Be Kind Rewind
Educated
The Tragedy of Homeworld, or: Why We Can't Have Good Video Games
Written by BKR.
At the time of writing Homeworld 3 has just been released. No doubt it will fade quickly from the public consciousness and the memory of gamers after the usual song and dance is done on social media. For me however it hit different than the usual necromancy of some dead property to make it dance to the tune of Blackrock. It's not because my expectations of video games were shaped by Homeworld or because I'm particularly nostalgic for it. I have my boxed copy of the game proudly sitting on a shelf, safe and secure, and no demoralization campaign can take it away from me or change how think of or how I perceive the game. If it weren't for others talking about Homeworld 3 and the amusment I got from seeing the Shrek faced antagonist in some giantess fetish animation it wouldn't register for me and not occupy any space in my mind.
No, what made me ponder the situation was that not only did I think we had already been over this already, but also learned the right lesson from it. How is it that people got excited over a new "Homeworld" game published by Gearbox and developed by Blackbird, being made in the present stardate?
If you know what I'm talking about you can stop reading right here and give me my well deserved reddix updoot, I'm not going to tell you anything you're not already aware of. But if you don't know it's time to rewind the tape back to the good old days of the 90's to explain what made Homeworld what it was, and why it isn't today.
In the older days of gaming journalism the writers would place just as much emphasis on the publisher behind the game as the developer, if not more so. That way of thinking about video games went out of fashion, other than when people were reminded that publishers exist because they wanted someone to blame for bad business practices or rushing developers for economic reasons. That's what fueled the kickstarter period, the myth that it was the big bad publishers that were keeping the oppressed game developers down, they dindu nuffin wrong. Now you could give them your money directly. I'm going to have to presume that if you're reading this you are already painfully aware of how that turned out. This becomes relevant for Homeworld 3 but we'll get to that later.
The Rise
If you were a PC gamer at the time you'd be familiar with the publishing giant Sierra, even back then they were an old and storied thing, dating all the way back to 1979, and if you're old enough, no doubt responsible for some of your favorite games. In fact, when we're talking about 90's PC gaming there are only a few entities that are responsible for most of it. These were the guys that would fund and produce games like Arcanum, Starsiege: Tribes, Betrayal at Krondor, Caesar III, among many, many others, just to give you a taste. If you're into adventure games you're probably jizzing in your pants a little just thinking of Sierra.
Homeworld was always the vision of Alex Garden, the man with the plan, the mover and shaker, the guy who would get a meeting with Scott Lynch, VP of Sierra at the time, and sell the game with nothing more than a whiteboard and concept art and get the game project funded. It's hard to get across how much of a gamble publishers were willing to take in those days. This was an untested team being put together just for this game consisting of a bunch of unproven young guys that were going to attempt to put together something never done before. What was then that pipedream of fully realized and simulated Star Wars battles running on a computer, as a playable fun game. At the time a proposal as out there as No Man's Sky was at the time of its development.
Perhaps it should be obvious from the previous paragraph but I subscribe to a great man of video game history reading, while not being reductive in this, for no man is an island and exists in isolation. Homeworld was inspired. It took the basic premise of the Mormon Star Wars copycat Battlestar Galactica, a 70's show with quite another vibe and aesthetic, and aimed to present this as not just as the first truly 3D RTS, but one that looked like a Chris Foss or John Harris science fiction cover illustration. It was around Alex Garden this band of industry talent grew, because the vision was contagious, and he had already recruited great concept artists and designers to get his pitch sold. I'm not saying that he is the sole reason Homeworld was good, but that you need a guy like that to drive talent into making something great.
Too White? Too Asian? Too Male? Too talented? Too intelligent?
Because Homeworld was something entirely the project did run over budget and deadline but in the end the studio had the full backing of Sierra and got extensions, in the end it was worth it for not just the game but also the reception and sales they got, remember this because people on the team certainly did going forward. You should also know, even if it won't come up in a positive context again, that there was studio meddling. Sierra saw the potential in the game and sent in two in-house company writers to improve the writing, the core concept had been done by David J. Williams. Both of them insufferable leftists, but at the time the tumblr virus hadn't eaten their brains yet, and furthermore they were workmanlike. People don't understand that leftists are corpo deluxe people, chief upholders of capitalism, and if capital doesn't want them doing something they don't. Even here on the Codex we have our own Australian Chinese-wannabe landlord Marxist. Arinn Dembo was so ashamed of having written a script for a good game she used a male pseudonym in the credits. She also wrote the Ground Control manual for Sierra. Yeah, Ground Control was another Sierra game, something else to bear in mind for later.
