Homeworld 3 has BIG PROBLEMS (gameplay analysis and critique)
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- PROCLAIMER: This video is not a paid ad, unlike most of the others. I'd never take a bribe to shill a game or otherwise give preferential or censored coverage. I'm a Homeworld player of 25 years since the demo of the first game, and I wanted to make this to evaluate Homeworld 3 and give my findings impartially and with basis in my expertise and history with the games.
And I really hope they get addressed and this game launches in a far better state than this. People waited years or even decades for this. They really deserve better. Part of me hopes that this demo was someone at the company trying to get proof from the fans that the game needed to be delayed, to get more time for it. But it already had so much time. It already got delayed over and over again. And now there are even more layoffs. What can they even do in 3 months? Do they even have enough people left to do the patching?
See my first 2 hours of Homeworld 3 uncut, here:
• I waited 20 years for ...
#homeworld #homeworld3 #blackbird #gearbox
0:00 intro - delays and layoffs
1:35 no rebinding
2:30 ability buttons
15:40 dragged selection boxes
16:55 dragged target boxes
17:55 no ATTACK MOVE
26:50 flanking bonuses absent (?)
28:20 big explosions are muted, played down
31:00 ion cannons are a bit weird
32:15 no modules now? ok
35:50 no unit veterancy that DoK introduced? ok
36:20 the mothership design is weird man
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The amount of lost knowledge in the RTS dev tribe is stagering
QOL improvements and common sence desing practices made from 90 to 2010 have been forgotten
Sadly its been more then 20-30 years now, and thats conservative estimate, chances are more if you take into account people back then were already probably old. RTS has the problem that the "magic" that made the old games good is something that everyone coming in to make new games clearly doesnt understand or value. This is why you dont really get RTS now, you get more "moba/dota/LoL" masquerading as "RTS", partly because they think thats what "everyone" wants and partly because thats what the new people know.
People call "FPS" a stupid name, but hey at least it literally has "what it needs to be" codified in the damn name. Harder to mess up! (and embarassing that it's needed!) Or for fighting games "rollback netcode" (which is as specific as it can get on how it needs to work). Maybe we should have called regular rts "base-building isometric battlefield frontline tactics control game" or something, or for homeworld's case "3D-movement high simulation-detail space opera with ship maneuvers and resource management"
Like you say, it's a lost art at this point, people literally have to learn to make them from sratch or are previous veterans (rarer and rarer by the day), since unlike shooters that have very fixed rules how things should work (even taking into account variation) RTS doesn't. It doesn't help that the "problems" RTS has in terms of engine/movement/controls are difficult problems or annoying problems with a lot of "bad solutions" and hard-to-do good ones.
A lot of "RTS" I see in recent years are not even RTS as far as I'm concerned. Tell tell signs what you see is not a RTS for me: do you have "abilities" and apm sinks? its a moba-rts. Is the camera cinematic-perspective instead of isometric (or isometric-ish), it's a wannabe-esport-rts. Do you have no-base or base-like management besides maybe some 3 buildings and turrets, and the "base" is a very minor detail in combat, it's a moba-rts. Are the units designed to be some really easy to balance dumb looking toy-thing, instead of fun or interesting, it's a esport-moba-rts for pro players only. Is the resource gathering non-existent or lacking depth? moba-rts. Is the campaign shit or non-existent, just-bad-rts. Is everything overly simplified but has a lot of resources and some fixed building? it's mobile-wannabe-rts (thats typically not very real time unless real time is measured in days).
Some other games with this problem: Building Games (nobody knows how to make Ceasar3 anymore, lol)
Yeah, a lot of the botched mechanics in HW3 and other recent mediocre RTS games remind me a lot of the wave of mediocre '90s budget RTS games that followed Dune 2 & Warcraft. But those guys were in unknown territory trying to rush out a clone game on a limited budget, devs now are given years on bigger budgets but they're still trying to reinvent the wheel and messing it up.
I thought series veterans were supposed to be working on this, did they get hit by a memory wiping beam or has the project been taken over behind the scenes by former mobile game developers who've never played a PC game?
I absolutely agree and I am glad I am not the only one seeing this. I thought that I am just being grumpy but those games back in the days were created by the people who were playing them I think and they wanted to play their games.
I often used a methaphore describing lost knowledge phenomen - after one especially long ruling pharaoh (like 90 years) all pyramid builders had no work and the knowledge of how to build them magnificent has been lost. I do not remember which one was it though. Just like nowadays everything is moving to cloud and all infra technicians are so much needed because they are rare.
Homeworld 1 was absolutelly brilliant.
@@felix_xb agree with all of these. Age of Empires II is one of the few games going right now that hits a majority of these, and that’s just an updated game from 1999 with some modern spit-and-polish.
Yeah, I've got a rant about this that boils down to a few key points
*1.* To many devs RTS = Micro. They think fighting with the UI is just as important as fighting your opponent. This is **insane**
*2.* Mistaken notions of presentability and accesibility. (See also, what western devs said about Elden Ring's UX/UI)
The result of 1+2 is that RTS games aren't allowed to have depth, because if the UI and controls can't be good, and the game needs to be accessible, then depth CANNOT be allowed.
*3.* REFUSAL TO LEARN. Not *one* established RTS studio will deign lowering itself to the despicable level of actually studying what worked in another RTS game.
"Appeal to a wider audience" Command and conquer, civ, diablo, finalfantasy, total war, *insert franchise here*
Is the wider audience with us in this room?
@@wulfgarpl I suppose you could say it's a hypothetical room filled with hypothetical people. all forced/conditioned to adhere to the holy tenets of globalism and communism of the TALMUDIC strain. You will own nothing and be happy. Now, that'll be $20 for the dlc package you didn't request or need or won't even be able to access when we accidently patch it out of your existence. If you disagree with these terms; yeh, you guessed it, antisemite!
@@wulfgarpl Do YoU GuYs NoT HaVe FOnez!?
Everytime I read or hear that phrase I already know the game is going to be bastardized... I can't think of a single game that I've played and enjoyed, in my entire life, that was marketed with that premise.
Yeah, I'm reading your comment. @@wulfgarpl
8:24 "Your keyboard turning into a drum kit with a rhythm" - right on - excellent way to describe APM burden
make sure to press your damage cooldowns on cooldown or else your dps wont be as good
man, this sucks
I love this new word I learned from the video: "APM burden", perfectly describes the complete pointless wrist destroying purpose of it all.
It's completely opposite to the design of all classic Relic games, each one giving more tools of automation to the player, reducing tedium and letting you focus on decision making and your order of battle, culminating in the intelligent soldiers of company of heroes squads (which were then promptly lobotomized for coh2 I might add)
the curse of starcraft
@@doltBmB Relic tried to do more smart units in COH3, but stupid community cried about not beign able to predict units behavior.... It needed tweaks but it is now butchered. Maybe it can came back if it was the temporary solution.... coh2 community is probably worst...
I spent most of my time in the demo battling the camera and control scheme trying to find something that felt natural. It's so odd they felt the need to re-invent the wheel when the camera and controls of Homeworld 2 are great.
If you think you can re-invent the wheel then it still has to roll' when you are done.
I have to replace my bathroom sink because it's new-age artsy design makes it not function as a sink faucet properly. For example.
By trying to make it look neat they forgot that it has to also be a faucet and make water go'....
It's not reinventing the wheel, it's adding a new spin to the wheel. Personally I'm happy with it, of course there will be more optimization until the release.
