Homeworld Remastered

[supasheep]

Continuing the vein of remastering old games that seems quite prevalent at the moment:

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/

 

I've never actually played any of the series, but I've heard good things and I'm looking forward to trying them out. I like the move of having both the "remastered" (whatever that means in this context) and the original games in one package.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Homeworld and Homeworld 2 are games I dearly, dearly love. In terms of a cohesive, highly-refined aesthetic, few video games can even touch them. I don't think anyone makes it through the opening few missions of Homeworld's campaign without getting an experience they'll remember forever. The combination of restraint in the storytelling, the deep background in (for instance) the game manual, and the brilliant colors in space plus the great art design on the ships and those amazing cutscenes really adds up to something wonderful. There are some weird things about balance in the first game and the difficulty level in each of them is sort of all over the place, but the fundamentals of the game are pretty good - they do 3d fleet combat pretty well, better than anything except Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, I think.

It's tough to know without seeing it in motion and so on, but it looks like the remastering has been done pretty well, so that's exciting, and like you say it's great to have the original games too. The price is pretty reasonable too. If this leads to a resurgence in popularity that will be great - these games never got their due. There are some pretty neat Homeworld 2 mods out there, too, and since we get the original game I imagine those will work just fine. Pretty cool!

[YoThatLimp]

It is nuts how amazing the OG ones still hold up, I started playing through Homeworld 1 last year and it was totally amazing. I caught wind of the remakes so I stopped and have been eagerly awaiting this announcement. 

 

i totally agree with all points made by Tycho, just a really really excellent game.

[Sno]

The original Homeworld remains, i think, one of the best RTS's i've ever played. Terrific both as a narrative campaign and in multiplayer skirmish.

I always had some issues with Homeworld 2 though, primarily from a campaign standpoint. Mainly that the story doesn't make a lick of sense and has some messy retcons, and that the scenario design cheats to a degree that is wildly unfun. You can never stack the deck in your favor, the missions will always spawn in more than your present force can respond to, and if you play like an intelligent person who plans out in advance, your attack force that is bumping up against your production cap will be met in kind with an even larger force you now cannot possibly respond to given the production barrier you have already put yourself up against. I would be completely fine with Gearbox building a baby mode into that game, because that campaign was way too hard.

HW2's a great skirmish game though.

I'm a little disappointed that Gearbox apparently couldn't nab the rights for - or wasn't interested in remastering - Homeworld: Cataclysm, the sometimes divisive "1.5" game released between Homeworld and Homeworld 2. It's a much further departure from the first Homeworld than HW2 is, but it does a lot of really fun and interesting things. The campaign was solidly enjoyable and though the two factions kind of felt very unbalanced for skirmish play, the variety in those factions and the game's unique mechanics made for entertaining competition.

 

Also, that Shipbreakers game that was meant as kind of a free to play multiplayer-centric spiritual successor from some members of the original team is apparently now, with support from Gearbox, going to be a full game with its own campaign, and properly set in the background lore to the first Homeworld. (Which sounds super cool to me, as anybody who has seen the manual for Homeworld knows there's a lot of really elaborate, cool history there... Shit, i hope they include a PDF of that thing with these re-releases.)

[Gwardinen]

Very much hoping this works out well. Although I have been playing Theme Hospital again for the last few days, and would kill a homeless person for a remastering of that.

[Sno]

[Gaizokubanou]

Interesting observations about HW2's campaign Sno.  I don't recall it being all that difficult but last time I played it was... back when it came out so can't really say how reliable my impression of it is.  All I remember is that I made lot of missile-beam frigate and ran this deathball style fleet, just sniping enemy ships one at a time.  And that the campaign had 2 wow moments, one is when I had to fight that giant stationary fort and two is when I first get the battleship.

[Sno]

I mean, i also haven't played it in a long time, i've replayed both Cataclysm and the original Homeworld more recently than Homeworld 2, but i never had problems with either of those and always just found HW2 miserable because of the reactive enemy spawns.

[Apelsin]

I just purchased this in a nostalgia-fueled stupor.

When I last played this I was maybe 9-10 years old, so it was really too hard for me and internet was not yet quite a thing so I never tried the multiplayer either.

Is anyone else going to try this out? 