In retrospect the premise of the game and the goal of it, which was highly detailed and simulated space combat from a strategic vantage point with the story being more of an afterthought, made this story much more universal. Individual people had little place in this space epic and you were free to infer yourself what the human scale of what the game presented you with would be like. When your homeworld burns there is no camera shot of a person making a sad face or melodramatic dialogue, it's distant and understated, which gives the player a sense of magnitude. Ironically the game developed without a diversity consulting agency and its writers kept under strict check and being ridden by science fiction nerds managed to be one of the most inclusive games in the true sense of the word. Even today you could sell the game to both sides of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict and both would think it was a game made about them.
The greatest triumph though was the depth the game offered, the game looked like a science fiction book cover of the 90's from one of the big illustrators because that was the expected aesthetic from something premium, but since the game was doing something new there were few expectations when it came to the meat of the game. The newly formed Relic didn't need to go the route of a simulator with their new game, but they did, and it speaks volumes that the copycats of it didn't. Anyone can do a basic Command & Conquer clone in space, turning it into a flat plane, making the AI and units as if you would any other RTS. Homeworld emphasised both AI and physics, ships didn't simply start and stop without momentum, and their projectiles were simulated and not colorful tracer lines on top of hitscan.
I can tell this is going to be overly long and few will read it even without going into the nitty gritty, so I'll mention one illustrative part of the depth. In your regular RTS after the Westwood formula you have a couple of stances for your units, if it's a competently put together game you can expect a passive mode where they simply follow orders, an aggressive stance wherein they'll attack and pursue enemies, and perhaps a skirmish mode if you're lucky, taking shots at enemies but not letting them close up on the unit. Homeworld's three stances however don't just change rudimentary behaviour but change the power distribution of the ship. Put them in evasive and they'll group two and two, with a wingman each, increase the speed of the unit, allowing them to manouver away from enemy projectiles at the cost of damage, as well as fuel for the larger ships. Set the stance to neutral and they'll balance the power output and hang back unless ordered otherwise. Finally the agressive stance makes your weapons hit harder at the cost of everything else, they'll hit like a truck but ignore enemy fire and become slower and more vulernable. This is something you'd expect in a first person space sim, not an RTS of the time.
Alex Garden also managed to not just attract and make the right choice in getting Paul Ruskay on board, but somehow also the band Yes to make the credits track for the game.
When the game was released in 1999 after several delays and a two year development cycle it was a massive success to such an extent we still remember it and talk about it.
The Fall
Sequels are rough, especially if you're going to follow up a first project that became iconic and established its own niche. The original team set out to develop a sequel, that was going to have features that had to be cut from the first game, and even more. Ambition had paid off the first time, delays had added value, and persistence had pushed them through challenges. They started to hammer away at it not after some pause or cancelled other project, but straight away in 1999. Both Sierra and them hoped to capitalize on the success of the first game and outdo themselves.
Details are scarce as companies in those days didn't put up their unfinished slop as a early access scam or kickstarter bait, studios went dark until they knew they had something to show. This is what we do know, they spent six months of development on a monster of a game before it was cancelled and the project was put on ice until 2002 when a newly formed team cobbled together something they deemed conservative in 18 months. Most of the original Relic team left after the clusterfuck that was the first iteration of Homeworld 2, including Alex Garden, and the team sent in to pick up the pieces couldn't work with many of the systems abandoned and had to for example cut out a terrain system, a new ambitious collision system, and units getting experience tied to who they work with in combat, veteran teams that had been through thick and thin together being much better coupled than with other units. There had been vector-based attack system. They at some point also considered making the first 4D RTS with time modulation as a core mechanic.
