The Homeworld Trilogy

Relic's 1999 Homeworld is a classic, and Barking Dog's Cataclysm should be one. Relic's sequel was a miscue; last game I ever preordered. I've lately been hitting up prequel Kharak. One bitten, I wasn't going for it when it came out; instead I nabbed it in a 2020 sale-bundle; but then only got to Cape Wrath - I know, I know - "git gud n00b". [And there's a HW 3, currently being pilloried on Steam.]

The lore is... interesting. The first (now second) game came with a manual. It delved heavily into Kharak history and social-structure: a mix of clan (kiith) and faith, basically high-tech Dune. None of that matters to the first game we got. Except that if we read it, it makes for that much of a shock, when . . . If I may hazard a spoiler, the narrative choice reminds of Tolkien's first-edition of "Fall of Gondolin". (Much as Tolkien rejected Herbert's take on religion.)

Lately we're hearing from Relic's successor Blackbird (Rob Cunningham and Jon Aaron Kambeitz) that Homeworld was supposed to be about the actual world. Your kiith was in these wastes, or in orbit (the devs weren't sure, either) to cut apart ruins in SF-Late-Antiquity (by resource-scrounging first; then more-formally, from the second Sarathi mission on). In Kharak these devs have given to us that dying world, and meanwhile the same devs came up with Shipbreakers to go more into chopshops-in-space. Probably why they'd called their crew "Relic".

Problem: Blackbird have decided to go the way of the Creative Class. Apparently what players enjoyed during Shipbreakers' early-access is not what the game has become, which forces lazy agitprop into unskippable content.

I have to say that Kharak has some girlboss moments. Start with Rachel S'jet. Already she was/"will be" reified as the home base Mothership in the original game. Here she's got her own vessel, alongside the (usually) moveable carrier. You're not allowed to allow her to die; contrast, the uncounted drivers of assault-vehicles and, later, railguns. This means every sortie you take her on is an escort-mission. The plot often forces the player to drag bratty li'l sis along; sometimes she even interrupts the narrative. This game, structurally, is Rachel's story. The player must orbit Mary Sue; his (or her!) avatars are Rachel's betamales. I concede some sugar in this medicine, in that Rachel had/has a brother; so she at least doesn't hate men. Cunningham and Kambeitz make a point of hating men; the Gaalsien have a... oof . . . "Fathership".

Moving to Mandalore's review, I don't recall having to pay extra for this game's lore manual - although, sale. So I went onto Steam where, I regret to inform, I have verified: in normal process you gotta pay extra. As Mandalore notes, the planet's lore is not adequately fleshed in the game, so this manual needs inclusion at least as "fluff". That's some Kotick-tier corpocrat shadiness. I'll add: most content is copied over from the 1999 original Homeworld manual; and where not, we get ads for DLC like Khanseph. To the latter, as Mandalore also notes: such needed into the mission, which in mainline is all-Gaalsien-all-the-time.

Mandalore's right that the game still has bugs. For all that the developers have tweaked this game into a version "1.4.4" (as of end of 2023) they haven't fixed the display popin/popout I'm seeing in Cape Wrath and beyond (the sensor blackout doesn't hold for the whole episode). He's also likely right that additional missions were on the drawboard and that we're looking at too much tech being allowed to the player in too-large chunks (he's looking later in the game; I'm looking at Sarathi Basin, as far as I'd got last weekend).

You can't mod this game because of course you can't, chud. As Mandalore complains you can't even map the keys; which Americans may well consider a ADA vio. I'd not trust Blackbird toward a "1.5" on account they'd just make Rachel's brother a transgender.

Even the manual has bugs. That original 1999 continuity error with Gaalsi(en) being exiled in 717 when the authority to do that, Tiir, was founded in the 810 - that's still in there. Tiir needed to be founded in the 700s as Saju-ka's rival. The war can draggle on for another century, maybe Tiir rooting out Siidim diehards.

On the plus side: I like that I get to see Kharak in its final days, and at least a taste of the old kiith system (Gaalsien being the final holdout). That adagio hits that much harder.

On HW2's general badness I'd considered the canon to devolve back to Barking Dog. Given Blackbird's record of moneygrubbing, hypocrisy, and bait-and-switch... Doctor Disaster argues gamers would be fools to trust them with a preorder of the next sequel.