@@jerk1921 Bingo we live in the world of make everithing pretty, or beleiving we can make better and forget that should do the basic function
The Homeworld 2 camera was awkward. This is much more in line with other RTS games. The camera is absolutely an improvenent but the game has other problems
Waking up in the middle of the night, sneaking past my parents room and loading up Homeworld 1 is one of my earliest memories. It has a special place in my heart.
I completely agree with your critique. Well said brother.
I still remember completing a 2 hour skirmish for the first time on Fields of Plaz, on a foggy monday afternoon in 2000, just after I got the full game.
I barely knew how to play the game.
Same. Completing Homeworld 1 campaign in the middle of the night was a cathartic experience for me. Next day I still had to go to school.
Mi first honeworld experience was with 2 the music, the ship, the idea of scale, was not until sins of a solar empire i have that experience, even when i have sins first, homeworld 2 was so different, the narrator, the story, everithing is so amaising, such a unique yet sober game was so good
Total Biscuit was right, never pre-order.
I miss him a lot.
the mothership model were getting is worth the preorder by herself
@@VarenvelDarakus As do we all.
This is game is not the same with other AAA games, it's made with passion. I don't care about this nerd-picky video about mechanics I don't really care. The story and the game progression are more important for most players and also design, feeling, etc.
@@claudianreyn4529 I'll believe it when I see it , so far demo only proves opposite what your saying , not to say they remove sugestion posts (including autors) and more , nothing screams passion like mass censorship on forum.
The emotional tone of the Relic Homeworld games was so deliberately flat, muted and professional - every line brief and delivered with habitually restrained and sometimes forced reverence. So when you heard these stoics drop their guard and allow even just a drop of fear or sadness to lace their words, it left a very strong impression. Then, when they didn't, it was even stronger.
That impression is dead with Blackbird's Homeworld. The tone, like the gameplay, is all over the place. Just utterly broken.
I'm glad other fans can pick this up as well, ever since they've shown the cinematics and the story trailler I already felt like the tone was way off base.
Ironically Deserts of Kharak did nail that tone in the unit callouts.
Professional military is the impression I got as well. That's why Cataclysm made such a strong impression because it was those same stoic professionals losing their shit over something they couldn't comprehend.
@@quyiter Hilariously, the protagonists in cataclysm weren't military, just a impromptu militia of space miners
@@BobMcBobJr For sure, but they were still professionals.
10 years ago I would always look forward to new releases. Devs used to have the mindset of here's everything you enjoyed about the last game but we've added better graphics, more scale and extra features. It's been brutal looking at comparisons between games like Black Flag/Skull and Bones and Batman Arkham/ Kill the Justice League this year.
Just you wait till the moment when they will be downgrading old titles so people would move to a newer just for a sake of having something similar, but working
Yeah, it seems to be a trend with developers nowadays thinking they'll improve the franchise by messing with stuff nobody asked for, instead of iterating on what works and what made the previous games classics on their own merits, I blame the mindset of "everything new and different is progress, every idea is creative and valid", it's been endemic to game development and has been the downfall of many a great series.
When gamers ask for innovation we don't mean just put stuff inside a blender and hit the pure switch, but to actually improve on systems that are already foundational.
Mean IQ is going down and Blackbird is no stranger from modern corporate culture, if you get my drift.
@@GeneraluStelaru small IQ makes up for some good media slaves
It's the chosen people taking over gaming
Tactical retreat. Manor Lords, implemented where units can move backwards facing the enemy with shields held in front and not expose their backs. Homeworld has Z axis so would expect feature where ships flip 180 or turn away to ensure damage is not concentrated by fire in one location.
Mechwarrior 5 an enemy AI that takes too much damage on one side will purposely turn away to absorb damage on it's fresh armored side towards the player, it knows to do so to maximise survival because legs, arms, head, torsos back and front side to all have their own individual armor, armor is weaker at back, not some single unit health bar. i.e. You had to made tactical decision to reduce their damage output to you by targeting certain sections that held certain more dangerous weapons or target leg to reduce agility. You had to juggle multiple enemies of different types so that decision was to be made across them to create manageable situation overall of dealing with multiple threats.
Think about Star Trek where captains would choose to target weapons, engine or forcefully focus to penetrate punch hole through shield to one location towards an enemy shield generator. Captains could order shield energy rebalanced towards other parts of the shield bubble, making one side stronger but weaker on another i.e. to cover retreat or forward push to protect certain sides of the ship. Captains would reinforce ship shields and dilemma of powering down weapons and reduced life support to stall time for allies to come to their defence. Decisions that made impact to survive.
It does need ability to set specific chain of instructions to follow sequentially once or repeat until another command overrides, not just how or what to attack but set limits of self preservation to avoid them fighting to the death. Sharing shield incoming damage to different side, evasive move types depending on enemy weapon range or avoid their cone of fire instead of going across it, too much damage let them retreat tactfully to given location. Setup your own custom sequence of actions to follow depending on enemy type you choose for them to attack and satisfaction they can follow pre-determined orders you've already set.
You're in control of a fleet, but no captains to command. You're the captain of every ship or grouped ships...
manor lords will be doing it on land yep, but homeworld did it 25y ago. ships could just float backwards while slugging it out. easy peasy.
Remind me of star treck fleet comander, when figthing an enemy and you damage the shield, you have to try to inmediatly put damage in the lower side shiled, because the enemy will try to put a stronger shiled facing you, amaising how old games feel inmersive and bring you in, modern game feel empty
@@Krysnha Coz today it is about numbers, fidelity and epick stuff for marketing... Not many cares about details...
@@zbigniew2628 so true
@@zbigniew2628 and inclusivity as we see in Homeworld 3.
well, as always: dont pre order
Homeworld 1 is my favorite game, ever, but outside of the teasers I haven't really felt any significant excitement for HW3, I'm jaded (that's not a good thing), and I hate that my cynicism keeps being proven right when it comes to new games.
There's a good possibility I will not enjoy HW3 (at least not nearly as much as the original), and the worst part is that I don't really care, other than this mild familiar feeling of disappointment.
@@tatuira93 i tried to feel excited about HW3 when playing the Demo... but idk... something was lacking that made the previous games exciting and interesting... anyway I dont have to play at the moment so I cant justify spending 60 bucks for a game anyway
i'm 3 weeks late to the show, oh well... my 2 cents. When it was first announced and available for pre purchase on FIG or whatever it was called i had to twist my own arm not to per-order, just based on pure nostalgia. I calmed my tits and decided to place the money in my steam account and "reserve it" for HW3. 2-3-4? delays later i'm happy i didint "pull the trigger". This may end up as wait until its fixed purchase (eg: Cyberpunk)
sins of a solar empire managed ability bloat in a great way: they gave you the option to let your units automatically use their cooldown abilities while also giving you the option to toggle it off for manual control should you need it.
Such a simple, intuitive thing. The kind of thing that literally any critical feedback allowed from fan communities would point out.
It should be simple to set it up to auto activate as soon as a condition is met. Being in combat or firing weapons for attack things. Moving for speed boosts.
Yes, and so easy and intuitive in a 16 years old game, allowing you to focus in the battle
Not to mention auto casting in Warcraft III. They knew this could become a headache, even back then.
This is one of the two big games I was waiting for and was disappointed by the demo... I'm glad you're talking about it.
Yes quite disappointing....
The other being?
@@pl-AthEE_Three Dragon's Dogma 2.