I don't remember what this all looked like from the outside at the time, but Homeworld died when the sequel got cancelled and rebooted. The new Sierra producer was a hardass, Chris Mahnken, and thought that further losses were unacceptable and gave the new team a strict deadline, tight budget and demanded frequent milestones after the last Homeworld 2 had been a big money pit with nothing to show for it for Sierra. What remained at this point was ephemeral residue from the creative hubris of the first game. Without Alex Garden the new team lacked clear leadership and fought to take the game in different directions, trying to get their own pet ideas into the game, particularly in regards to the story.
Lighting doesn't strike twice, especially not without a lightning rod. Only three artists survived the calamity of Homeworld 2 burning and stayed for the new Homeworld 2. Paul Ruskay returned to bless the game with both soundscape and musical style that had set apart the first game apart aesthetically compared to its competition. To the consumer it still the old Relic, delivering a disappointing sequel to a truly great game. How did they manage to make the physics worse in the sequel after spending four years on it compared to what was achieved in the two spent making the first game? It wasn't the same people, and they didn't have four years, they franticly spent the last 18 months trying to patch something together from the wreckage of the last attempt and you should be impressed they got it working at all since nobody then employed knew the old projectile system.
All that remained was the style, slightly trampled, since I very much doubt the sequel had a style guide bible like the first one, or half as much thought put into the ships. Alex Garden had been adamant about UI being a crutch and that it should be minimal at all times, but without him the new team had started cluttering the game up with a fat UI taking a lot of space. It's not ugly, the main menu and graphics evoke the stylishness of The Designers Republic, but it felt out of place after the minimalism of the first game. They did manage to reproduce some of the style in the game, the artists that remained leading the charge into something resembling Homeworld. In the end we got a game that looked good, that had the right sound, but not only failed to innovate or improve upon the formula of the first game, but also did just about everything when it came to the meat of the game, the gameplay, worse. Sounds familiar?
Sidetracks
While Alex Garden was leading the brave charge into the sun with his brazenly bold and unworkable Homeworld sequel Sierra wanted something to keep Homeworld relevant and the fans happy, knowing they were in for the long haul if the first game was anything to go by. As was in style at the time they got a second studio to get to work at it, Barking Dog, and since they were building off the already pre-established Homeworld base without any hardship there isn't much to say about it. Typically the company they contracted would go on to work on some other mercenary project afterwards, this temporary B-team. In this case though one of company men, one the writers sent in to clean up Homeworld, was on the project and had risen to the rank of designer, as well as amateur-professional voice actor.
Martin Cirulis, the writer in question now designer, wouldn't work on Homeworld 2, but since that team was a directionless shitshow it didn't matter. Why he does matter is because he'd go on to found Kerberos Productions and it's interesting because that game is the total opposite of the direction the Homeworld series would contiue on. Serving as the lead designer on Sword of the Stars it seems that working with the original Homeworld team had rubbed off on him. This was in the dark era of console gaming and the PC scene was underfunded. Sword of the Stars is a 4X game in the Master of Orion tradition, but with real-time sort of Homeworld-esque real-time battles. The game's art direction looked like something you'd find on DeviantArt at the time, or in a 00's webcomic, but the gameplay depth was greater than most of its competition. While Paradox is still trying to figure out asymetric space 4X, having watered it down in Stellaris after their more distinct system didn't work, Kerberos was successfully doing it about as well it could be done in 2006. They also managed to get Paul Ruskay to make a soundtrack for the game.
So why aren't people comparing Stellaris unfarvourably to Sword of the Stars, a game with more mechanical depth? Presentation. Homeworld might be one of the richest games mechanically in its niche, but unless presented as it did few would have played it to know about it. The better you look, the more you see. And the more others see. Still, it did well enough to warrant a sequel but it seems that Martin Cirulis either didn't learn from the Homeworld 2 debacle or didn't know about it, because he repeated the same mistake if milder. Going for more systems and in general increased scope and ambition the team launched Sword of the Stars II not as a triumph but as a broken unplayable mess, from which the series never recovered. Another one for the graveyard.
