You can read the interview or listen the interview with the player below. IncGamers: What’s your personal connection to Homeworld?īrian Martel: For me, it’s always been this amazing epic/mythic tale of the people that are leaving their homeworld and going across the galaxy to find another planet. That kind of Battlestar Galactica meets Star Wars thing is just fricking cool. I think it’s got some of the best ship designs in the last 20 years. I always loved the sense of scale and the space opera thing. Over the years as it just languished and sat around and no one ever figured out how to get it released, I would occasionally just pick it up and play a few missions here and there and think, ‘Wow, that looks amazing.’ It was just one of those things which I always loved. Hard angles, painted metal, no faces – these were things even aged graphics cards could handle well. In terms of strategy games which ‘need’ remastering, Homeworld was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list. But in terms of strategy games which really, truly benefit from remastering – well, this is a chart-topper. Light, shadow, texture and high resolutions are part of it, of course, but they wouldn’t mean much without scale. Small fighters are insects, the mothership is this enormous obelisk, the stellar backdrop is palpably infinite-feeling, and the camera zooms all the way in and out to show how all these things compare to each other.Ĭombine this with a celestial score (plus, of course, the rightfully iconic, still-powerful usage of Adagio for Strings at the start of Homeworld 1) )and starkly industrial sound effects and you’ve got space. It’s a universe away from the squat, constrained worlds of almost any other real-time strategy game. I know it can be ugly to bust out hyperbole in a game review, but I’m extremely tempted to say that Homeworld was and is a masterpiece of visual design. The new textures help, though even then some still look blown up and blocky when you get in close, but it’s the crispness that the Remastering most benefits from. Resolution and anti-aliasing (plus assorted less obvious shader tricks) mean these looming industrial shapes, these man-made visitors to a vast and empty space, look that much more 3D and tangible, that much less like simple game models. Homeworld is simply incredible and everyone should play it.They’re colourful too, borrowing respectfully from Chris Foss rather than Star Wars, and this with their unusual shapes (broadly avoiding any jet or shuttle inspiration) take on true character. Only a few minor problems interfere, like the abstraction of ship classes to arbitrary geometric shapes in menus, but they're meagre quibbles given the quality of the package. Lasers cast light on vessels, a depth of field effect enhances the already well-developed sense of distance between craft and the updated UI makes cycling between factory units easier. They've recreated Homeworld's ageing backgrounds and ship textures in keeping with Relic's original vision. That's helped by Gearbox' outstanding update work. The steep learning curve is entirely worth the effort, though, for the fantasy of commanding such an extraordinary collection of sleek, glowing vehicles, and for the spectacle when they boost into battle. Campaign missions can become very difficult if you fail to preserve forces between missions and the technicalities of combat-like micromanaging units to attack the softer top armour of frigates-becomes arduous in Homeworld's biggest scraps.
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