It's like they tried to reinvent the wheel... and made a square.
And then get angry when someone said you make a square
The balls on that Battlecruiser hyperspace flank was impressive, that's some Somtaaw-esque courage.
Thank you for keeping the industry accountable! Great video.
The way time to kill has constantly gotten shorter has been my absolute least favorite part. Back in 1 I was able to keep Raider Ion frigates and multi beam frigates all the way to the end of the game through very careful play and aggressive protecting of my lil babies. But after Catacalysm there was basically no point in caring about anything smaller than a Destroyer and now it looks like I only need to care about the Mothership. I hate the idea of building a ship... loading it up with brave and willing Higgarans... then sending it to its absolute death for a short fight then build another. It makes losing a ship mean nothing.
In 2, i manage to mantain the destroyer, since get to ending, even i manage o mantain one battleship, from first build, to end, and several of mi automatic ship, in first playthrougth, the idea in homeworld is ship anr resource conservation for what i see they are making homeworld for the normie and casual audience
You know what all this makes me really wish for?
A Nightdive remaster of Homeworld 1. Which is to say, a remaster done properly - maintaining the actual behaviour of the original game, but just adding some higher detail models and textures and fixing a few bugs, maybe adding a mission editor.
agreed , they should add a powerful editor and make mod 100% friendly like MOWAS2
The demo really dragged my hype for this game down. The new terrain system is terrible, my ships get stuck on nearly anything that's floating around. The camera control is a backstep from the nearly PERFECT controls of Homeworld 2. Small crafts die like flies or suicide into their target's nose first. The freaking ability spam bullshit is also a goddam insult to our intellect. All this game has is the pretty graphics all the other great balance and synergies mechanics of the past games have been gutted out of this hollow, pretty shell of a Homeworld game.
The graphics aren't even that much of an improvement when you zoom into the units. Attention to detail like missiles launching at the wrong angle from the orientation of their launchers, small bullet effects looking atrocious for a game released in 2024, and even missile explosions and strikecraft damage effects not looking much better than HWR (if not outright worse) is a huge disappointment.
I don't have a problem with the terrain system, I think it's a nice addition, it just appears bad because the AI in general and path finding systems are beyond garbage. Fighters sometimes take a minute find attack vectors, MID-FIGHT. And as an artist who knows VFX, 3D and UE I'm kinda disappointed with the lackluster amount of ship details up-close, it's not that different from HW2. The amount of detailed geometry and textures you can cram into an UE game while maintaining performance is insane. I'm not for details for details' sake but big spaceships (and big objects in general) should have them and. Huge missed opportunity that the devs of the previous games would have jumped on if it were possible.
I also feel that the VFX weren't that much of a step up and with the tools of UE you can make some beautiful shit.
All in all it seems like the devs do not have the chops to make this sort of game, they should have had consultants from Relic to help them out with this. Or, unsurprisingly, Gearbox is a bottom tier publisher.
@@ShinTurrican Seeing as they completely removed hyperspace just to make the terrain system work, I absolutely have a problem with it
wow considering that ship and fleet conservation was a mark of homeworld, i did mi autmost to conserve ships, i even manage in two arrive with the destroyer, to the end battle, even when after open for the duel with Makan is no longer needed, i even arrive with many autmoat ships wich i build nad hardly loose
"cooldown buttons with flat bonuses" you're hitting the nail on the head
Bonus should have come with some downsides ( look like the ablities talked in the video should incur damage to the unit using the bonus )
@@dvhh As mentioned as an example in the video, missile destroyers dumping all tubes is a completely "real" interaction within the game system, in that by firing off all available missiles, all missile tubes were stuck reloading. A flat damage buff cooldown might as well be magic in comparison.
Reynold Sanity said something along the lines of "If an ability is always being used it's an ability that should be passive." And I couldn't agree more. There's no reason to be constantly hitting buttons for basic stat boosts. It's like someone decided you can't have a good RTS without high APM.
Considering even Blizzard didn't have that level of ability repetitiveness (at worst there were tradeoffs, and in the case of healing even in Brood War that was automatic), HW3's approach seems to misunderstand ability design comically badly
It still amazes me how much subtle nuance there is in 25 year old games.. Red alert remastered is more replayable and afrer 3 years playing I'm still improving with micro improvements that I learned over time, little nuances in the game that keep it fresh each time.
And then we see this... People making games as if forced to, likely are at all hours of the night whilst the more expensive skilled programmers are kicked out for having ideas, talent, principles, opinions, take less crap, and insist on quality control.
Man they actually are, they are on paycheck and need to show boss the graphs
Cataclysm had the ability keys down right. Abilities on most ships were situational actual abilities that provide you some sort of benefit. Mimics would close themselves and they could do that to be suiciders. Acolytes had missiles. They could fire ones in the needed to redock in order to refresh their missiles. Ramming frigate could physically push enemy ships You can't deal with right now away. The ACV's could EMP ships to slow them down or make them stop fighting Temporarily
I forgot about the HW3 ability spam because I was so disconnected and disinterested in my small units outside of the initial opening salvo (just queue up more, the attrition all but guaranteed 25-50% looses per encounter) that I only used it for frigates.
Sphere formation exists but the formations are cycles via a specific button and you had to mouse cover over that button in the interface to trigger a specific formation.
Sphere formation I didn’t check. The one thing I constantly failed to do in the demo mode was provide the resources with an escort so the constant drips of 4/5 enemy corvettes CONSTANTLY spawning in below and behind them tended to have a field day.
The worst part is formations do jack shit, there is zero tactical depth to the combat with no move fire orders and behaviours barely working, all ships are made of paper as well, something went wrong with this game. How could Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm nailed the gameplay so well and we are reduced to this? Even Homeworld 2 was not my favorite at least it stuck to its rng mechanics guns and had some novel stuff like subsystems. Capital ship fights in the OGs were so meaningful and tense compared to this mess. We are possibly watching the death of another classic genre defining franchise. Its really sad since Remastered already did enough damage.
Whats wrong with HW Remastered?
@@jatzi1526 Its Homeworld 1 on 2's engine, a terrible idea, much of the stuff i said above also barely works. Formations\tactics etc, although 3 is going even worse. I never felt so much gaslit in my entire life to see people playing remastered as if its homeworld classic gameplay, its not even close. Its not that I hate 2 engine for Homeworld 2 mechanics it was perfectly fine, but H1 was ruined by HW RM decisions.
@@Atrahasis7 I also share that feeling of being gaslit by seemingly universal praise that Remaster received and how it's even cited by some as "remaster done right". I played the OG HW1 in 2022 for the first time and finished OG HW2 a year later and then checked the Remaster and was just completely baffled by formations and stances literally not working like they are supposed to anymore in both games and people just not caring or not noticing it. Like for example sphere formation doesn't make your ships surround an enemy anymore, they just fly in a static round blob instead. (Also new graphics just break visual identification of smaller ships with NLIPs disabled because they are all shiny reflective so they just blend in with the background)
@@nekichnik Yeah its very weird. While its true most people dont engage with the deeper mechanics the difference is astounding to the the people who enjoy the game and see how brilliant H1 and Cata was.
Everithing dies, and before he surrender and evenc oment in thosw who surround, he said it better, modern games are not for incentivse us, or foment us, but to numb us and make us in lab rats touching a button so next thing come
Spot on on a lot of key issues here especially the ability button bloat that is invading a lot of RTS game design at the moment. I think it's the misconception that because Warcraft 3 was such a legendary game that led to MOBAs and was reinforced in Starcraft 2, that this is ultimately what game devs think players want. It's not and games like Warhammer TW/ Company of Heroes emulating the ability spamming design have no business with it in the first place.
