Homeworld 3

TL; DR: A wasted opportunity to relaunch a Homeworld franchise. I know that it's been done to death buit after trying to play it one more time I just have to went. The good: - it's a new HW game, probably the last one I'm sure - pretty graphics What went wrong for me: - firstly - I didn't like how Gearbox handled a preorder of the Collectors Edition in my contry. After preordering it almost two years before release, a month before I got a notification that I won't be receiveing the product - guess it wasn't in enough quantities to make content creators happy - I'm not a content creator just a fan - secondly - I feel ripped off that I bought the highest tier of the game possible on Steam with the season pass just to be scammed by 2K Games, Gearbox and BBI, when they decided that the game is DoD and won't be supported any more - thirdly - why the Fig campaign lasted so short? BBI could have made much more money towards developing this game, instead it was decided that 1 mil is enough. A mistake IMO. What I think went bad generally: - the game was developed in UE 4 engine, that is very old at this time, and mostly relies on a single core optimizations, thus some visuals - like weapon beams and explosions doesn't look that good nor hi-fidelity when you look up close - for me that takes some of the immersion away - even with beafed up system with RTX 4090 the game just runs poorly in some situations and stutters when there's to much going on on the screen - the game - being on an UE 4 engine only supports DLSS 2, AMD FidelityFX 2 and XeSS from intel. These are outdated upscalers and make the image blurry, which is very visible from the distance. - bad game design choices: it all begins like any Homeworld game should. Then it falls apart. I'm not a fan of first missions being a tutorial - it hampers the replayability - but presentation is very nice. There is a sense of mistery, lingering threat and vulnerability. Then everything changes and in the middle of the missions you feel like you are playing another game, when everything that lead to the moment didn't matter and just disappeared. Hyperspace being weaponized? Gone. Why did we fight the raiders? Just a vague explanation that they are afraid of us. Why are we fighting the Incarnate in the first place since it all boils down to Imogen being the superior being and the main antagonist of this game would like her to be joined by her. Ok. So why is she bent on destroying the mothership and Imogen with it - it doesn't make any sense. The game space - I get it that we can traverse structures now, and they play some part in strategising approach to some missions - but why do they have to be in every mission? It's a space opera not a space-platform opera. Some missions are just not fun - especially the one with horizontal platforms with turrets on them - felt more like a chore than actual gameplay feature. The last mission is just boring - repeating the same and same patterns. At least in HW 1 the last encounter felt like a challenge. Where is this weaponised hyperspace? Why doesn't it play any role in this game, except some cutscenes? Why does the enemy attack you straight on like in HW 1. The game is too short IMO, but it's obvious that BBI run out of ideas or had to scrap many of them so the last missions are not that great. Guess some higher-up though about monetization and wargames DLC that ppl would gobble up more, instead of thinking how to pull in the user base. - Ship design: oh boy was it underwhelming; On Higaaran part - why is there only one corvette? and again why did BBI go with the useless desing of the battlecruiser like in HW2? The ship is massive - it should have guns - instead we get nothing more than a bloated cruiser (why don't we get battlecruisers like in HW 1 - filled with guns and ion cannons). And why the main ability of the BC's is to turn of all the guns of to make the fleet dish out more damage (but it doesn't say by how much - so it very well could be like 1%). Why on earth only ion frigates and BC's can have Ion weapons. The HW 1 cruisers and BC did have them and it looked amazing. Not to mention the multibeam frigate in Cataclysm/Emergence. You sensed a progression in power of your shops. Now it fizzles out and larger ships only become bullet sponges whith slightly more dps. No subsystems this time. Special abilities of the ships aren't very good either. The Ion frigate looks weird and the beam doesn't always go straight so it looks weird also. The Incarnate ships look all the same from the distance - this time I feel like they just copy-pasted designs from Vaygr - vertical design, slim ships - nothig setting them appart one from another. At least in HW2 the cruiser and BC was iconic in design and had some flavour. Now it just looks like a bigger fish. From a distance you can't distinguish carrier from a cruiser or a battlecriuser. Not to mention that all the frigates look the same. Just more or less pointy. - War games - if you don't have friends to play it gets boring really fast. The idea is nice. I wished that they implemented it in a campain - you must leave the Mothership behing and only with a carrier and small fleet sneak past the enemy - that would be more entertaining for me - Why weren't the new factions and ships added to the Skirmish/multiplayer mode? This is all the fun IMO. Instead players were forced to play wargames which many didn't find appealing, and thus got bored and left. A mistake. - Major technical issues on launch. The new UI mechanics were not that great - this is a strategy game not a camera FPS. At least there was a way to switch to HW 2 controls which made everything more manageable. The ships AI was mostly broken, stances didn't work, ships got stuck on walls, but it got fixed in time. - And lastly the major part of my dissapointment with this game is the main story. It just doesn't make sense. It's starts awesome. Karran is missing. Something bad is going on with the gateway network. Then we find out that hyperspace is weaponised and nowhere is safe. Many people die. We go to save our ppl and galaxy once more. Traps are set by our enemies who wan't to capture us... and maybe even kill us? Everything is shrouded in mistery. A new Space Opera begins. By the end, it all comes down to three ladies bickering who is right and then decide that billions died because one of them felt lonely and misunderstood and was an outcast by her ppl. So she became a space nazi. The race of Unbound is superior and the rest must be unalived (souds too familliar). But she is a woman of colour. So the story is both stupid and racist. I'm not going to bash miss Joyce who conceived the story, but it's obvious that she didn't play, nor even seen the previous games, just wanted a nice girl-story so she decided to ♥♥♥♥ all over peoples hopes and dreams about this game. It's also obvious from previous marketing material, that the game had different cast of characters and cutscenes than what we got. I bet that the story was also different and got changed after some "consulting agency" had their way with it. I don't care if the story is woke or not - I'm not even sure what that means. I can enjoy any story as long as it's good. But this story is abhorrent. So no, I don't recommend this game to anyone. And I'm deeply saddened that I have waited 20 years for this and I feel like it's a slap in the face for all the fans of the series. I can't stand how souless the game development had become. It's also why I will never again buy anything that's coming from Gearbox. What felt like hope after they aquired HW rights and releasing HW Collection, now turned out to be the worst possible outcome for this franchise. R.I.P. Homeworld. You will be missed. Peace out.