Homeworld 3 is a game that RTS lovers have been waiting over two decades for. The series stands alongside greats such as Command and Conquer and StarCraft 2 as some of the most beloved PC classics of all time. It’s only natural, then, that over 100,000 players jumped at the chance to play the returning space strategy game when its War Games demo arrived during Steam Next Fest. It’s also natural that many of those players had a lot of thoughts about how to improve on what they played. As such, developer Blackbird Interactive has detailed a hefty list of changes it’s now making ahead of the game’s May launch date.
“It’s rare for a series to stand the test of the time like Homeworld has, and seeing so many of you waiting patiently all these years is an incredible honor,” Homeworld 3 game director Lance Mueller writes in a blog post on Steam. He says working on the beloved RTS game is “a responsibility we take seriously,” and as such shares a hefty (although not comprehensive) list of the biggest changes coming as a result of demo feedback, which will be put in place ahead of the Homeworld 3 release date.
The extensive blog digs deep into five core aspects of the game: controls, combat, the attack move system, the user interface, and the roguelike-inspired War Games co-op mode. “Let’s not mince words here,” Mueller says of the control system. “Many of you found that the Modern controls were simply unintuitive and that the adjustments we made to Classic controls departed too much from previous Homeworld games.” As such, both controls have been tweaked somewhat to better serve their intended audiences, along with the addition of a fully rebindable custom controls option.
On combat, Mueller acknowledges a common sentiment that units felt too “squishy,” leading battles to wrap up too quickly. “A core part of the Homeworld fantasy is the idea of your ships enduring from one battle to the next,” he says, noting that “the art team has gone to extreme lengths to ensure ships bear the scars of their hard-fought battles. But all of that is for naught if combat feels like feeding ships into a woodchipper.”
As such, ships are now 30 percent tankier across the board, which should make engagements a little more drawn-out and tactical without neglecting the ability to catch the enemy unawares with a devastating ambush. Formations have also been improved so that your ships better organize themselves and travel in formation without needing to stop and regroup their current flight path. Ability durations and cooldowns have also been extended, in an attempt to make their use more potent and less something that requires constant attention.
Blackbird is also bringing back the classic ‘attack move’ order from the old Homeworld games, which “your units will intelligently obey based on the presence of hostile threats, opening up new avenues for more strategic control of your units. This new system works regardless of the control set you’re using, and you’ll also see a clearer indicator that you’ve given this order with both green and red lines indicating the simultaneous presence of attack and move commands.
“A lot of you felt like the HUD ate up too much screen real estate, especially compared to older Homeworld games,” Mueller notes. As such, a HUD slider will allow you to easily adjust this to your preference, and the team has also “refactored many elements of the HUD so it will appear less obstructive than it did during the War Games demo.”
Mueller also addresses the NLIPS feature – that’s ‘Non-Linear Inverse Perspective Scrolling,’ a feature of the previous Homeworld games allowing you to scale ship models so they appear the same size regardless of their distance from the camera. “In the War Games demo, NLIPS was bugged and that resulted in ship sizes being all out of whack,” he explains, noting that these issues “have been addressed and it now works properly,” if you choose to use it.
As for the Homeworld 3 War Games mode – the three-player co-op mode drawing inspiration from the best roguelike games for a run-based series of combat challenges – Mueller says, “We’re thrilled that so many of you are just as excited by War Games as we are.” The team is building on the mode further by doubling the amount of objectives that can appear in a run, dramatically increasing the variety on offer, while resource controllers, a common point of frustration leading to run-ending moments when they were destroyed, have been rebalanced and will now be free but slower to produce while in the War Games mode.
“This list of changes isn’t necessarily comprehensive but is meant to address the more widespread points of feedback we saw,” Mueller concludes. “That so many of you not only took the time to play the War Games demo but then dedicated so much energy into writing detailed feedback is not something we take for granted.” He adds that the team is still “keen to hear what you think about today’s Dev Update and will continue to listen and assess in the weeks left until Homeworld 3 launches. Thank you.”
Be sure to check in with the Homeworld 3 system requirements if you’re excited for the series to return. In the meantime, you’ll find plenty to keep you amused among the best strategy games you can play in 2024.
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