Necromancy
The next person coasting on old glories was Rob Cunningham, former art teacher that had been dragged into developing Alex Garden's pitch and then the game, as well as Aaron Kambeitz, the guy responsible for the cheap cinematics that were created due to budget and time constraints more so than being intentionally stylistic, but working out as a happy accident in favor of Homeworld just like how Max Payne got its distinct graphic novel style from restrictions and necessity. Say what you will about Blackbird, becaues the company was founded by artfags the games they put out are nice to look at. THQ at the time had the Homeworld IP and they were hoping to get a deal with them to bring the series back with their first game. What kind of game was it? A free to play live-service version of Ground Control, that old Sierra game, but with more of an Homeworld aesthetic.
THQ had been working with what little was left of Relic before, on the Dawn of War series, the good ones, not the moba that SEGA comissioned for the third and last entry. THQ croaked in 2013, at which point Hardware: Shipbreakers had been in development for three years starting development in 2010. In swoops the cancer on gaming, Gearbox. Notorious terrible developer and publisher, the company that shat out Duke Nukem Forever, that scammed SEGA by outsourcing their Alien: Colonial Marines game to some rinky dink developer for peanuts while spending the money on their own redditor approved Borderlands series. That Gearbox goes in and buys up the IP from under the noses of Blackbird and then comes to an agreement with them. If you've been following along in this piece you'll know by now that whoever has the money calls the shots.
It would take until 2016 for Hardware: Shipbreakers, now rebranded as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, to get released. One can only imagine how many reboots and firing and hiring cycles went on behind the scenes. Either due to backlash or simply the market tanking the game had underwent a change into a more traditional game without MMO, F2P and live-service parts. The final result was a bleak copy of Ground Control with remaining moba or phone game elements, like special abilities with cooldowns. Paul Ruskay returned, of course, at this point he's earning a living by giving people nostalgia drip feed by ear.
It's after this I start to question the sanity of people.
Posthumous execution
Apparently this repurposed F2P Ground Control clone was enough to convince some people that the old Relic was back, reborn as Blackbird Interactive. Despite funding the game Gearbox made Blackbird hold a figstarter, crowdfunding Homeworld 3. Now I don't know about you but if you've reading up until this point you have to ask what sort of assclown would back such a proposal with his money. Certainly not a Homeworld fan. This is a company that took six years to develop Deserts of Kharak, clearly suffering from not just bad leadership but also being a company without vision and direction if what their ultimate goal is to relive the glories of... 1999. And this is a band where only the drummer is left since the original success.
Somehow, don't ask me how, they managed to get their funding and started to promise the keys to heaven to the backers. I don't know, maybe Randy needed a quick cash flow to pay for prostitutes pissing on him. I wonder what happened next, it's not like we've ever been here before, right? The game began development around 2017 and just came out, you do the math. Should a Homeworld sequel take six years or so? Sierra ran a tight ship and managed to salvage something from the trainwreck sequel. Gerabox though, they have other ambitions than selling games of a quality that gamers will accept.
Shortly before release the studio rewarded employees with massive layoffs, and have been at it for a long time now, cutting down on personnel. What I want to know is why anyone was looking forward to this game or thought it would be anything other than a trainwreck. Not only is just about all the original team gone, there are no visionary people around, there is no science fiction media around worth engaging with anymore that might inform the direction of the game, the reboot TV show Battlestar Galactica as far as I can tell copied Homeworld of all things and that was a long time ago by now that aired.
One of the founders of the studio was the cinematics artist guy from Homeworld and from what I can tell he was promoted into incompetence, no longer doing the servicable cinematics present in Desters of Kharak for Homeworld 3. According to wikipedia the Sierra company man they got in to fix up the writing in Homeworld, Martin Cirulis, also did the writing on Homeworld 3. But you have to remember he wasn't responsible for the premise of the game or general direction, and where he really shone was as a designer on Sword of the Stars. Since the credits aren't up on mobygames yet I can't tell how much more of a dumpsterfire the game was.
After all this time we got another Homeworld 2, a game without strong vision and direction, mechanically shallow and skimping on simulation, but retaining some of the visual style and audio design, just enough to lure the dumbest of herd animals into thinking of better times and better games, from when the new millennium hadn't arrived yet. Nobody learnt anything from history. On top of that you have woke capital and corporate, bringing the game down even more. If man was a learning animal we'd know better than to pay too much attention to branding, "IPs", and studios that fire and hire quicker than brothels in busy areas.
