![]() It’s been 100 years since the end of Homeworld 2 saw Karan S’Jet unlock a hyperspace gate network that has led to a golden age of prosperity, but now an anomaly is spreading, taking gates and planets off the grid. Karan led a fleet through to search for answers, but never returned, so now it’s up to Imogen S’Jet to take up the mantle and lead a new fleet to find her and stave off this threat. Of course, that means bringing core fleet functions out of cold storage, building up your strength on the go and jumping from one conflict flashpoint to another. “There’s a certain tone with Homeworld in general and we want to stay within that,” explained Game Director Lance Mueller. So we have to think of inventive ways of getting to that power escalation that RTS’ always have.” “Especially coming up with the story, we’re trying to think of how to be fresh, but it’s also a video game and you can’t have everything at the beginning. Playing through the second and third levels of the game, we were working through some of the early build up of gameplay and mechanics, tutorialising how to engage with strategy gaming in fully 3D space. It’s easy to imagine that, just because Homeworld did it in 1999, 3D space combat has been completely solved, that it’s now easy to do. That’s not exactly the case. Blackbird Interactive is working to modernise the controls, the UI and everything about how the game plays for modern systems. “I think all gamers have certain expectations now in 2022 of the games that we play, and the streamlined elements that have come from modernisation of all games in general. So we focussed on making that all the things that were there before are there, but if anything was clunky or had fallen out of date, we made sure to update those for a more modern audience.” Lance said, “It’s about making sure we’re true to the original franchise and the experience that they’ve enjoyed and wanted, so we focussed on making sure that the core game is there for. So yes, there is plenty of common ground with the originals, from fleet building and management, to the persistence of forces between levels, and the switching in and out of Sensor mode (with the familiar “Bwooooorm” sound as you do so), but they’re also looking to reinvent some parts of the wheel. In particular, the game is now more physically-based in its calculations during combat. Where previous games would abstract damage values in the fight, now every projectile is tracked with true ballistics so that every hit hits and every miss misses. ![]() One area that Blackbird Interactive is trying to push boundaries is with the pathfinding in-game. “The pathfinding system, like GPS or the internet, was actually a military system,” Lance said, “and in the last 10 years conventional pathfinding for drones, rescue drones and stuff like that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |