And it sort of came to life right from the get-go.” “So adding in these coral reef systems, which provide cover for you as a player, and really encourage this sort of ambush strategy, and being able to kite the other units, and really take advantage of your positioning - and navigation, and movement of ships - it was really important to us. And it has interesting play spaces, and interesting points of interest that you’re focused on, but really it’s this huge expanse. “In the previous Homeworld games, it’s sort of this huge pool that you’re just moving around in and engaging in combat. “We always love to refer back to this idea of coral reefs,” Neale said with a laugh. The observation made former lead gameplay designer, now associate game director, Kat Neale break into a wide grin. They reminded me a lot of schools of fish. I was even able to subtly augment their formations and their dispositions, causing them to be more or less offensive or defensive as needed. Without setting any waypoints, my wings of tiny fighters were orbiting their targets, using these floating space structures for cover - darting out to make attacks, then retreating while their weapons recharged. The movement of the tiny fighter ships that I witnessed during the demo felt natural, almost organic. Additionally, sometimes they can get hung up on, say, a gigantic megalith sitting in the middle of the road. The big problem with pathing is that mobs of units can look more like a pile of debris rolling down a hill than ranks of trained combatants marching shoulder to shoulder. One of the most complex elements of any real-time strategy game is called “pathing” - that is, making units intelligent enough to get from point A to point B on their own. Image: Blackbird Interactive/Gearbox Publishing And so that original inspiration of Homeworld 2, with what we were starting to really scratch the surface of in Deserts of Kharak, we felt like, What if we go full-on into this?” “I heard from a number of fans that they felt that Deserts of Kharak was more 3D than a lot of the Homeworld games, because of the way the terrain worked. “The terrain featured pretty prominently in that game,” McGuire said.
But the game uses subtle hills and rock formations the way other games might use vast mountain ranges: as screens for deadly ambushes and chokepoints for deadly confrontations. The game takes place in a vast desert, with four-wheeled attack vehicles, aircraft, and large land-based carriers doing battle across vast swaths of land.
#GAMESPOT HOMEWORLD 3 PC#
Released in 2016, Deserts of Kharak has been a fixture on Polygon’s list of the best modern PC games, in large part because of its clever use of terrain. They weren’t able to make it work technically, and when we started talking about Homeworld 3, we were inspired by that idea, but were also inspired by what we were doing on Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.” “This idea of space terrain and this idea of these massive large-scale megaliths that a player could interact with. “They showed this feature and they ended up cutting it later,” McGuire said. The camera swings in close alongside fighters and bombers, detailing an almost Star Wars-style trench run on the final objective, turrets blazing away in defiance of the attacking waves of enemy ships. That 21-year-old demo reel, still available on YouTube in various places, shows an assault on a large orbital structure much like the one seen in this week’s trailer. “One of the things we were heavily inspired by,” McGuire said in an interview with Polygon, “was one of the ideas that they had originally for Homeworld 2 back in - this would have been like 2001.” But, to hear Blackbird Interactive’s chief creative officer Rory McGuire tell it, it’s actually more like Homeworld the way I imagined it. This is Homeworld the way I remember it, with its signature three-dimensional space combat lighting up the darkness on my computer screen. Polygon played the level shown in that video - remotely, mind you, and without the final bits of graphical flourish like ray tracing - but the experience was nonetheless stunning. A new trailer for Homeworld 3 arrived on Tuesday, showing spacecraft large and small duking it out over the wreckage of massive orbital structures.
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