They forget that Warcraft 3 streamlined a lot of its own abilities compared to Warcraft 2. Take the Priest for example. She can heal or increase the damage of your troops but only one was togglable to autocast. This isn't a handicap that limits the player but a tactical decision for them to make "Do I care about keeping my troops alive...no I have a bank of resources lets kill them quickly" . There is no reason that the Carrier in this game does not have a toggle ability be it "increase unit production +25% but lowers firepower -50%" or the cloaking ability for bombers be on autocast but they have to return to refuel more frequently. It's just apm-isation for the sake of it thinking if a player has more things to do it's more fun and engaging when in games such as this it's the opposite if anything. You could even do a power system like in Space flight sims and apply it fleetwide e.g. Dedicate power to weapons for Ion Cannon frigates at the cost of shields/speed making them highly damaging glass cannons that you have to defend vigorously with interceptors that instead of a bloody button increasing their speed every 10 seconds you've set them to High Speed/Firepower Low shields. This would be more engaging than button mashing.
It makes me just feel like the same button mashing that was present in Rome Total War 2. Having to push a button to get my cavalry to charge properly, giving them the stat boost that they should have had all along. It's like the dev's just saw that the gameplay was boring and decided "just give them a button to push every 10 seconds that makes the thing about that thing more thingier". So your scouts which are fast go faster, your interceptors which shoot other interceptors are more shooty, etc. It's just lazy. That was my whole Homeworld 3 experience in a word. Lazy.
Adding abilities instead of upgrades for armor and speed are a horrible choice. Also support ships are just bad too needing to be micromanaged all the time or die
@@darkfoxx87 It's all easily fixable though isn't it for example Support Ships - Make guarding/escort auto repair ships. Interceptors - Enter Dogfighting mode : +Damage +Speed - Shields. I don't work in design but this clearly isn't a hard science.
@@chrisschmidt2245 That is my personal hatred of modern total war. Unless it's to change formation/stance/ammunition just fock off with the ability buttons. Only unit it made sense for was the General where you could see the point of him being used to Rally his troops
@@Farron6 Interceptors having an ability where they do far more damage for like 5 sec but with a long (30sec-1min) cooldown would be fine if it autocasted on contact. Then they could ... intercept the enemy, get in, get out or get in, get reinforcements. Makes them the rapid response unit. I personally like the idea that interceptors are super fast and have high damage to small ships but have limited ammunition so they have to dock to rearm. It creates basically the same situation as above but with more immersion. They could even have a line about it "We stripped the ammunition fabricator off the old designs to lighten the frame." or something like that.
This is so stupid. So basically just go through control groups and press s to win. What amazing and deep gameplay and totally not an indication of the team not knowing wtf they are trying to do instead of just trying to appeal to starcraft 2/dota audience, who, in turn will not like it either because it's lazy busywork-micro.
I loved Homeworld games, but I don't really see what this game has to offer in comparison to the Nebulous: Fleet Command. I hate to admit it but anything this demo is doing the NFC is doing better, other than giant ship hulls. Here's a video idea for future, comparison between NFC and HW3.
At this point I'm putting my faith in Falling Frontier, even if it keeps getting delayed. At least each video that comes out feels more and more in depth space RTS.
The StarCraft 2 comment is on point. As much as that game gets complaints about busy work (and many are justified) at least you have drawbacks and built-in limitations to using abilities, not to mention abilities that you'd typically want on all the time will auto-cast. It's like the dev team used the *stereotype* of StarCraft as the base, not even the real thing.
Nebulous: Fleet Command, Falling Frontier…every year it feels like the most competent people in game design are all in small/indie studios.
@@liesdamnlies3372 It isn't just those either. We can look at the bigger success stories, like Helldivers 2 and see that the gaming industry is seeing a lot of growth and development in the small and indie studios. It seems people are really getting sick of all the corporate bullshit
Don't forget that they wish to appeal to a "modern" audience too... Imogen (Imoen?) is very ugly, Highara is a desert planet with dust clouds flying left and right (Highara is Earth like with more jungles), Khar-Kushan has wrong internal colors not to mention very smal bridge, its a MOTHERSHIP with multiple departments for Christ sake, but no, a bridge copied from Gundam Unicorn or whatever is called. We constantly see one over-smarty guy but fully representative..., but other that him, there is no one else, only Imogen, bald Karen and onemore. Whoile universe out there, but only 4 living people and few fillers called crew, how great! Also, broken mechanic or tedious battles are only a incing of this cake of incompetence.
Oh, and I forgot, entire story is a trash similar to Rings of Power. Imogen smile is the same as Galadriel in the horse riding scene....
Thank you God, for You Tubers, thanks to them I don't need to buy this garbage.
We can't have nice things it seems, sad
no
Perfect ending to the video man. Almost made me tear up. The Gardens of Kadesh still gives me goosebumps, especially when that banger combat track by Paul Ruskay begins..
i lost faith when i seen CGI S'jet instead of the 2d concept art portrayals. there's just something about the concept art that makes homeworld what it is.
Also it reminds me if Battle Fleet Gothic warhammer 40k space game, but without charm, rams, tactical shooting in the back, abordage, targeting engines, but with 3d map.
For me if you ask is correct battlefleet is very simplifie, battlestar galactica deadlock is more complex than gotic, but gotic has the sound, the ram, the hughe ships, these looks mhe
OG Homeworld was my first RTS experience, and I fell in love with that game. Here we are 20 years later and you've hit every nail on the head. It's terrible. Thankfully 20 years of waiting and all the other games in those 20 years that released as an utter shitshow made me very stoic. So I was prepared for the worst.
Do you want to know why things like aesthetic capital ship explosions are gone and noticeably worse from 20 years ago? Look at who actually developed the game. Who wrote the code for a certain feature and got it reviewed half the globe apart on a different timezone.
The amount of extensive outsourcing going on nowadays makes development that is both agile and effective very difficult. The person who implemented that feature might not even have known for which game they were working at the moment, or which unit was supposed to display that particular animation. And the person who reviewed it probably didn't even know the name of the company employing the first person.
In those situations "good enough" means "perfect", and the overall bar drops significantly by accumulation of minute concessions to mediocrity like these. Not to mention some of these people might care about the end result even less than an intern would. It's all in the hands of the QA people, who will look for functional issues, not artistic ones that aren't directly in the spec they received from another department.
This compounded to the loss of "know-how" stated in other comments.
I really wanted to like this game, but i started to get worried when they released the trailer a few months ago. They just didn't seem get the original theme of the games right.
Seems my worries were spot on.
Thanks for this detailed analysis!
This is just heartbreaking.
Also that point in the Beam weapon mechanics, its a beam for godsake, its an instantaneous beam, if someone also has played Freespace 2 will know than when a bigger ship get in range, its start firing in automatic their beam weapons and its a instantaneous beam, hearing firing the colossus or the sathanas and being near that two ships (The two most bigger ships in that game) was very cool, but HW3 beam mechanics its also out place.
And the fact that in HW1 even, ion cannons actually push away units by the impact force. Actually all other weapons do that but ions are more prevalent. And that was 30 years ago.
