[PC] Homewold 3

[briareos_kerensky]

It has been a hot minute since the last proper Homeworld game, and after being delayed multiple times, Homeworld 3 is finally here.

To keep things organised, I'm going to divide my thoughts into categories, starting with...

Technical aspects

The game runs well on my 3080ti and 5950X at 4K, max detail, and no raytracing; no hiccups, loading is basically instant, and so far (mission 7 or 8 of the single player campaign) even the larger battles have gone smoothly. I did encounter a bug where opening/closing the sensor manager would result in the camera pointing in the far distance and I had to refocus it on one of my ships; minor stuff.

There are plenty of options to choose from, including HUD scaling, but when you adjust that, you don't see how big the various windows would end up being.

Interface

HW3 allows to choose between "modern" and "HW2 style" layouts, and I went for the modern, but I think I'll go back to HW2 style, all the hotkeys are messed up for me. Sensor manager is still the spacebar, but movement is now V instead of M; you can click anywhere to move ships without the movement disk, but it's very imprecise...at least if you're used to previous Homeworld games. Docking no longer has an hotkey by default, and instead of directly choosing formation and stance with function keys, you need to cycle through them, as function keys are now for quick-selecting all your fleet, cycle through builder ships (mothership and carriers), all strike crafts, all collectors, etc etc.

Vertical movement is performed by holding down the left mouse button and dragging without the need of the shift key.

It takes a bit to get used to, but modern style is not bad, but you'll have to reacclimatise yourself if you have committed HW1+2 interface to hearth.

The HUD is an evolution of the HW2 HUD, and there are things I like, and things I don't. I like how compact is the build/research manager, though clicking on a builder ship doesn't automatically swithc to that ship's build queue, and carriers have no names, so it's impossible to check at a glance who is doing what and where they are.

All selected ships have their icon grouped in the right lower corner, but those icons are big and past 10 units, the others are hidden: smaller icons (like in Starcraft 2) would have allowed to show more units in one go and reduce screen estate taken by this interface element. You can scale things down in the options but that will scale everything, including the build manager which is of perfect size.

The sensor manager now shows how many ships are in one area when zoomed out: at first I thought they were group numbers, but then those small numbers shown up on enemy groups. It's fine for enemies, but I know how many of my ships are located in an area and I would have preferred group numbers for allied ships.

Some special actions now require to select units one by one, you cannot select a group of them and order to deploy mines, for example. There's no order queueing like in Starcraft 2 either, you need to select units one by one and use their special order every single time. So far this applied only to minelayers and turrets, abilities like the fighter's overdrive can be triggered in groups.

Luckily the game allows to issue orders while paused, and you can slow down game time to micromanage your fleet...and camera...more effectively.

Story

HW3 has the same writer as HW1 and HW Cataclysm onboard, so I thought they would ditch or downplay the mysticism of the hyperspace cores and instead go back to a more "technological" story...how wrong I was.

So far the story seems to double down on how the three hyperspace cores are this manna from the Progenitors and how they could change the galaxy forever. OK, I might not like the direction, but if the story is compelling...

And this is where HW3 drops the ball real hard. All HW games had missions introduced by black and white hand drawn still pictures with minimal animations with voiceovers narrating what where the outcome of the previous mission and introducing the general setting for the upcoming one; in the first HW you never saw any character, it was "Intel", or "Fleet Command", or "Captain Soban" talking, and kept an aura of mystery. HW Cataclysm and HW2 did show a couple of persons, but it was more like the ships where the protagonist of these games, and I quite liked that, it made Homeworld unique.

In HW3 we have these lavishly animated cutscenes where you see all of the characters, and they talk, talk, and talk. You even see the Big Bad Guy of this game, and...

...

Sorry...

...

I know I should pay attention to the story, but I'm trying my hardest not to laugh. Seriously, I cannot take the current fleet command, Imogen S'Jet, seriously because she looks like a deer staring down a truck's headlights barrelling down the road, and here comes a vision of the Big Bad Guy saying "clever girl" way too many times. I know I shouldn't always think about memes first, but damn that line felt like one after the Big Bad Guy unveiled their evil plan in a way that didn't felt threatening at all.

Right now the story feels more like a generic sci-fi flick, and even a step down from HW2. Yes the story in HW2 was a mess, but it still had that sense of mystery and your opposition was unknown and foreboding, here in HW3...we have our fleet command talking to the Big Bad Guy through hyperspace telepathy.

Eh.

Game

Finally here, at the meat of the post.

