The amount of lost knowledge in the RTS dev tribe is stagering QOL improvements and common sence desing practices made from 90 to 2010 have been forgotten

"Appeal to a wider audience" Command and conquer, civ, diablo, finalfantasy, total war, *insert franchise here*

Total Biscuit was right, never pre-order.

The emotional tone of the Relic Homeworld games was so deliberately flat, muted and professional - every line brief and delivered with habitually restrained and sometimes forced reverence. So when you heard these stoics drop their guard and allow even just a drop of fear or sadness to lace their words, it left a very strong impression. Then, when they didn't, it was even stronger. That impression is dead with Blackbird's Homeworld. The tone, like the gameplay, is all over the place. Just utterly broken.

8:24 "Your keyboard turning into a drum kit with a rhythm" - right on - excellent way to describe APM burden

Waking up in the middle of the night, sneaking past my parents room and loading up Homeworld 1 is one of my earliest memories. It has a special place in my heart. I completely agree with your critique. Well said brother.

I spent most of my time in the demo battling the camera and control scheme trying to find something that felt natural. It's so odd they felt the need to re-invent the wheel when the camera and controls of Homeworld 2 are great.

It's like they tried to reinvent the wheel... and made a square.

10 years ago I would always look forward to new releases. Devs used to have the mindset of here's everything you enjoyed about the last game but we've added better graphics, more scale and extra features. It's been brutal looking at comparisons between games like Black Flag/Skull and Bones and Batman Arkham/ Kill the Justice League this year.

sins of a solar empire managed ability bloat in a great way: they gave you the option to let your units automatically use their cooldown abilities while also giving you the option to toggle it off for manual control should you need it.

well, as always: dont pre order

The balls on that Battlecruiser hyperspace flank was impressive, that's some Somtaaw-esque courage.

Tactical retreat. Manor Lords, implemented where units can move backwards facing the enemy with shields held in front and not expose their backs. Homeworld has Z axis so would expect feature where ships flip 180 or turn away to ensure damage is not concentrated by fire in one location. Mechwarrior 5 an enemy AI that takes too much damage on one side will purposely turn away to absorb damage on it's fresh armored side towards the player, it knows to do so to maximise survival because legs, arms, head, torsos back and front side to all have their own individual armor, armor is weaker at back, not some single unit health bar. i.e. You had to made tactical decision to reduce their damage output to you by targeting certain sections that held certain more dangerous weapons or target leg to reduce agility. You had to juggle multiple enemies of different types so that decision was to be made across them to create manageable situation overall of dealing with multiple threats. Think about Star Trek where captains would choose to target weapons, engine or forcefully focus to penetrate punch hole through shield to one location towards an enemy shield generator. Captains could order shield energy rebalanced towards other parts of the shield bubble, making one side stronger but weaker on another i.e. to cover retreat or forward push to protect certain sides of the ship. Captains would reinforce ship shields and dilemma of powering down weapons and reduced life support to stall time for allies to come to their defence. Decisions that made impact to survive. It does need ability to set specific chain of instructions to follow sequentially once or repeat until another command overrides, not just how or what to attack but set limits of self preservation to avoid them fighting to the death. Sharing shield incoming damage to different side, evasive move types depending on enemy weapon range or avoid their cone of fire instead of going across it, too much damage let them retreat tactfully to given location. Setup your own custom sequence of actions to follow depending on enemy type you choose for them to attack and satisfaction they can follow pre-determined orders you've already set. You're in control of a fleet, but no captains to command. You're the captain of every ship or grouped ships...

"cooldown buttons with flat bonuses" you're hitting the nail on the head

You know what all this makes me really wish for? A Nightdive remaster of Homeworld 1. Which is to say, a remaster done properly - maintaining the actual behaviour of the original game, but just adding some higher detail models and textures and fixing a few bugs, maybe adding a mission editor.

This is one of the two big games I was waiting for and was disappointed by the demo... I'm glad you're talking about it.

Thank you for keeping the industry accountable! Great video.

The way time to kill has constantly gotten shorter has been my absolute least favorite part. Back in 1 I was able to keep Raider Ion frigates and multi beam frigates all the way to the end of the game through very careful play and aggressive protecting of my lil babies. But after Catacalysm there was basically no point in caring about anything smaller than a Destroyer and now it looks like I only need to care about the Mothership. I hate the idea of building a ship... loading it up with brave and willing Higgarans... then sending it to its absolute death for a short fight then build another. It makes losing a ship mean nothing.