The most infuriating thing is that they HAVE THE F***IN SOURCE CODE!!! from the original games. The logic is already written, you can see exactly how it was done and just use it to make it again... duh
Few space games have nailed the sense of scale like Freespace 2 - it could take you a minute just to fly the length of the Colossus. You felt like a gnat on a battlefield of giants when the big ships started blasting each other with beams wider than your fighter... but a gnat that mattered, because you could sting the tender spots to turn the tide.
I'm another OG Homeworld 1&2 player since their release and I agree with all points. I was soo cataclysmicly disappointed with the Demo and I appreciate you taking the time to actually document all the issues in this way. It's not JUST the broken camera & UI mechanics.
How they managed to unlearn all of the best parts of HW in this is sad. They could have literally just 'modernized' and upgraded the HW: Remaster engine and it would have been a vastly better game.
wtf I dont need cooldown abilitys I just want a regular ballanced game
hard to made in a fast pace
This is why I never pre-purchase anymore.
Volound you are really good putting into words how i feel
35:30 Seriously though, ya member Cataclysm? I had emotional ties to units there cause they were simple miners who never wanted to face the Horror itself alone, but had to fight it anyways because nobody took it seriously and later it was way too late. They were fragile and very badly suited, but they fighterd till the last breath and I was trying to save every last ship in my disposal, even mimics that desired to be killed.
I really am furious, imagine having that 25 years ago and now nothing but an empty shell that dares to use the same name
Great summary of all of the issues.
One this that I think that you missed was how fighter formations have the same issue at capital ship tactical movement. NONE of the fighters fire until the ENTIRE formation has a shot. This causes some of the formations to just sort of spiral around each other firing a small volley every ~15 seconds.
yes that was really annoying, having to split formations into ~5 fighter groups so they can actually fight effectively.
even in tutorial if you used 20 scouts you could see how poor they function against even 5 scouts if you order them all at once...
What I got most from this video was a reminder of how fucking amazing the original Homeworld is, when you've demonstrated some tactics in HW1 it instantly made me want to close the video and boot the game, lol.
I haven't played this Beta but i'm finding a lot of similarities between what you noticed and two games i really wanted to succeed, which are Warno (released in 2022) and Broken Arrow (unreleased but with Beta out). I'm still mostly an RTT/RTS guy and (apart from old-TW and other franchises) i've been an avid player of Eugen games for a decade and i still find those older releases better than these modern ones.
There are so many things that now go wrong that had been done right in the past that it seems like these devs just create games but never play them.
Anyway keep up the good work; those with a louder voice than the rest of us have a great responsibility :)
Hello fellow Eugen freak in the wild! I've been playing Warno for about a year and its development has been...interesting. There's been so much tweaking of unit stats and adding and taking away stuff from divisions it's kind of mind boggling and I feel like in general they should just pick a lane and stay with it. I get the feeling there is a lot of back and forth on the dev team and at the end of the day arbitrary decisions are being made behind closed doors without an understanding of what makes a game fun in the first place.
That being said for the most part I love Warno and after I got used to the camera controls HW3 was pretty fun as well. I really hope HW3 makes it to release as it was great to play in that universe with modern graphics. Really when it comes down to it I just want to play WG:RD and HW1 on modern graphics. That being said I do appreciate all the work that goes into these titles and they are games after all so I try to focus on having fun.
I had no idea about secret abilities. Were they preserved in the remaster?
I didn't play the H3 Demo because I wanted to experience it for the first time when it launches.... Your video made me so sad, I really thought that they will at least make a H1 reboot if anything, but all the cuts to the mechanics make me loose hope in future games.... I always thought that I still play old games because of nostalgia, but they are are objectively better made. Devs used to make games they would love to play, not they make them for "the modern audience" with 5 seconds attention spans. Just sad.... But hey.. if they delayed the game launch because of the feedback, at least they are listening to some extent.... Thanks for the demo review!
This seems too broken to fix with just a bit of delay.
They need to go back to the very start with planning and feature development. And it seems they dont have the actual expertise for that anymore, otherwise it would not have ended up like this.
Im expecting they will try attempt to put a few bandages on the most attrocious things and call it a day.
The game sitting at Mixed is not a great sign. From what people are saying, they stripped away aLOT of features and elements that were standard in the first 2 games. And people are comparing the story to a poorly written netflix show. Seems they made this game for the mythical 'wider audience' and not actual rts players.
Like why are they even putting you in the middle of a debris field if you can’t even combat maneuver into and out of cover?
yeah let me first say hw1&2 VET....i refunded after the demo this is NOT homeworld 1 0r 2 standrads.......... demo was terrible and DEVS are silent ! a small delay means nothing without tellling us what your fixing ,.... FYI ..... (the delay was asked for buy the community because of how bad the controls where! & the backlash online, the layoffs where from other BBI not homeworld so a few corrections there!) but great video ! ......so many people online defending the demo and controls smh???
I will play devil's advocate here and say that some of the issues may just be part of this game mode.
Unit veterancy and modules may be present in the main campaign but not here because the idea was to create a more simple version of the game for when you just want a quick space battle.
Of course i may be wrong but it's a possibility.
I thought that may be the case as well. I hop so, it seems like it may just be an arcade mode to do quick “rouge like” co-op games with friends instead of investing the time into a full RTS match
Hi, I'm from 2 months in the future.
Yeah, that wasn't the case.
@Volound - I agree with you said, by 90% you're right, this game has big problems. I can confidently say this, because I'm someone who played the first HW 25 years ago and I'm someone who has been modding HW2 for over 15 years. I want to say, even more - unfortunately Homeworld3 looks like complete crap.
After 25 years, I expected real progress from this franchise, but what I can see breaks my heart. My main complaint is - why Homeworld3 looks so stupid and unrealistic!?
Before everything you said about ships in this video, there is one global problem. This game bills itself, as a space game, but there's no space in it, what they call space, doesn't look like space, because In space of HW3, on megaliths can lie piles of sand or the wind may blow, all megaliths or asteroids are dead static at zero gravity, none of them have rotation or drift, as it must be in real space. There are mountains of icebergs lying motionless there, which look as if they were formed by the earth's gravity. A game about space - it doesn't have space - that's the first problem for me!
Next, about ships. There are no realistic ballistics, with ricochets or projectile durability! All projectiles fired by ships forever disappear after a 2-3 seconds! Ships absorb shells, like sponges, what they can call as ricochet, is just a rare visual effect, cause shells cannot bounce off the hull and damage neighboring ships. There is no collision physics between ships, like there was in classic HW. The all ships do not have fuel, subsystems, crews or ammunition on board! No hint of detail or depth!
It's impossible to look at the UI, without bleeding from your eyes, it simply litters the entire player screen by senseless rubbish! All the ideas or design are borrowed from previous games and implemented poorly. Sometimes, I just see the Desert Of Kharak v.2.0 but on the ether, which can't even be called as true space. I'm really sorry. Probably only a decade can correct this, when will the 50th patch for this game and when will the modders master the tools and create something decent ...
I agree with every single point made. Can't like twice, though.
On a side note: no Attack Move? Déjà vu!
Developers of the Homeworld: Fleet Command board game have changed movement rules past public testing, turning Capital Ship movement to what we could see in the Homeworld 3 demo. Instead of space ships we got sail ships. I've been posting on the game's bgg forum to dissuade them, but they're being adamant about it.
Now, the digital saga is butchered the very same way. Is this the doing of blue-haired people again? Decades of wait for a disappointment. 99 was peak of human civilization.