Written by BKR.
At the time of writing Homeworld 3 has just been released. No doubt it will fade quickly from the public consciousness and the memory of gamers after the usual song and dance is done on social media. For me however it hit different than the usual necromancy of some dead property to make it dance to the tune of Blackrock. It's not because my expectations of video games were shaped by Homeworld or because I'm particularly nostalgic for it. I have my boxed copy of the game proudly sitting on a shelf, safe and secure, and no demoralization campaign can take it away from me or change how think of or how I perceive the game. If it weren't for others talking about Homeworld 3 and the amusment I got from seeing the Shrek faced antagonist in some giantess fetish animation it wouldn't register for me and not occupy any space in my mind.
No, what made me ponder the situation was that not only did I think we had already been over this already, but also learned the right lesson from it. How is it that people got excited over a new "Homeworld" game published by Gearbox and developed by Blackbird, being made in the present stardate?
If you know what I'm talking about you can stop reading right here and give me my well deserved reddix updoot, I'm not going to tell you anything you're not already aware of. But if you don't know it's time to rewind the tape back to the good old days of the 90's to explain what made Homeworld what it was, and why it isn't today.
In the older days of gaming journalism the writers would place just as much emphasis on the publisher behind the game as the developer, if not more so. That way of thinking about video games went out of fashion, other than when people were reminded that publishers exist because they wanted someone to blame for bad business practices or rushing developers for economic reasons. That's what fueled the kickstarter period, the myth that it was the big bad publishers that were keeping the oppressed game developers down, they dindu nuffin wrong. Now you could give them your money directly. I'm going to have to presume that if you're reading this you are already painfully aware of how that turned out. This becomes relevant for Homeworld 3 but we'll get to that later.
The Rise
If you were a PC gamer at the time you'd be familiar with the publishing giant Sierra, even back then they were an old and storied thing, dating all the way back to 1979, and if you're old enough, no doubt responsible for some of your favorite games. In fact, when we're talking about 90's PC gaming there are only a few entities that are responsible for most of it. These were the guys that would fund and produce games like Arcanum, Starsiege: Tribes, Betrayal at Krondor, Caesar III, among many, many others, just to give you a taste. If you're into adventure games you're probably jizzing in your pants a little just thinking of Sierra.
Homeworld was always the vision of Alex Garden, the man with the plan, the mover and shaker, the guy who would get a meeting with Scott Lynch, VP of Sierra at the time, and sell the game with nothing more than a whiteboard and concept art and get the game project funded. It's hard to get across how much of a gamble publishers were willing to take in those days. This was an untested team being put together just for this game consisting of a bunch of unproven young guys that were going to attempt to put together something never done before. What was then that pipedream of fully realized and simulated Star Wars battles running on a computer, as a playable fun game. At the time a proposal as out there as No Man's Sky was at the time of its development.
Perhaps it should be obvious from the previous paragraph but I subscribe to a great man of video game history reading, while not being reductive in this, for no man is an island and exists in isolation. Homeworld was inspired. It took the basic premise of the Mormon Star Wars copycat Battlestar Galactica, a 70's show with quite another vibe and aesthetic, and aimed to present this as not just as the first truly 3D RTS, but one that looked like a Chris Foss or John Harris science fiction cover illustration. It was around Alex Garden this band of industry talent grew, because the vision was contagious, and he had already recruited great concept artists and designers to get his pitch sold. I'm not saying that he is the sole reason Homeworld was good, but that you need a guy like that to drive talent into making something great.
Too White? Too Asian? Too Male? Too talented? Too intelligent?
Because Homeworld was something entirely the project did run over budget and deadline but in the end the studio had the full backing of Sierra and got extensions, in the end it was worth it for not just the game but also the reception and sales they got, remember this because people on the team certainly did going forward. You should also know, even if it won't come up in a positive context again, that there was studio meddling. Sierra saw the potential in the game and sent in two in-house company writers to improve the writing, the core concept had been done by David J. Williams. Both of them insufferable leftists, but at the time the tumblr virus hadn't eaten their brains yet, and furthermore they were workmanlike. People don't understand that leftists are corpo deluxe people, chief upholders of capitalism, and if capital doesn't want them doing something they don't. Even here on the Codex we have our own Australian Chinese-wannabe landlord Marxist. Arinn Dembo was so ashamed of having written a script for a good game she used a male pseudonym in the credits. She also wrote the Ground Control manual for Sierra. Yeah, Ground Control was another Sierra game, something else to bear in mind for later.