The demo really dragged my hype for this game down. The new terrain system is terrible, my ships get stuck on nearly anything that's floating around. The camera control is a backstep from the nearly PERFECT controls of Homeworld 2. Small crafts die like flies or suicide into their target's nose first. The freaking ability spam bullshit is also a goddam insult to our intellect. All this game has is the pretty graphics all the other great balance and synergies mechanics of the past games have been gutted out of this hollow, pretty shell of a Homeworld game.

Cataclysm had the ability keys down right. Abilities on most ships were situational actual abilities that provide you some sort of benefit. Mimics would close themselves and they could do that to be suiciders. Acolytes had missiles. They could fire ones in the needed to redock in order to refresh their missiles. Ramming frigate could physically push enemy ships You can't deal with right now away. The ACV's could EMP ships to slow them down or make them stop fighting Temporarily

It still amazes me how much subtle nuance there is in 25 year old games.. Red alert remastered is more replayable and afrer 3 years playing I'm still improving with micro improvements that I learned over time, little nuances in the game that keep it fresh each time. And then we see this... People making games as if forced to, likely are at all hours of the night whilst the more expensive skilled programmers are kicked out for having ideas, talent, principles, opinions, take less crap, and insist on quality control.

The worst part is formations do jack shit, there is zero tactical depth to the combat with no move fire orders and behaviours barely working, all ships are made of paper as well, something went wrong with this game. How could Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm nailed the gameplay so well and we are reduced to this? Even Homeworld 2 was not my favorite at least it stuck to its rng mechanics guns and had some novel stuff like subsystems. Capital ship fights in the OGs were so meaningful and tense compared to this mess. We are possibly watching the death of another classic genre defining franchise. Its really sad since Remastered already did enough damage.

I forgot about the HW3 ability spam because I was so disconnected and disinterested in my small units outside of the initial opening salvo (just queue up more, the attrition all but guaranteed 25-50% looses per encounter) that I only used it for frigates. Sphere formation exists but the formations are cycles via a specific button and you had to mouse cover over that button in the interface to trigger a specific formation. Sphere formation I didn’t check. The one thing I constantly failed to do in the demo mode was provide the resources with an escort so the constant drips of 4/5 enemy corvettes CONSTANTLY spawning in below and behind them tended to have a field day.

Reynold Sanity said something along the lines of "If an ability is always being used it's an ability that should be passive." And I couldn't agree more. There's no reason to be constantly hitting buttons for basic stat boosts. It's like someone decided you can't have a good RTS without high APM.

Spot on on a lot of key issues here especially the ability button bloat that is invading a lot of RTS game design at the moment. I think it's the misconception that because Warcraft 3 was such a legendary game that led to MOBAs and was reinforced in Starcraft 2, that this is ultimately what game devs think players want. It's not and games like Warhammer TW/ Company of Heroes emulating the ability spamming design have no business with it in the first place. They forget that Warcraft 3 streamlined a lot of its own abilities compared to Warcraft 2. Take the Priest for example. She can heal or increase the damage of your troops but only one was togglable to autocast. This isn't a handicap that limits the player but a tactical decision for them to make "Do I care about keeping my troops alive...no I have a bank of resources lets kill them quickly" . There is no reason that the Carrier in this game does not have a toggle ability be it "increase unit production +25% but lowers firepower -50%" or the cloaking ability for bombers be on autocast but they have to return to refuel more frequently. It's just apm-isation for the sake of it thinking if a player has more things to do it's more fun and engaging when in games such as this it's the opposite if anything. You could even do a power system like in Space flight sims and apply it fleetwide e.g. Dedicate power to weapons for Ion Cannon frigates at the cost of shields/speed making them highly damaging glass cannons that you have to defend vigorously with interceptors that instead of a bloody button increasing their speed every 10 seconds you've set them to High Speed/Firepower Low shields. This would be more engaging than button mashing.

We can't have nice things it seems, sad

This is so stupid. So basically just go through control groups and press s to win. What amazing and deep gameplay and totally not an indication of the team not knowing wtf they are trying to do instead of just trying to appeal to starcraft 2/dota audience, who, in turn will not like it either because it's lazy busywork-micro. I loved Homeworld games, but I don't really see what this game has to offer in comparison to the Nebulous: Fleet Command. I hate to admit it but anything this demo is doing the NFC is doing better, other than giant ship hulls. Here's a video idea for future, comparison between NFC and HW3.