Also the time to kill is too fast, remembers the fights in HW, HWC than the fights between bigger ships was more longer, the trend started to get fast in Homeworld 2, Remastered, but now the ttk in hw3 is too damn fast. didn't let to see and appreciate the combat mechanics well.
Higher DPS is fine, in fact HW2 classic was a bit slow. But what HW3 is missing is dynamic strikecraft combat where they take time to maneuver and line up their shots, and squadron management so its easy to manage and dock/repair large groups of fast-dying fighters (as in HW2). The result in the HW3 is very high TTK because ships basically just sit right in front of each other and fire head-on. Not only is this bad for gameplay, it's incredibly boring to watch. @@taerkasten5090
"Is this the doing of blue-haired people again?"
Or you know just plain incompetency, they looked at the top RTS everyone raves about i.e starcraft/warcraft + combined with people being more familiar with moba-style rather than tactics RTS style and you get this.
Dude HAD to include culture war nonsense. Bro the blue haired people are here, right now, agreeing with you about the state of the game. Stop with the garbage.
Like, all this stuff happened last generation too, so to claim some sort of moral superiority is also nonsense. One of my favourite cynical things to learn is about how grifts today are basically the same as they were 2000 years ago, just with better technology and more legal-ese terminology. Just listened to a podcast pointing out how during the American Civil War grifters would pile up on each other to supply the new union arm with paper shoes, and would lobby their brains out to ensure nobody in Washington could do anything about it. How subcontractors would subcontract to yet more subcontractors, who would continue the repetition half a dozen more times until the pie was a crumb.
"99 was the peak of civilization" bruh the problems of today didn't just start, and the youth deride the boomer generation for a reason. They were complacent and complicit in the widening flaws that have been present since before they were born, and now those problems are chasms. These are trends. Blaming young people and progressives for the problems of a given decade is also a trend since the times of Babylon. Ffs. Tired of this.
@@SolarFlareAmerica I'm not your dude, buddy!
Funny how you accuse me of claiming moral superiority, while it's the colored-haired people who do that on daily basis, calling everyone not catering to them racists and whatnot. No, they're not here agreeing with us. They couldn't care less about the success of the game. Their infestation of western companies has only one purpose -- pushing more of their ideological agenda onto society, and in return, gaining more influence on it. At any cost and by any means available.
It's not nonsense, when it has a real negative impact on a product we've waited dozens of years for. Imagine I had recently an unpleasant encounter with the pronouns individuals, as I was working my lower back part off (for free), listing all the issues with the Homeworld board game's cards and rules. They had me indefinitely banned from the company's discord -- not due to numerous comments the devs or QA people botched their job, but for daring to wonder whether diversity hire had any part in the product's end quality (saw plenty of pronouns under their employees' names). The power these lunatics hold is terrifying. They don't care how productive someone is for their company. One instance of wrongspeak against their religion and off to gulag with you! Keep being docile and granting them authority, and you in the west will experience communism firsthand.
Where I'm from, screeching adults, battering others over some words are checked for mental illness or straight locked up.
''Smash the keyboard like a drum kit'' HAH! Your poetry gives voice to my experience of this demo. I suspect they want a cut of the moba - esports audience, and you can't have patient, cunning strategies with esports, you need the fast pace serotonin rush that only button mashing and blank stats can provide. That is the taste I had from the War Games experience anyway. Also, anyone else notice the ships just look like flying iphones?
Unresponsive units, abilities not working, units floating around eachother rather and actually flying or manoeuvring, terrible ship designs like the suppression frigate, ion cannons struggle to aim or move as you point out. The list goes on.
Bugs can be ironed out, but bad design can't be redesigned in just a few months. Concerning.
All the new objects and scenery, while a good idea, just clutter the view, which is a shame and I don't think that is anyones fault.
You made some great suggestions too, if I can add some; impacts from larger ships can nudge smaller (eg - frigates) off their axis/orbit slightly, and to take into account the new objects like flying through tunnels - missile can fire around objects to their targets if you have probe near the target. Providing a work around to line of sight. That could be fun.
After the demo I was slightly paranoid that maybe I was just old and bad at Homeworld, so I reinstalled the remaster, and ofcourse, it was so straightforward and well designed...sigh.
The shilling for this demo as been sickening.
''Ur mAH GurrD S pEcE RTS IS bAck!''
i wish it would be like homeworld resurgance(catacllism) or hw1 , but it seams to went homeworld 2 route , in way all if not most fans going to dislike it.
real shame , and i already had few frenchises i beloved died in past years , dow3 , total war warhammer / total war games.
who is really like kick in balls as resurgance is not only of best story driven games i ever played , best horror game i ever played and proved that you can have good story in strategy games
and hw3? they could make completly new story , even in new time and not have to deal with anything hw2 was , but they chose otherwise.
homeworld 2 was great, probably the single most balanced rts in existence
@@doltBmB gameplay yes , story no
Homeworld 2 was good, but that's pretty debatable... frigates were nerfed to hell and beyond in HW2, they were not much more than slower and oversized corvettes. @@doltBmB
@@tatuira93 it is rather that frigates took the role that corvettes had, while corvettes became something inbetween a fighter and a frigate instead, destroyers took the role frigates had and battlecruisers were introduced to take the top spot
so it's not really a nerf so much a shuffling of roles
HW2>HW1
I knew there was something wrong when I saw the demo. They immediately throw destroyers and battlecruisers at you but basically nothing was happening. I almost fell asleep watching the demo but I still distinctly remember the time in homeworld remastered when battlecruisers and destroyers were epic battles. Fighters/Interceptors are just so slow man, like they are fighting in atmosphere it almost feels wrong.
What's the point of all these realistic graphics and realism art design if the game itself can't even get that technically right? Getting the game to homeworld 1 physics should be the easiest thing in the world. It's not actually hard to simulate physics in zero gravity. You might as well replace all of homeworld's visuals with the absurdly cartoonish warhammer or warcraft style and it would actually fit the demo better. At least the game would have some character and balls.
Dear lord i hope they get this game right. Delay it until xmas if needed.
@Volound Hi are you planning to release an update about the official release version? I'd be very interested in seeing your feedback
i want to, but i refuse to pre-order games.
@@Volound fair one
Are projectiles actual objects or hit/miss is dice roll followed by animation?
they said they are modelled like hw1
This video needs more eyes.
They'll probably delay the game again because they cannot possibly consider adding missing features / fixing all the bugs / replacing the shitty abilities in under 3 months.
Great observations and commentary! The supposed 'RTS revival' is definitely suffering from what appears to be designers that don't fully understand what made earlier games in the series great. Company of Heroes 3 is another one that - even a year after launch - is struggling to catch up to what it once was. I hope the devs at Blackbird get to see this and take it in a constructive way to help them get back on track.
I enjoyed your use of the term 'orthogonal' to describe what abilities should be (complementary trade offs) rather than spammable boosts. These are the foundations of good game design that should be established from the beginning of the process and have supporting elements designed around them to accentuate the game loop. It feels like modern titles put all the effort into updated graphics/physics engines and somehow lost sight of the actual gameplay mechanics. What's really odd is how common it is with 'revival sequels'.
After watching this and reading the blog post I still have a bit of trepidation over the upcoming release in a week. My biggest problem was the abilities being these shoehorned "do your job, but better" things that barely even belong in a traditional RTS. The changes announced only make mention of making them last longer and have a longer cooldown, but I dunno, the idea of just "hey, do more damage" button still irks me, as it isn't interesting no matter what cooldown they slap on it.