Strike craft fuel is gone. Yeah! Formations and stances work. Yeah! Back to bulding one ship at a time, including strike crafts. Mhm, it's OK I guess.

Unit balancing is in the middle between HW1 and HW2. Strike crafts like fighters can damage capital ships if they strike their weak spot but not as effectively as HW2; units like bombers and other anti-capital crafts absolutely tear through them, so you need to keep fighters on hand to deal with them. Dedicated anti-fighter frigates are good too, but if you actually micromanage your strike crafts they won't be able to retaliate as they lack speed an maneuverability.

Most maps now have structures you can "interact" with, taking cover and even using tunnels to move undetected. These structures do play an important part in all missions they are present, but also pose a new threat to the player: this is the first HW where I had to reposition the camera due to terrain obstructing the view, and was particularly dire in the last story mission I played. Well, dire for Homeworld standards, I have seen way worse cameras.

So far the single player campaign has been rather uneventful. Launching the mothership with not all systems ready? Check. Asteroid fields? Check. Mission in which you have to either wait for your strike crafts to dock or leave them? Check. Capture one or more enemy ships? Check.

Oh yes, capturing is back, and it's done by your resource units; it's more fulfilling than in HW2, but so far I haven't encountered any particularly dangerous enemy ship what would greatly bolster my fleet, so outside mission objectives, I relied on my own ships. By capturing you can break your unit cap limit, but you aren't exactly strapped for resources in HW3, and building even large capital ships is not such a huge investment in resources or time.

Also, external modules are gone, research is done internally inthe motheship, and resourcing has been greatly streamlined, with resource controllers doing their job quietly and effeciently, moving around resource fields on their own.

HW3 has about the pace as HW2, though its mission design feels less franctic, probably because I still have to encounter a particularly hard enemy (like the inhabitants of Kadesh from HW1 or the Progenitor Movers in HW2), and even the big scary defence mission wasn't all that hard...in fact I prepared for a secondary attack that never happened, diverting forces from the main area of interest, and still having a fairly easy time with the enemy assault (lost a single support frigate).

[MartyG]

Not sure what you've done there, but black text on a brown background isn't readable.

[briareos_kerensky]

?
You mean my post? I see it black on light blue, like any other initial post in a thread.

[MartyG]

The above is fine, this is how the first post looks - it looks like the font has been set to black, overriding the the default colour on the font text which would usually be white on the dark theme. Quote your own post you'll see the colour BB-code markup.

[briareos_kerensky]

Well, that was strange...corrected.

[briareos_kerensky]

Aaaaaaand...I'm done. Single player campaign complete. Steam says I've played for 8 hours, which makes it a tad shorter than Deserts of Kharak, which in turn was shorter than all other HW games.

Going through the game did highlight some bugs.
Fleet command would announce in a worried voice that destroyers and carriers are low on health when instead it's an enemy ship you're destroying.
I tried going back to HW2-style controls, but: you still need to cycle through formations and tactics, no shortcuts via function keys, camera controls are gone, no quick-select of units via the function keys either, but at least the movent disc is now mapped to M and shift for vertical control. Yay?
During the final mission the mothership would get damaged by...something, never seen a beam or a projectile getting near it; I was able to fulfill the mission objectives only for the mothership to reach 0 HP, but the final cutscene started so, I was in the clear! Well, no. The mission failed screen pops up with no mouse or keyboard control, forcing me to Alt+F4 the game. Second try, the mothership doesn't get attacked by this mysterious threat, and everything goes well...only for the final enemy ship to clip through the mothership. Luckily it was just a cosmetic error, but it really sucked to see that.
Even the credits aren't perfect, the very last line didn't scroll completely out of the screen and it was halfway visible.