Perfect ending to the video man. Almost made me tear up. The Gardens of Kadesh still gives me goosebumps, especially when that banger combat track by Paul Ruskay begins..

i lost faith when i seen CGI S'jet instead of the 2d concept art portrayals. there's just something about the concept art that makes homeworld what it is.

Also it reminds me if Battle Fleet Gothic warhammer 40k space game, but without charm, rams, tactical shooting in the back, abordage, targeting engines, but with 3d map.

wtf I dont need cooldown abilitys I just want a regular ballanced game

This is why I never pre-purchase anymore.

OG Homeworld was my first RTS experience, and I fell in love with that game. Here we are 20 years later and you've hit every nail on the head. It's terrible. Thankfully 20 years of waiting and all the other games in those 20 years that released as an utter shitshow made me very stoic. So I was prepared for the worst.

This is just heartbreaking.

I really wanted to like this game, but i started to get worried when they released the trailer a few months ago. They just didn't seem get the original theme of the games right. Seems my worries were spot on. Thanks for this detailed analysis!

Volound you are really good putting into words how i feel

I'm another OG Homeworld 1&2 player since their release and I agree with all points. I was soo cataclysmicly disappointed with the Demo and I appreciate you taking the time to actually document all the issues in this way. It's not JUST the broken camera & UI mechanics. How they managed to unlearn all of the best parts of HW in this is sad. They could have literally just 'modernized' and upgraded the HW: Remaster engine and it would have been a vastly better game.

Also that point in the Beam weapon mechanics, its a beam for godsake, its an instantaneous beam, if someone also has played Freespace 2 will know than when a bigger ship get in range, its start firing in automatic their beam weapons and its a instantaneous beam, hearing firing the colossus or the sathanas and being near that two ships (The two most bigger ships in that game) was very cool, but HW3 beam mechanics its also out place.

35:30 Seriously though, ya member Cataclysm? I had emotional ties to units there cause they were simple miners who never wanted to face the Horror itself alone, but had to fight it anyways because nobody took it seriously and later it was way too late. They were fragile and very badly suited, but they fighterd till the last breath and I was trying to save every last ship in my disposal, even mimics that desired to be killed. I really am furious, imagine having that 25 years ago and now nothing but an empty shell that dares to use the same name

Do you want to know why things like aesthetic capital ship explosions are gone and noticeably worse from 20 years ago? Look at who actually developed the game. Who wrote the code for a certain feature and got it reviewed half the globe apart on a different timezone. The amount of extensive outsourcing going on nowadays makes development that is both agile and effective very difficult. The person who implemented that feature might not even have known for which game they were working at the moment, or which unit was supposed to display that particular animation. And the person who reviewed it probably didn't even know the name of the company employing the first person. In those situations "good enough" means "perfect", and the overall bar drops significantly by accumulation of minute concessions to mediocrity like these. Not to mention some of these people might care about the end result even less than an intern would. It's all in the hands of the QA people, who will look for functional issues, not artistic ones that aren't directly in the spec they received from another department. This compounded to the loss of "know-how" stated in other comments.

Great summary of all of the issues. One this that I think that you missed was how fighter formations have the same issue at capital ship tactical movement. NONE of the fighters fire until the ENTIRE formation has a shot. This causes some of the formations to just sort of spiral around each other firing a small volley every ~15 seconds.

What I got most from this video was a reminder of how fucking amazing the original Homeworld is, when you've demonstrated some tactics in HW1 it instantly made me want to close the video and boot the game, lol.

I didn't play the H3 Demo because I wanted to experience it for the first time when it launches.... Your video made me so sad, I really thought that they will at least make a H1 reboot if anything, but all the cuts to the mechanics make me loose hope in future games.... I always thought that I still play old games because of nostalgia, but they are are objectively better made. Devs used to make games they would love to play, not they make them for "the modern audience" with 5 seconds attention spans. Just sad.... But hey.. if they delayed the game launch because of the feedback, at least they are listening to some extent.... Thanks for the demo review!

Dear lord i hope they get this game right. Delay it until xmas if needed.