Capturing ships was so cool, especially in Cataclysm. I am not surprised of the state of the game, considering the majority of the games that are being released since for a long time now you can observe a pattern of "road to the bin", cause thats where they will end up to, the companies end up being bought or banckrupt and sad part is that they wont understand why, or so it seems.
Thanks for pointing out some of the issues I simply missed in my play attempts because I was struggling too much trying to understand the controls. Honestly, I do not think the next 2 months will change much especially with the new round of layoffs at the studio. I really hope that I am wrong.
Someone also noted than the beam mechanics on the "Incarnate" ships are more elaborated, if you slow down the video in the part 31:08 and 31:19 in the moments than the destroyer fires their beam weapon, you saw than the effect is more akin to the classical ion beam, and the hiigaran beam weaponry looks exactly as the OP says, like an harpoon being fired rather than a beam weapon, BBI can employ the effect and sequences of the incarnate beam weaponry as the same for the hiigarans vessels but with different SFX for look them opposite with the respective change of color.
Thanks for the critique on the demo, really making me reevalutate about getting the game if this is how its going to be on release. Will be keeping tabs on this channel if you plan on putting out a release review
You're advertising why releasing a demo before launch is a great thing. Hopefully the devs will take your critiques and make them more attractive. If the game already released, and you released this video, that would be the definition of "problems.' Lets wait and see what the devs have when they release.
I found the GUI too large - to the point of being stifling. Units also don't behave in a way you would expect and occasionally ignore orders with no reason given
its better to have a large ui then fucking squinting at the tv games these days have tiny text hard to read not everyone wants the same thing
@@Dragonborn1178 a game claiming it's AAA should have a scalable UI, especially given not everyone uses the same monitors, resolutions etc.
Think beyond yourself.
@@timothywilkins1831 some people dont have 20.20 vision and dont wanna sit super close to a 20 in monitor and have disabilityes with there eyes think past your self and not about what you want
also ui scaling is the perfect way to deal with it but we dont live in a perfect world better to have larger ui that devs can fix later then small ui that limits who can play your game there are forums about people that have legal blindness and they want larger ui why do you think devs now make accessable games maybe you should think about more then your self and about more people that need ui for them this isnt 90s pc gaming its 2024 and people play on lap boards with keyboards and mice like the razer turret setup hell i play with controller on my 55 in tv i play many rts games also i know how to use keyboard and mouse i play c anc c games supcom lotr and others get a grip bud and get outside your comfort zone of what the norm is
Another thing that's fucked up: the old unit tactics are gone, by which I mean Aggressive, Neutral and Evasive. These outright changed the behavior and movement of your ships to a significant degree. Now we just have Aggressive (pursue enemy until killed), Neutral (pursue for a short while then stop when they're out of range), and passive (don't return fire at all). What a disgrace.
As a Homeworld fan for 20 years, I agree with every single point in this video. Totally heartbreaking that such basic features that were present in the Remastered are missing. Devs couldn't copy paste them at least smh
For a reasons unknown I couldn't get to the wargames mode. I played trough the tutorial mission tho. But I'm really glad that you brought these points out. _specially_ about the abilities, the one about bombers broke me. I mean I love the idea of stealthbomber but the execution... compared to the original HW stealhfighter. Pardon my language but what a shitshow. I love the original HW and use it as a benchmark. I really hope that these things are fixed so the gameplay would make more sense.
And I just got to the NO ATTACK MOVE part... what the hell.
Wow.
Glad you also mentioned some good/great points too, like fighters taking damage if near big explotion!
Only thing that I think different than stated in your video is that personally I love the new mothership design. And I am faily certain that we get to see a large hangar door opening from the belly. I've noticed that every hangar has a yellow outlining, indicating a utility port / area or a hangar. And there is a relatively large yellow rectangle on the belly of the ship. I hope that this is the case.
Volound, Thank you for the great video. I appreciate the work that went into this, the passion shows and share your tougths.
Hopefully this video reaches BBI trough discord or other channels.
My thanks for the video.
PS.I found a video where someone confirms my suspicion about thehangar door. Have look, its not a destroyer, but a battlecruiser is pretty too.
czcams.com/video/gIcCVOFaaoU/video.html&ab_channel=KharAdun_Channel
Volound, on capital ships: PLAY STARSECTOR. Even unmodded, it's an awesome game that really highlights ship combat well. You've got ship ai that will actually rotate the ships to have the unharmed armor take the punishment that a weakened side no longer can. Some ships are literally designed for this. Its an awesome game.
I tried to have a wall of barrage missile frigates in the demo to defeat the destroyer or whatever it was in the end of 3rd stage of war games.
They hugged eachother so close they would barrage on themselves.
Also i barely noticed any differences between the barrage missile frigate and regular missile frigates. Maybe like shooting from 10% further away than the base version.
But my point is they clumped so closely in various formations that they shot eachother. Making them being in a formation detrimental tl their own survival and their effectiveness against enemies.
I would have expected the "improved" version that it describes would mean more than just a slightly further shot range.
Is there a point defense mechanic ?
Great video and breakdown of what's wrong with the gameplay mechanics, makes me want to go back and play the originals which clearly I was not playing with a full understanding. Makes me very concerned for Homeworld 3, I cant see a lot of this issues being fixed without a further significant delay.
Cataclysm still remains my favourite. I didn't get on so well with Homeworld 2, in particular the final boss seemed to not match the strategic gameplay I expected from the series. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Pretty much on the money with most of these. They focused the game on this wargames mode and tried to recreate a starcraft 2 style…
If people want PEAK homeworld then go and get homeworld emergence off of GOG. It’s old as hell from a far away era but it is worth it. Homeworld 1 and 2 are good but Emergence(real name cataclysm) is probably the best in my opinion due to how you have to handle the fleet
literally reverse engineering hw1 engine and giving it a refreshed ui, new maps and races would have made a better game
I hope HW3 takes in your feedback, because moving while firing is a staple in RTS.
As someone who plays mostly single player RTS for the story, I loved Cataclysm. All I need from this game is a good single player story.
Valid critique and one that I support to push for better RTS games. Will be purchasing a copy as I dont want the genre to die and get closed down like other studios
A good video marred by the frustration, not that it exists, but that it invites dismissal through over reliance on emotion.
Missing a couple of points, but overall this needed to be said as I share that frustration myself, but lack the dedicated comparison footage of years of the previous games to provide such a clear cut comparison.
It does make me wonder if they replaced the teams direction with those that worked on the mobile game, whether through cost or other reasons I can only speculate to, I will have to check the credits and listings.
As for directional armour, it's impossible to tell since TTK is so low and combat is so... mindless.
My extra points that I found annoying: no ui/hud toggle (to hide it), initiate hyperspace noisy like crazy
I'm still hoping that some of simplified things going on here are specific to that game mode. But yeah, definitely some things are missing like controls. I kind of liked that demo mode but yeah, not to the same depth as you have it present in this analysis but I did notice similar problems.
All I can hope for is that It won't be that bad on release and wonder if it will be moddable. Modders could do miraclous things if they are allowed to. And yes, I know these should be fixed by default but that is not how it works for most games lately...