The single player campaign was a disappointment. HW3's pace is faster than all other HW games (probably even than Deserts of Kharak) which doesn't give any time to soak in the atmosphere. There are no standout missions, and the final mission was as simple as selecting all your ships and moving them towards an objective.
Unfortunately HW3 goes back to HW1's single-player balancing that makes strike crafts useless when you get your second type of frigate, and doesn't seem to use HW2's dynamic enemy balancing, so you'll see the opposition attacking your 45+ offensive frigates with fighter squadrons. It also doesn't help the AI (at least in medium difficulty) is as dumb as it can get, and it will happily stream units two at a time into your frigate wall. There are enemy capture corvettes and disruptor frigates, but those will be quietely ignored in most missions, and only used in preprogrammed attacks.
The game likes to build up the Big Bad Guy and their grand admiral as these ruthless military geniuses, but the best thing they can do is to appear in their respecitve missions in a ship bigger than what you have, and maybe sit behind some structures.
Structures are another missed opportunity. I think only one mission tries to make use of structures as cover and tunnels in those structures as a way to sneak past turrets, and in all other missions are more of a way to obstruct your camera view.
Formations work, sort of. The game doesn't ouright tells you that, but formations are limited in number of units, so you select wall formation for your capital ships, only for them to split into two or three different formations. If you have different classes selected, units are split almost at random, but ships in formation do match their speed.
From what I've played, super-capital ships like destroyers and battlecruisers have to be used alone, it's basically impossible to keep them together with your frigates due to difference in speed. Due to this I think my shiny 5 battlecruisers fired a total of two shots in the whole game, as frigates would accelerate toward the enemy and destroy it before they could enter firing range.
Carriers proved to be useless, the mothership is very well capable of taking care of all your production needs throughout the campaign, and you don't need carriers to be drop-off points for your resource collectors, or mobile repair bases for any of your units, as only support frigates have healing abilities. Maybe it'll be different in hard mode and you'll need to replace your losses quickly.

The story is a mess. There's none of the atmosphere and mystery of any HW title. in HW1 you were a lone ship against a whole empire, going through peculiar location to peculiar location. HW Cataclysm had the Beast, still the best villain in a HW title. In HW2 Makaan was way less interesting but you still felt he had power, plus the whole Progenitor thing led to some interesting moments.
In HW3 the first enemies you face are renmants of the Taidaan empire, and in one cutscene you see one of their carriers spawing inside an asteroid, using the hyperspace field to cut through solid matter. Fleet command goes "impossible" and that plot thread is dropped until you see your forces doing the same with no questions asked.
The Big Bad Guy is never felt as a threat to you, despite what everyone says. All cast members don't have any of the charisma previous characters had, and as said in the first thread, I had a very hard time not laughing during certain cutscenes. It's like everything had to be rushed through and ther's no build up to anything. The ending is disappointing as well, the Big Bad Guy simply accepts their fate and eveything is resolved.
I think the whole mystical aspect of hyperspace travel should have either been dropped or downscaled entirely, it went nowhere in HW2, and it's still going nowhere here.

I really want to like the soundtrack but I don't know if track selection is bugged or simply the direct decided to have the music absent for most of the game. Paul Ruskay is still at the main composer, so you do get these wornderul tracks mixing middle eastern instruments with western sensibilities, but only in a handful of battles. There's a choir version of Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings, which highlighted some of HW1's most memorable moments, and in HW3 is used sparingly, but doesn't quite have the same impact.

There's a single player roguelike mode which I'll try next, but I must say I'd rather play HW1 or HW Cataclysm than HW3.

[briareos_kerensky]

Gave a try to the roguelike mode, it's actually interesting and I will play some more of it.
You start off by selecting emblem and fleet colous, which is a nice touch...only that's bugged. I chose a red trail for my ships only to see some of my fighters having a blue streak instead, and enemies still had their original red colour, making hard to discern who is who. In my second run I reset to standard trails, only to see that enemy ships have my fleet's colours...this doesn't change much as zooming on enemy ships is not something you normally do, but...

Anyway, after setting your cosmetics, you choose the fleet type. All fleets starts with a carrier and one resource collector; the rest depends on your choice. Fleet types also have different available units and unit caps, making each one a different way to play. The starting Hiigaran fleet has more strike crafts and less frigates; the remaster fleet not only uses a HW1-style carrier but also has less strike crafts types but different and more frigates types.

Being a roguelike, you go from mission to mission, each with a single objective. You carry over resources, research, and units between missions as well as artifacts, objects you have to salvage from the field. These are buffs that have various effects, like improving the carrier's build speed, improve fighter's health, having frigates sacrifice health for damage, and so on. It also forces you to use different units based on recovered artifacts, though there is no scuttle action for built ships.
Missions don't allow you to turtle at all, and unit caps are very strict, so you have to almost rush to your objective, or enemies will overwhelm you. There is no active pause, as the mode is basically always-online: you can ping to see if there are other players in your same mission and help each other, and you can undertake a run in coop.

It's actually a fun mode, though I'd have made strike crafts more resilient, as you go through them at a even faster rate than in the campaign, and you have to keep building them as the initial popluation cap for frigates is eight for most fleets. Frigates still seem to be king, an eclectic mix of firepower, resilience and speed. For the same reason fleets with access to assault frigates tend to have an easier time than others that have to rely only on highly specialised vessels.
Still, this could be the highlight of HW3