This video needs more eyes. They'll probably delay the game again because they cannot possibly consider adding missing features / fixing all the bugs / replacing the shitty abilities in under 3 months.

I will play devil's advocate here and say that some of the issues may just be part of this game mode. Unit veterancy and modules may be present in the main campaign but not here because the idea was to create a more simple version of the game for when you just want a quick space battle. Of course i may be wrong but it's a possibility.

I haven't played this Beta but i'm finding a lot of similarities between what you noticed and two games i really wanted to succeed, which are Warno (released in 2022) and Broken Arrow (unreleased but with Beta out). I'm still mostly an RTT/RTS guy and (apart from old-TW and other franchises) i've been an avid player of Eugen games for a decade and i still find those older releases better than these modern ones. There are so many things that now go wrong that had been done right in the past that it seems like these devs just create games but never play them. Anyway keep up the good work; those with a louder voice than the rest of us have a great responsibility :)

Like why are they even putting you in the middle of a debris field if you can’t even combat maneuver into and out of cover?

The game sitting at Mixed is not a great sign. From what people are saying, they stripped away aLOT of features and elements that were standard in the first 2 games. And people are comparing the story to a poorly written netflix show. Seems they made this game for the mythical 'wider audience' and not actual rts players.

Another thing that's fucked up: the old unit tactics are gone, by which I mean Aggressive, Neutral and Evasive. These outright changed the behavior and movement of your ships to a significant degree. Now we just have Aggressive (pursue enemy until killed), Neutral (pursue for a short while then stop when they're out of range), and passive (don't return fire at all). What a disgrace.

Capturing ships was so cool, especially in Cataclysm. I am not surprised of the state of the game, considering the majority of the games that are being released since for a long time now you can observe a pattern of "road to the bin", cause thats where they will end up to, the companies end up being bought or banckrupt and sad part is that they wont understand why, or so it seems.

Great observations and commentary! The supposed 'RTS revival' is definitely suffering from what appears to be designers that don't fully understand what made earlier games in the series great. Company of Heroes 3 is another one that - even a year after launch - is struggling to catch up to what it once was. I hope the devs at Blackbird get to see this and take it in a constructive way to help them get back on track. I enjoyed your use of the term 'orthogonal' to describe what abilities should be (complementary trade offs) rather than spammable boosts. These are the foundations of good game design that should be established from the beginning of the process and have supporting elements designed around them to accentuate the game loop. It feels like modern titles put all the effort into updated graphics/physics engines and somehow lost sight of the actual gameplay mechanics. What's really odd is how common it is with 'revival sequels'.

yeah let me first say hw1&2 VET....i refunded after the demo this is NOT homeworld 1 0r 2 standrads.......... demo was terrible and DEVS are silent ! a small delay means nothing without tellling us what your fixing ,.... FYI ..... (the delay was asked for buy the community because of how bad the controls where! & the backlash online, the layoffs where from other BBI not homeworld so a few corrections there!) but great video ! ......so many people online defending the demo and controls smh???

I knew there was something wrong when I saw the demo. They immediately throw destroyers and battlecruisers at you but basically nothing was happening. I almost fell asleep watching the demo but I still distinctly remember the time in homeworld remastered when battlecruisers and destroyers were epic battles. Fighters/Interceptors are just so slow man, like they are fighting in atmosphere it almost feels wrong. What's the point of all these realistic graphics and realism art design if the game itself can't even get that technically right? Getting the game to homeworld 1 physics should be the easiest thing in the world. It's not actually hard to simulate physics in zero gravity. You might as well replace all of homeworld's visuals with the absurdly cartoonish warhammer or warcraft style and it would actually fit the demo better. At least the game would have some character and balls.