[Dewar]

I've been debating on it, since I never got to play the originals, but then I installed the Long War mod for XCOM.

[Gaizokubanou]

I've been debating on it, since I never got to play the originals, but then I installed the Long War mod for XCOM.

 

Prepare yourself for the 50+ hp bosses.

[miffy495]

I only ever played Cataclysm, so I'm interested in checking out the original. Am utter shit at strategy games though.

[undermind9]

the temptation is very high.  I only play campaigns, i have to imagine there are phenomenal people out there in the multiplayer portion

 

i think i am going to wait for a hefty sale though before i pull the trigger.  I have have enough other untouched product to get through, ive also got Void Destroyer that just went final release from a kick-starter that need to explore and give a fair shot

[Salacious Snake]

I'm downloading it now. I remember liking the original for its style, but finding it super difficult; I'm terrible at RTS games. Let's hope I've gotten smarter since then!

[TychoCelchuuu]

Here is a reference card if you want it.

[undermind9]

check out those hot alt + ctrl key strokes!

 

 

Youth these days don't even know how to make their fingers make those kinds of combinations.  I've actually got some young people that work for me that really struggle with the pinky-LCTRL + shift/alt.  I would like to suspect it is a PC game generational thing - they can index finger controller trigger just fine...but wouldn't know how to add a unit to a control group or some other complex RTS maneuver.  In turn when i tell them to ctrl-shift-R to reverse a spline their fingers look like a weird seized claw shape

[Gwardinen]

I believe basically all of those options are available from the shift + right click menu, for those who cannot make elaborate claw shapes with their hands.

[Sno]

For all their talk in preview materials about not "george lucasing" it, they've apparently made some pretty significant changes. (I guess there's no fuel logistics anymore for HW1 fighters, as an example.)

It also sounds kind of busted right now, seems like a lot of people are having a lot of issues. (Formations are apparently incredibly broken right now.)

[Justin Leego]

How's it working out for people? Going by the Steam user reviews, it's either still the best game ever after 90 minutes of play, or it's a half built remaster that's in beta when it really shouldn't be.

edit - oh, crossposting

[Sno]

People generally seem super positive about the remake, but it's hard to tell how much of that is simply due to how terrific Homeworld was in the first place. The remake definitely sounds a bit wobbly at present, i think i'll be waiting for a couple patches.

[TychoCelchuuu]

For all their talk in preview materials about not "george lucasing" it, they've apparently made some pretty significant changes. (I guess there's no fuel logistics anymore for HW1 fighters, as an example.)

It also sounds kind of busted right now, seems like a lot of people are having a lot of issues. (Formations are apparently incredibly broken right now.)

Yeah, I mean, Homeworld is now a different game. In switching it over to the Homeworld 2 engine they changed all the combat and stuff, so now instead of the 1-to-1 weapons modelling of the original game, where something would hit a ship or miss a ship just depending on where the ship was, now it's all dice rolls, like in Homeworld 2. All the tactics are different, they changed the resource costs on a bunch of ships and on research, from what I hear the formations work completely differently... I mean I'm not saying the game is worse, and you get the original Homeworld anyways, but this is pretty much the definition of George Lucasing it up. Even the cutscenes have been redrawn! That's not a bad thing, they look nicer, but they also look a bit different. That's Lucas Bread and Butter.

[Apelsin]

The only thing I noticed was the tutorials were super broken. It would ask you to press Continue to move on to the next section, but then immediately start playing the audio for that next section. This meant that when you pressed the continue button you skipped a section you haven't actually heard yet. 

 

Other than that, I quite like it. I'm still screwing things up in my campaign though. Will need to start over.

[TychoCelchuuu]

The tutorials in my game say "INCOMPLETE" or something in the menu before you click on them so I think the brokenness is totally supposed to happen.

[Sno]

I've been seeing a lot of people complain that the AI is super dumb in Remastered, as opposed to the AI in the originals.

It sounds like they might have fucked up a lot of subtle things.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I've been hearing reports of missions bugging out if you load them from autosaves rather than hitting the "restart mission" button, and I guess formations are more or less broken compared to how they worked in HW1. Morninglord's posts in this thread are particularly detailed - I guess he was like a super duper HW1 fan so he's noticing all the little differences.