If a game doesn't support key rebinding in 20 FUCKING 24, said game is not worth buying. Simple as. This shit has been figured out DECADES AGO. SupCom Forged Alliance Forever even allows you to make custom key combinations, let alone rebind your damn keys. Also, "combat maneuver confirmed" is probably one of the lines I heard the most in Homeworld 2, and it's not even a thing anymore. There is no faith to be had.
AN ANSWER For you
I tried the sphere defence on the resource collector. Did not work for me.
usually when a game is delayed for few months that means there's something real wrong.
couldnt be more wrong. the best games ever made were for the most part delayed by several months or even a year in some cases.
When people working on the project get fired days/weeks/months before a delay happens, including the game director, means there's something real wrong.
And for finalize my commentaries, "No Shipyard" "¿Battlecruisers will be hyperspaced to the area once they are completed?", Mothership seems than dont have the hangar bay than let them get out, in HW1 theres a bay for carriers, destroyers, heavy cruisers get out once they are builded, Homeworld 2 added the shipyard since the new mothership wierdly have the bay but didnt launch an BC, so they put the shipyard for compensate and the big question is "¿How the battlecruiser will came in once one is builded?"
I don't play RTS much but the APM thing smells like a chasing Esports kind of thing.
It only takes a short glance at previous or contemporary titles to understand how to do abilities per unit well. Even the high APM of StarCraft has features like energy or health cost to make you think about how you use unit abilities. Red Alert 3 had no mana system but they had cooldowns, statistical changes, costs in money, and even fundamentally and sometimes permanently changing or destroying the unit in the process. The comically short CD’s for “same but better’ abilities really detracts from the gameplay and turns your strategy game into a QTE with extra steps.
It doesn’t help that these abilities are comparatively boring as well. Cataclysm/Emergence did something very similar with many units having a special ability or two but they all had niches, trade offs, and even detriments.
The Acolyte was interceptor, bomber, and corvette all in one but it depended on how you used it’s abilities that made it effective in these roles, like linking Acolyte’s into ACVs to EMP a Heavy Cruiser then unlink as they maneuver behind it to missile it’s weaker sides. Alternatively you could be fighting assault frigates and need to divide your missiles between them to efficiently fight them.
Hive Frigates could eat fighters with their Swarmers but any another dedicated anti fighter unit would eat its Swarmers in turn. While the Swarmers didn’t do much damage they could distract capitals reasonably well so your Acolytes without ACVs or EMPs could still get their missiles off.
Ramming frigates replaced ion frigates and filled a similar niche but differently. Even infected it could still shove a Beast capital out of the fight long enough for your other ships to leg it. Also while comically ineffective fighters they weren’t completely harmless and would smash through stationary Defenders in the way. The ramming also required multiple Ram Frigates to move larger ships, necessitating a larger investment and probable loss.
Leaches were creative in their use with them being slow anti-cap assassins, spies, or even ad-hoc resource harvesters by leeching off an enemy capital mid fight to help recoup losses.
Ship’s like the Destroyer and Multi-Beam Frigate didn’t have abilities but had passive intricacies that made them important like the Multi-beams maneuvering like corvettes rather than frigates and having wide firing arcs of near instant hit weapons to counter enemy Acolytes before they stunned you or beast missiles before they hit, and the Destroyer being the first infection-resistant ship to let you stand and fight beast capitals without sacrificing things, especially the Beast Mothership.
The Dreadnaught had an ability to permanently give up one of its ion beams but gained the repulse weapon to ping pong siege cannon shots and disrupt enemy formations while not affecting its own fighter escort.
Speaking of, the Command Ship for both Beast and Somtaaw had modules and abilities that couod decide how the game went with the Siege Cannon of the Somtaaw and the health-drain overclock of the Beast Mothership, as well as its own infection beam.
Even the Processor, the basic resource controller, had enough guns and repair beams to basically be an assault and 2 support frigates in the shape of a destroyer parading as a resource controller. While all auto cast or passive, it still made it a uniquely useful ship in fleet fights where workers are easily picked off but you need a repair ship, or need something to buy time early in the game so you put 2 next to each other and they get exponentially tougher with healing eachother and fighting at the same time.
will you be making a video on broken arrow open beta or is there a NDA of some kind? or are you just not into that kind of world in conflict cold war RTS game?
The people working on Home world NEED to see this video!
Thanks! This is very usefull summary. Luckily I was not hyped out for this development, frankly I forgot that it was even in the works, so not much dissapointment felt. But still thanks for helping to dodge the bulet.
Mad props for getting as far as to analyze the game systems. I only got as far as choking on the controls, then I spent more time figuring out where the suggestions/feedback section of the discord was (spoiler, there isn't one. Or wasn't. I guess they were really confident in the release 🙄)
Like, seriously I get that game development is hard, but just... Build the foundational stuff, like the controls, off of the previous success. Fine tune it. Then add systems and gameplay. If something was already done correctly, don't change that. Add stuff maybe, but the original was beautifully intuitive. Like you, I played the first one when I was 8ish, and somehow was able to grasp everything without a tutorial or reading the manual. I can go back a decade later and pick it right up no problem. This one, the tutorial was long as fug (and broken) and I still stumbled my way through two matches before just saying "fug this, wtf"
I can say that sphere formation scouts ordered to attack a single target do not surround that target and hold formation like in HW1. I couldn't even find the guard command :(
This was a massive damage boost, since it stopped strikecraft from performing strafing runs. In turn, this made them more vulnerable to the slow kinetic turrets on assault frigates, destroyers, and cruisers.
Admittedly, sphere in HW1 was pretty broken if you used evasive maneuvers on strikecraft that would jitter a lot (defenders, scouts), or if you ordered a sphere guard on a strikecraft (not programmed well - it allowed the guarding strikecraft to accelerate faster than their normal top speed, with no regard for facing direction. And the formation automatically expanded or contracted as they changed targets, which was extremely evasive)
issue that I see without digging into details is I look at gameplay and it looks like a game that has been released 10 years ago- I was hoping for some next gen- really get me immersed kind of graphics.
I'm glad you're saying this. Everything I've seen about HW3 seems... not great. The controls and interface look poor, and even in official promotional footage I'll notice AI ships getting stuck in the "terrain" of the map and all sorts of odd behavior.
One of my favourite moments in RTS was in a late mission in HW2. I used ion frigates to draw in 3 Vagyr BC's and their escorts. I then jumped a carrier full of bombers behind and waxed the subsytems so they were left drifitng. there was another identical group coming from another direction so I did the same trick but, left a bomber squad behind to prevent the repairs. Once all the escorts were dead and the BC's pacified, i was able to jump my own BCs in behind them to dispatch them leasurely. not a single unit lost due to good positioning and tactics against a force 3 times the power. Contrast this with the HW3 demo where my ships are more akin to HP, than units to preserve.
They could have literally remade homeworld 1 with a great new story campaign with new graphics and I would be happy.
Ion beams don't have to travel at hyper relativistic velocities to be "effective". Without going into much detail optimal velocity for desired effect is based on target material, its thickness and particle being used. So depending on desired effect and target velocity might be quite low by comparison to laser, but stil in 1-10% c range.
20 years...After 20 odd years, they can't be innovative with the HW mechanics. They can't even keep the old mechanics fun...
A lot of these problems have been fixed, but there are still issues.
I did not realize they laid off OG staff. There is a staggering amount of developer skill degradation going on in video games between 1999 and now. How are they getting basic control schemes for Homeworld wrong after all this time? Seems like they were excessive with the "streamlining for a wider audience" design philosophy and ended up taking out basic functionality in the process.