In retrospect the premise of the game and the goal of it, which was highly detailed and simulated space combat from a strategic vantage point with the story being more of an afterthought, made this story much more universal. Individual people had little place in this space epic and you were free to infer yourself what the human scale of what the game presented you with would be like. When your homeworld burns there is no camera shot of a person making a sad face or melodramatic dialogue, it's distant and understated, which gives the player a sense of magnitude. Ironically the game developed without a diversity consulting agency and its writers kept under strict check and being ridden by science fiction nerds managed to be one of the most inclusive games in the true sense of the word. Even today you could sell the game to both sides of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict and both would think it was a game made about them.
The greatest triumph though was the depth the game offered, the game looked like a science fiction book cover of the 90's from one of the big illustrators because that was the expected aesthetic from something premium, but since the game was doing something new there were few expectations when it came to the meat of the game. The newly formed Relic didn't need to go the route of a simulator with their new game, but they did, and it speaks volumes that the copycats of it didn't. Anyone can do a basic Command & Conquer clone in space, turning it into a flat plane, making the AI and units as if you would any other RTS. Homeworld emphasised both AI and physics, ships didn't simply start and stop without momentum, and their projectiles were simulated and not colorful tracer lines on top of hitscan.
I can tell this is going to be overly long and few will read it even without going into the nitty gritty, so I'll mention one illustrative part of the depth. In your regular RTS after the Westwood formula you have a couple of stances for your units, if it's a competently put together game you can expect a passive mode where they simply follow orders, an aggressive stance wherein they'll attack and pursue enemies, and perhaps a skirmish mode if you're lucky, taking shots at enemies but not letting them close up on the unit. Homeworld's three stances however don't just change rudimentary behaviour but change the power distribution of the ship. Put them in evasive and they'll group two and two, with a wingman each, increase the speed of the unit, allowing them to manouver away from enemy projectiles at the cost of damage, as well as fuel for the larger ships. Set the stance to neutral and they'll balance the power output and hang back unless ordered otherwise. Finally the agressive stance makes your weapons hit harder at the cost of everything else, they'll hit like a truck but ignore enemy fire and become slower and more vulernable. This is something you'd expect in a first person space sim, not an RTS of the time.
Alex Garden also managed to not just attract and make the right choice in getting Paul Ruskay on board, but somehow also the band Yes to make the credits track for the game.
When the game was released in 1999 after several delays and a two year development cycle it was a massive success to such an extent we still remember it and talk about it.
The Fall
Sequels are rough, especially if you're going to follow up a first project that became iconic and established its own niche. The original team set out to develop a sequel, that was going to have features that had to be cut from the first game, and even more. Ambition had paid off the first time, delays had added value, and persistence had pushed them through challenges. They started to hammer away at it not after some pause or cancelled other project, but straight away in 1999. Both Sierra and them hoped to capitalize on the success of the first game and outdo themselves.
Details are scarce as companies in those days didn't put up their unfinished slop as a early access scam or kickstarter bait, studios went dark until they knew they had something to show. This is what we do know, they spent six months of development on a monster of a game before it was cancelled and the project was put on ice until 2002 when a newly formed team cobbled together something they deemed conservative in 18 months. Most of the original Relic team left after the clusterfuck that was the first iteration of Homeworld 2, including Alex Garden, and the team sent in to pick up the pieces couldn't work with many of the systems abandoned and had to for example cut out a terrain system, a new ambitious collision system, and units getting experience tied to who they work with in combat, veteran teams that had been through thick and thin together being much better coupled than with other units. There had been vector-based attack system. They at some point also considered making the first 4D RTS with time modulation as a core mechanic.