''Smash the keyboard like a drum kit'' HAH! Your poetry gives voice to my experience of this demo. I suspect they want a cut of the moba - esports audience, and you can't have patient, cunning strategies with esports, you need the fast pace serotonin rush that only button mashing and blank stats can provide. That is the taste I had from the War Games experience anyway. Also, anyone else notice the ships just look like flying iphones? Unresponsive units, abilities not working, units floating around eachother rather and actually flying or manoeuvring, terrible ship designs like the suppression frigate, ion cannons struggle to aim or move as you point out. The list goes on. Bugs can be ironed out, but bad design can't be redesigned in just a few months. Concerning. All the new objects and scenery, while a good idea, just clutter the view, which is a shame and I don't think that is anyones fault. You made some great suggestions too, if I can add some; impacts from larger ships can nudge smaller (eg - frigates) off their axis/orbit slightly, and to take into account the new objects like flying through tunnels - missile can fire around objects to their targets if you have probe near the target. Providing a work around to line of sight. That could be fun. After the demo I was slightly paranoid that maybe I was just old and bad at Homeworld, so I reinstalled the remaster, and ofcourse, it was so straightforward and well designed...sigh. The shilling for this demo as been sickening. ''Ur mAH GurrD S pEcE RTS IS bAck!''

Thanks for the critique on the demo, really making me reevalutate about getting the game if this is how its going to be on release. Will be keeping tabs on this channel if you plan on putting out a release review

The people working on Home world NEED to see this video!

Thanks for pointing out some of the issues I simply missed in my play attempts because I was struggling too much trying to understand the controls. Honestly, I do not think the next 2 months will change much especially with the new round of layoffs at the studio. I really hope that I am wrong.

As a Homeworld fan for 20 years, I agree with every single point in this video. Totally heartbreaking that such basic features that were present in the Remastered are missing. Devs couldn't copy paste them at least smh

usually when a game is delayed for few months that means there's something real wrong.

After watching this and reading the blog post I still have a bit of trepidation over the upcoming release in a week. My biggest problem was the abilities being these shoehorned "do your job, but better" things that barely even belong in a traditional RTS. The changes announced only make mention of making them last longer and have a longer cooldown, but I dunno, the idea of just "hey, do more damage" button still irks me, as it isn't interesting no matter what cooldown they slap on it.

i wish it would be like homeworld resurgance(catacllism) or hw1 , but it seams to went homeworld 2 route , in way all if not most fans going to dislike it. real shame , and i already had few frenchises i beloved died in past years , dow3 , total war warhammer / total war games. who is really like kick in balls as resurgance is not only of best story driven games i ever played , best horror game i ever played and proved that you can have good story in strategy games and hw3? they could make completly new story , even in new time and not have to deal with anything hw2 was , but they chose otherwise.

I agree with every single point made. Can't like twice, though. On a side note: no Attack Move? Déjà vu! Developers of the Homeworld: Fleet Command board game have changed movement rules past public testing, turning Capital Ship movement to what we could see in the Homeworld 3 demo. Instead of space ships we got sail ships. I've been posting on the game's bgg forum to dissuade them, but they're being adamant about it. Now, the digital saga is butchered the very same way. Is this the doing of blue-haired people again? Decades of wait for a disappointment. 99 was peak of human civilization.

My extra points that I found annoying: no ui/hud toggle (to hide it), initiate hyperspace noisy like crazy

literally reverse engineering hw1 engine and giving it a refreshed ui, new maps and races would have made a better game

Someone also noted than the beam mechanics on the "Incarnate" ships are more elaborated, if you slow down the video in the part 31:08 and 31:19 in the moments than the destroyer fires their beam weapon, you saw than the effect is more akin to the classical ion beam, and the hiigaran beam weaponry looks exactly as the OP says, like an harpoon being fired rather than a beam weapon, BBI can employ the effect and sequences of the incarnate beam weaponry as the same for the hiigarans vessels but with different SFX for look them opposite with the respective change of color.

I don't play RTS much but the APM thing smells like a chasing Esports kind of thing.

You're advertising why releasing a demo before launch is a great thing. Hopefully the devs will take your critiques and make them more attractive. If the game already released, and you released this video, that would be the definition of "problems.' Lets wait and see what the devs have when they release.

Volound, on capital ships: PLAY STARSECTOR. Even unmodded, it's an awesome game that really highlights ship combat well. You've got ship ai that will actually rotate the ships to have the unharmed armor take the punishment that a weakened side no longer can. Some ships are literally designed for this. Its an awesome game.

