toba.

http://homeworld.wikia.com/wiki/Khar-Toba

In the original game, at least four other sister-ships of the Khar-Toba are shown descending on Kharak, so the premise of formerly-Hardware-now-Homeworld:Shipbreakers would likely be operations to salvage parts of the other ships, which presumably broke up on reentry and were distributed across the equatorial desert of the planet. A single-player story might involve the discovery and eventual capture of the corpse of the Khar-Toba, which re-unifies the Kushan people and leads to the century-long construction of the Mothership.

Wow, all that nerd lore came back to me with just a few minutes of snorking around Encyclopedia Hiigara:

http://homeworld.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

[NuclearDem]

15. Freespace mentioned.

For anyone still interested in that old series, check out this place. I used to have an account there. They've been using the source code released by Volition to upgrade the game for years, and a lot of the mods being released for it are top quality.

Also, on topic, I would love to see a high-quality Homeworld, as long as it doesn't mess too much with the game otherwise.