I don't remember what this all looked like from the outside at the time, but Homeworld died when the sequel got cancelled and rebooted. The new Sierra producer was a hardass, Chris Mahnken, and thought that further losses were unacceptable and gave the new team a strict deadline, tight budget and demanded frequent milestones after the last Homeworld 2 had been a big money pit with nothing to show for it for Sierra. What remained at this point was ephemeral residue from the creative hubris of the first game. Without Alex Garden the new team lacked clear leadership and fought to take the game in different directions, trying to get their own pet ideas into the game, particularly in regards to the story.
Lighting doesn't strike twice, especially not without a lightning rod. Only three artists survived the calamity of Homeworld 2 burning and stayed for the new Homeworld 2. Paul Ruskay returned to bless the game with both soundscape and musical style that had set apart the first game apart aesthetically compared to its competition. To the consumer it still the old Relic, delivering a disappointing sequel to a truly great game. How did they manage to make the physics worse in the sequel after spending four years on it compared to what was achieved in the two spent making the first game? It wasn't the same people, and they didn't have four years, they franticly spent the last 18 months trying to patch something together from the wreckage of the last attempt and you should be impressed they got it working at all since nobody then employed knew the old projectile system.
All that remained was the style, slightly trampled, since I very much doubt the sequel had a style guide bible like the first one, or half as much thought put into the ships. Alex Garden had been adamant about UI being a crutch and that it should be minimal at all times, but without him the new team had started cluttering the game up with a fat UI taking a lot of space. It's not ugly, the main menu and graphics evoke the stylishness of The Designers Republic, but it felt out of place after the minimalism of the first game. They did manage to reproduce some of the style in the game, the artists that remained leading the charge into something resembling Homeworld. In the end we got a game that looked good, that had the right sound, but not only failed to innovate or improve upon the formula of the first game, but also did just about everything when it came to the meat of the game, the gameplay, worse. Sounds familiar?
Sidetracks
While Alex Garden was leading the brave charge into the sun with his brazenly bold and unworkable Homeworld sequel Sierra wanted something to keep Homeworld relevant and the fans happy, knowing they were in for the long haul if the first game was anything to go by. As was in style at the time they got a second studio to get to work at it, Barking Dog, and since they were building off the already pre-established Homeworld base without any hardship there isn't much to say about it. Typically the company they contracted would go on to work on some other mercenary project afterwards, this temporary B-team. In this case though one of company men, one the writers sent in to clean up Homeworld, was on the project and had risen to the rank of designer, as well as amateur-professional voice actor.
Martin Cirulis, the writer in question now designer, wouldn't work on Homeworld 2, but since that team was a directionless shitshow it didn't matter. Why he does matter is because he'd go on to found Kerberos Productions and it's interesting because that game is the total opposite of the direction the Homeworld series would contiue on. Serving as the lead designer on Sword of the Stars it seems that working with the original Homeworld team had rubbed off on him. This was in the dark era of console gaming and the PC scene was underfunded. Sword of the Stars is a 4X game in the Master of Orion tradition, but with real-time sort of Homeworld-esque real-time battles. The game's art direction looked like something you'd find on DeviantArt at the time, or in a 00's webcomic, but the gameplay depth was greater than most of its competition. While Paradox is still trying to figure out asymetric space 4X, having watered it down in Stellaris after their more distinct system didn't work, Kerberos was successfully doing it about as well it could be done in 2006. They also managed to get Paul Ruskay to make a soundtrack for the game.
So why aren't people comparing Stellaris unfarvourably to Sword of the Stars, a game with more mechanical depth? Presentation. Homeworld might be one of the richest games mechanically in its niche, but unless presented as it did few would have played it to know about it. The better you look, the more you see. And the more others see. Still, it did well enough to warrant a sequel but it seems that Martin Cirulis either didn't learn from the Homeworld 2 debacle or didn't know about it, because he repeated the same mistake if milder. Going for more systems and in general increased scope and ambition the team launched Sword of the Stars II not as a triumph but as a broken unplayable mess, from which the series never recovered. Another one for the graveyard.