For a reasons unknown I couldn't get to the wargames mode. I played trough the tutorial mission tho. But I'm really glad that you brought these points out. _specially_ about the abilities, the one about bombers broke me. I mean I love the idea of stealthbomber but the execution... compared to the original HW stealhfighter. Pardon my language but what a shitshow. I love the original HW and use it as a benchmark. I really hope that these things are fixed so the gameplay would make more sense. And I just got to the NO ATTACK MOVE part... what the hell. Wow. Glad you also mentioned some good/great points too, like fighters taking damage if near big explotion! Only thing that I think different than stated in your video is that personally I love the new mothership design. And I am faily certain that we get to see a large hangar door opening from the belly. I've noticed that every hangar has a yellow outlining, indicating a utility port / area or a hangar. And there is a relatively large yellow rectangle on the belly of the ship. I hope that this is the case. Volound, Thank you for the great video. I appreciate the work that went into this, the passion shows and share your tougths. Hopefully this video reaches BBI trough discord or other channels. My thanks for the video. PS.I found a video where someone confirms my suspicion about thehangar door. Have look, its not a destroyer, but a battlecruiser is pretty too. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/na-TdrmAq8fFn4k.html&ab_channel=KharAdun_Channel

And for finalize my commentaries, "No Shipyard" "¿Battlecruisers will be hyperspaced to the area once they are completed?", Mothership seems than dont have the hangar bay than let them get out, in HW1 theres a bay for carriers, destroyers, heavy cruisers get out once they are builded, Homeworld 2 added the shipyard since the new mothership wierdly have the bay but didnt launch an BC, so they put the shipyard for compensate and the big question is "¿How the battlecruiser will came in once one is builded?"

They could have literally remade homeworld 1 with a great new story campaign with new graphics and I would be happy.

I had no idea about secret abilities. Were they preserved in the remaster?

As someone who plays mostly single player RTS for the story, I loved Cataclysm. All I need from this game is a good single player story.

I tried to have a wall of barrage missile frigates in the demo to defeat the destroyer or whatever it was in the end of 3rd stage of war games. They hugged eachother so close they would barrage on themselves. Also i barely noticed any differences between the barrage missile frigate and regular missile frigates. Maybe like shooting from 10% further away than the base version. But my point is they clumped so closely in various formations that they shot eachother. Making them being in a formation detrimental tl their own survival and their effectiveness against enemies. I would have expected the "improved" version that it describes would mean more than just a slightly further shot range.

issue that I see without digging into details is I look at gameplay and it looks like a game that has been released 10 years ago- I was hoping for some next gen- really get me immersed kind of graphics.

@Volound - I agree with you said, by 90% you're right, this game has big problems. I can confidently say this, because I'm someone who played the first HW 25 years ago and I'm someone who has been modding HW2 for over 15 years. I want to say, even more - unfortunately Homeworld3 looks like complete crap. After 25 years, I expected real progress from this franchise, but what I can see breaks my heart. My main complaint is - why Homeworld3 looks so stupid and unrealistic!? Before everything you said about ships in this video, there is one global problem. This game bills itself, as a space game, but there's no space in it, what they call space, doesn't look like space, because In space of HW3, on megaliths can lie piles of sand or the wind may blow, all megaliths or asteroids are dead static at zero gravity, none of them have rotation or drift, as it must be in real space. There are mountains of icebergs lying motionless there, which look as if they were formed by the earth's gravity. A game about space - it doesn't have space - that's the first problem for me! Next, about ships. There are no realistic ballistics, with ricochets or projectile durability! All projectiles fired by ships forever disappear after a 2-3 seconds! Ships absorb shells, like sponges, what they can call as ricochet, is just a rare visual effect, cause shells cannot bounce off the hull and damage neighboring ships. There is no collision physics between ships, like there was in classic HW. The all ships do not have fuel, subsystems, crews or ammunition on board! No hint of detail or depth! It's impossible to look at the UI, without bleeding from your eyes, it simply litters the entire player screen by senseless rubbish! All the ideas or design are borrowed from previous games and implemented poorly. Sometimes, I just see the Desert Of Kharak v.2.0 but on the ether, which can't even be called as true space. I'm really sorry. Probably only a decade can correct this, when will the 50th patch for this game and when will the modders master the tools and create something decent ...

If people want PEAK homeworld then go and get homeworld emergence off of GOG. It’s old as hell from a far away era but it is worth it. Homeworld 1 and 2 are good but Emergence(real name cataclysm) is probably the best in my opinion due to how you have to handle the fleet

I hope HW3 takes in your feedback, because moving while firing is a staple in RTS.

