![]() ![]() The Homeworld 2 engine has no analogue for the grouped fighter behaviour of the first Homeworld, where fighters would maintain formation in a dogfight and would pivot to face a capital ship as they were doing a drive-by strafing run a la Babylon 5/Battlestar Galactica, because Homeworld 2 doesn’t have a concept of the fighter as a single entity. Fighters in Homeworld 2 were no longer built individually they were built as a permanently grouped fighter wing and behaved as a permanently grouped fighter wing. Unfortunately for them (and for me), the second Homeworld did some seemingly-subtle mechanical streamlining that renders its engine an extremely bad fit. Surely the second game’s engine isn’t going to be such a bad fit for Homeworld? And they’re basically the same game anyway, right? It’s not like Homeworld 2 was a radical change in direction for the series it had many of the same ships shooting the same guns in a slightly more high-definition interface. It’ll be easier to make the needed changes in that engine. This is the sort of thing that sounds like a good idea from a development point of view. They’ve been introduced during the game’s graphical upgrade, and the reasons for this become apparent once you do a little reading into the under-the-hood retooling Gearbox did in order to make that upgrade possible in the first place: the entirety of Homeworld has been ported lock, stock and barrel into the Homeworld 2 engine so that they only had to overhaul one game engine instead of two. Homeworld absolutely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the likes of Duke Nukem Reloaded and Colonial Marines, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s just as bug-ridden as either of those games were at launch, and that these bugs are things that did not exist in the “classic” version of Homeworld. In recent years Gearbox have acquired something of a reputation for pushing out cynically licenced games that are… how can I put this… somewhat technically challenged in order to make a quick buck on the strength of their licenced property. It’s a real labour of love, and it shows. All of this marks Homeworld Remastered out as something unique: you don’t expend this amount of time and resources on a rerelease of a series that’s over a decade old unless you have a genuine passion for it. The stylised, hand-drawn cinematics and the voiceovers that accompany them – such an integral part of the flavour and feel of the Homeworld universe – have been redone with the original actors, and even the music’s been resampled at a higher bitrate from the original recordings. Everything from the ships to the skyboxes to the beam effects has been overhauled and upgraded, to the point where Homeworld Remastered looks better than 90% of AAA games you’re likely to play this year. The game has received a complete graphical facelift. Instead of sharpening all the textures up a bit and then calling it a day they’ve gone to extreme lengths to make this Remastered version look like it’s something that has a legitimate reason to be released in the glorious space-year 2015. With Homeworld Remastered Gearbox have made a real attempt at making something worth buying, you see. As you can probably tell, I’ve acquired a rather jaded view of this whole business of selling old rope for money, and so Homeworld Remastered being released in its current state comes off as all the more disappointing, since for the first ten minutes I played it it seemed like it might be the one game to break that mould. It’ll just tweak the game so that it works on modern operating systems at modern resolutions, stick an “HD” on the end of the title, and then push itself out onto Steam and other digital storefronts, happy in the knowledge that it’s bringing in maximal profit for minimal outlay through the sheer power of nostalgia. Your typical rerelease of an older game won’t go to the effort that Homeworld Remastered does. ![]() I dunno, my saying that does seem slightly unfair. ![]() ![]() I didn’t like Homeworld 2 the first time around, and so this is largely going to be a review of the remastered version of the first Homeworld. The Homeworld Remastered Collection is a packaged rerelease of space strategy classics Homeworld and Homeworld 2. ![]()
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