Necromancy
The next person coasting on old glories was Rob Cunningham, former art teacher that had been dragged into developing Alex Garden's pitch and then the game, as well as Aaron Kambeitz, the guy responsible for the cheap cinematics that were created due to budget and time constraints more so than being intentionally stylistic, but working out as a happy accident in favor of Homeworld just like how Max Payne got its distinct graphic novel style from restrictions and necessity. Say what you will about Blackbird, becaues the company was founded by artfags the games they put out are nice to look at. THQ at the time had the Homeworld IP and they were hoping to get a deal with them to bring the series back with their first game. What kind of game was it? A free to play live-service version of Ground Control, that old Sierra game, but with more of an Homeworld aesthetic.
THQ had been working with what little was left of Relic before, on the Dawn of War series, the good ones, not the moba that SEGA comissioned for the third and last entry. THQ croaked in 2013, at which point Hardware: Shipbreakers had been in development for three years starting development in 2010. In swoops the cancer on gaming, Gearbox. Notorious terrible developer and publisher, the company that shat out Duke Nukem Forever, that scammed SEGA by outsourcing their Alien: Colonial Marines game to some rinky dink developer for peanuts while spending the money on their own redditor approved Borderlands series. That Gearbox goes in and buys up the IP from under the noses of Blackbird and then comes to an agreement with them. If you've been following along in this piece you'll know by now that whoever has the money calls the shots.
It would take until 2016 for Hardware: Shipbreakers, now rebranded as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, to get released. One can only imagine how many reboots and firing and hiring cycles went on behind the scenes. Either due to backlash or simply the market tanking the game had underwent a change into a more traditional game without MMO, F2P and live-service parts. The final result was a bleak copy of Ground Control with remaining moba or phone game elements, like special abilities with cooldowns. Paul Ruskay returned, of course, at this point he's earning a living by giving people nostalgia drip feed by ear.
It's after this I start to question the sanity of people.
Posthumous execution
Apparently this repurposed F2P Ground Control clone was enough to convince some people that the old Relic was back, reborn as Blackbird Interactive. Despite funding the game Gearbox made Blackbird hold a figstarter, crowdfunding Homeworld 3. Now I don't know about you but if you've reading up until this point you have to ask what sort of assclown would back such a proposal with his money. Certainly not a Homeworld fan. This is a company that took six years to develop Deserts of Kharak, clearly suffering from not just bad leadership but also being a company without vision and direction if what their ultimate goal is to relive the glories of... 1999. And this is a band where only the drummer is left since the original success.
Somehow, don't ask me how, they managed to get their funding and started to promise the keys to heaven to the backers. I don't know, maybe Randy needed a quick cash flow to pay for prostitutes pissing on him. I wonder what happened next, it's not like we've ever been here before, right? The game began development around 2017 and just came out, you do the math. Should a Homeworld sequel take six years or so? Sierra ran a tight ship and managed to salvage something from the trainwreck sequel. Gerabox though, they have other ambitions than selling games of a quality that gamers will accept.
Shortly before release the studio rewarded employees with massive layoffs, and have been at it for a long time now, cutting down on personnel. What I want to know is why anyone was looking forward to this game or thought it would be anything other than a trainwreck. Not only is just about all the original team gone, there are no visionary people around, there is no science fiction media around worth engaging with anymore that might inform the direction of the game, the reboot TV show Battlestar Galactica as far as I can tell copied Homeworld of all things and that was a long time ago by now that aired.
One of the founders of the studio was the cinematics artist guy from Homeworld and from what I can tell he was promoted into incompetence, no longer doing the servicable cinematics present in Desters of Kharak for Homeworld 3. According to wikipedia the Sierra company man they got in to fix up the writing in Homeworld, Martin Cirulis, also did the writing on Homeworld 3. But you have to remember he wasn't responsible for the premise of the game or general direction, and where he really shone was as a designer on Sword of the Stars. Since the credits aren't up on mobygames yet I can't tell how much more of a dumpsterfire the game was.
After all this time we got another Homeworld 2, a game without strong vision and direction, mechanically shallow and skimping on simulation, but retaining some of the visual style and audio design, just enough to lure the dumbest of herd animals into thinking of better times and better games, from when the new millennium hadn't arrived yet. Nobody learnt anything from history. On top of that you have woke capital and corporate, bringing the game down even more. If man was a learning animal we'd know better than to pay too much attention to branding, "IPs", and studios that fire and hire quicker than brothels in busy areas.