I found the GUI too large - to the point of being stifling. Units also don't behave in a way you would expect and occasionally ignore orders with no reason given

thanks for highlighting the design issues. not pre-ordering that is for sure.

had this on my wish list, i didn't pre-order, played the demo, took it off my wish list, watched this out of curiosity

Valid critique and one that I support to push for better RTS games. Will be purchasing a copy as I dont want the genre to die and get closed down like other studios

Pretty much on the money with most of these. They focused the game on this wargames mode and tried to recreate a starcraft 2 style…

Okay, I will be honest you raise some really good points. You are making me less excited because of this video but I think you raise some really good points to make this game better! I hope they listen to you

One of my favourite moments in RTS was in a late mission in HW2. I used ion frigates to draw in 3 Vagyr BC's and their escorts. I then jumped a carrier full of bombers behind and waxed the subsytems so they were left drifitng. there was another identical group coming from another direction so I did the same trick but, left a bomber squad behind to prevent the repairs. Once all the escorts were dead and the BC's pacified, i was able to jump my own BCs in behind them to dispatch them leasurely. not a single unit lost due to good positioning and tactics against a force 3 times the power. Contrast this with the HW3 demo where my ships are more akin to HP, than units to preserve.

It only takes a short glance at previous or contemporary titles to understand how to do abilities per unit well. Even the high APM of StarCraft has features like energy or health cost to make you think about how you use unit abilities. Red Alert 3 had no mana system but they had cooldowns, statistical changes, costs in money, and even fundamentally and sometimes permanently changing or destroying the unit in the process. The comically short CD’s for “same but better’ abilities really detracts from the gameplay and turns your strategy game into a QTE with extra steps. It doesn’t help that these abilities are comparatively boring as well. Cataclysm/Emergence did something very similar with many units having a special ability or two but they all had niches, trade offs, and even detriments. The Acolyte was interceptor, bomber, and corvette all in one but it depended on how you used it’s abilities that made it effective in these roles, like linking Acolyte’s into ACVs to EMP a Heavy Cruiser then unlink as they maneuver behind it to missile it’s weaker sides. Alternatively you could be fighting assault frigates and need to divide your missiles between them to efficiently fight them. Hive Frigates could eat fighters with their Swarmers but any another dedicated anti fighter unit would eat its Swarmers in turn. While the Swarmers didn’t do much damage they could distract capitals reasonably well so your Acolytes without ACVs or EMPs could still get their missiles off. Ramming frigates replaced ion frigates and filled a similar niche but differently. Even infected it could still shove a Beast capital out of the fight long enough for your other ships to leg it. Also while comically ineffective fighters they weren’t completely harmless and would smash through stationary Defenders in the way. The ramming also required multiple Ram Frigates to move larger ships, necessitating a larger investment and probable loss. Leaches were creative in their use with them being slow anti-cap assassins, spies, or even ad-hoc resource harvesters by leeching off an enemy capital mid fight to help recoup losses. Ship’s like the Destroyer and Multi-Beam Frigate didn’t have abilities but had passive intricacies that made them important like the Multi-beams maneuvering like corvettes rather than frigates and having wide firing arcs of near instant hit weapons to counter enemy Acolytes before they stunned you or beast missiles before they hit, and the Destroyer being the first infection-resistant ship to let you stand and fight beast capitals without sacrificing things, especially the Beast Mothership. The Dreadnaught had an ability to permanently give up one of its ion beams but gained the repulse weapon to ping pong siege cannon shots and disrupt enemy formations while not affecting its own fighter escort. Speaking of, the Command Ship for both Beast and Somtaaw had modules and abilities that couod decide how the game went with the Siege Cannon of the Somtaaw and the health-drain overclock of the Beast Mothership, as well as its own infection beam. Even the Processor, the basic resource controller, had enough guns and repair beams to basically be an assault and 2 support frigates in the shape of a destroyer parading as a resource controller. While all auto cast or passive, it still made it a uniquely useful ship in fleet fights where workers are easily picked off but you need a repair ship, or need something to buy time early in the game so you put 2 next to each other and they get exponentially tougher with healing eachother and fighting at the same time.

I miss the Nexus Jupiter Incident explosions...

This is EXACTLY why "WE" never pre-order.

A good video marred by the frustration, not that it exists, but that it invites dismissal through over reliance on emotion. Missing a couple of points, but overall this needed to be said as I share that frustration myself, but lack the dedicated comparison footage of years of the previous games to provide such a clear cut comparison. It does make me wonder if they replaced the teams direction with those that worked on the mobile game, whether through cost or other reasons I can only speculate to, I will have to check the credits and listings. As for directional armour, it's impossible to tell since TTK is so low and combat is so... mindless.

Great video and breakdown of what's wrong with the gameplay mechanics, makes me want to go back and play the originals which clearly I was not playing with a full understanding. Makes me very concerned for Homeworld 3, I cant see a lot of this issues being fixed without a further significant delay. Cataclysm still remains my favourite. I didn't get on so well with Homeworld 2, in particular the final boss seemed to not match the strategic gameplay I expected from the series. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Its been a month since I played the demo so my memory might be hazy, but everything here mirrors many thoughts I had while trying this demo. Other things that really rubbed me the wrong way are how if all resource controllers are destroyed (and you don't have the resources to build another one) you're basically dead. There is no longer the ability to Retire or Salvage your ships. The Carrier becomes useless because it cannot produce resource collectors itself, nor serve as a resource drop-off point. I also tried to set Support Frigates to Aggressive to see if they would automatically repair nearby damaged allies. Instead they would try to attack enemies with their non-existant guns (so they just sit there and stare angrily). Telling them to guard and support a group of friendlies also did not work, so using support frigates just adds more to your APM burden since you now have to control each sluggish support frigate and heal damaged ships manually. Good luck doing that on multiple fronts. Yes, with those camera controls. Support frigates also no longer repair fighters or corvettes in any way. You might as well not bother Docking and Repairing fighter craft. Just build more fighters and throw them into the grinder. Gone is the squadron system from HW2 that let them sustain some losses they can replenish by docking. It made them feel not worth using compared to other units. It felt the same with LAVs in Deserts of Kharak where resources are limited, making them feel like a source of resource attrition if you use them at all because losses are inevitable due to how fragile they are but they are not cheap enough to truly be disposable. Trying to have them dock and repair also just means they get pursued and shot down without a fight. I hated the change to move controls. You used to just hold shift to order a move in the vertical plane (essentially a move order in one click). It felt really difficult to move something to something else. Its exacerbated by the hulks and large obstructions in the way so you watch your units rub against walls trying to get there. If a fight breaks out amidst the derelicts you just throw everything in and pray because attack move is gone and there's no seeing or controlling anything in that mess anymore.

I hope the stupid 15-second cooldown is just for test purposes ( to make testing it easier), rather than actually a design decision.

I think it's all very alarming. Hard to believe the choices being made, I will wait for reviews on this one.. and maybe a bit after that

Mad props for getting as far as to analyze the game systems. I only got as far as choking on the controls, then I spent more time figuring out where the suggestions/feedback section of the discord was (spoiler, there isn't one. Or wasn't. I guess they were really confident in the release 🙄) Like, seriously I get that game development is hard, but just... Build the foundational stuff, like the controls, off of the previous success. Fine tune it. Then add systems and gameplay. If something was already done correctly, don't change that. Add stuff maybe, but the original was beautifully intuitive. Like you, I played the first one when I was 8ish, and somehow was able to grasp everything without a tutorial or reading the manual. I can go back a decade later and pick it right up no problem. This one, the tutorial was long as fug (and broken) and I still stumbled my way through two matches before just saying "fug this, wtf"

I'm still hoping that some of simplified things going on here are specific to that game mode. But yeah, definitely some things are missing like controls. I kind of liked that demo mode but yeah, not to the same depth as you have it present in this analysis but I did notice similar problems. All I can hope for is that It won't be that bad on release and wonder if it will be moddable. Modders could do miraclous things if they are allowed to. And yes, I know these should be fixed by default but that is not how it works for most games lately...

AN ANSWER For you I tried the sphere defence on the resource collector. Did not work for me.

My hope is crushed, my faith is gone...... waited so long for this game. (now 61.... time is running out....) 🙂

I'm glad you're saying this. Everything I've seen about HW3 seems... not great. The controls and interface look poor, and even in official promotional footage I'll notice AI ships getting stuck in the "terrain" of the map and all sorts of odd behavior.

Thanks! This is very usefull summary. Luckily I was not hyped out for this development, frankly I forgot that it was even in the works, so not much dissapointment felt. But still thanks for helping to dodge the bulet.