Homeworld 3 gameplay preview: Fight like a fish

A new trailer for Homeworld 3On Tuesday, a video was uploaded showing large spacecraft fighting it out against the wreckage and massive orbital structures. 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. With its trademark three-dimensional space combat, this is Homeworld just as I remember it. But, to hear Blackbird Interactive’s chief creative officer Rory McGuire tell it, it’s actually more like Homeworld the way I Imagine it it.

“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.”

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. As the camera follows the fighters and bombarders close, the footage shows a trench-running sequence that is almost Star Wars-esque. The final objective has turrets firing away at the enemy ship attacks.

“They showed this feature and they ended up cutting it later,” McGuire said. “This idea of space terrain and this idea of these massive large-scale megaliths that a player could interact with. They weren’t able to make it work technically, and when we started talking about Homeworld 3We were both inspired by the idea and also by our work. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.”

This book was released in 2016 Kharak Deserts has been a fixture on Polygon’s list of the best modern PC games, in large part because of its clever use of terrain. It takes place in an enormous desert with large, land-based vehicles and aircraft fighting across huge swathes of ground. The game makes use of subtle hills and rock structures in a similar way to other games that might make use of vast mountain ranges. These are used as screen for ambushes or chokepoints and deadly confrontations.

“The terrain featured pretty prominently in that game,” McGuire said. “I heard from a number of fans that they felt that Kharak DesertsBecause of how the terrain was designed, it felt more realistic than many Homeworld-related games. So that was the original inspiration for Homeworld 2With what was just beginning to be a small part of the in, Kharak Deserts, we felt like, How about if this is all we do?”

A fleet stands proudly, defending its orbital depots.

Fighters stream toward a dormant gate, a distant star sparking in the distance.

Fighters stream across an icy planet, debris surrounding a pitched battle inside a crater.

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. Pathing can make a mob of units look like it is a bunch of garbage rolling downhill than a group of combatants moving side by side. Sometimes they may get caught on a massive megalith in the middle.

Not so in Homeworld 3. The tiny fighter boats that moved during the demonstration seemed almost organic, and it was natural. 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. Even subtly enhancing their formations or their dispositions allowed me to make them more offensive or less defensive depending on their needs.

These reminded me of many schools fish. Kat Neale, former lead gameplay designer and now associate director of games, glowed wide with delight at the observation.

“We always love to refer back to this idea of coral reefs,” Neale said with a laugh. “In the previous Homeworld games, it’s sort of this huge pool that you’re just moving around in and engaging in combat. And it has interesting play spaces, and interesting points of interest that you’re focused on, but really it’s this huge [empty] expanse.

“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 sort of came to life right from the get-go.”

This metaphor was extended by the team, who gave all its weapon systems more personality.

Concept art for Homeworld 3 titled “Trench Run” shows multiple ships rocketing through a trench.

A fleet battle showing a player-controlled mothership over a truly massive battleship.

Fighters raked by fire and flame rocket through the superstructure of a larger vessel.

“We fully simulate the ballistic systems,” McGuire said, “so a missile actually travels through space, and if it hits something, it blows up. Then it explodes. [we]The player could use all this strategically. It took us a little bit to stand it up, but once we got it in it just blew us away with just the richness of possibility and the strategic well that we could pull from.”

The Homeworld franchise continues to be alive more than twenty years later than the E3 2001 demo. Modiphius Entertainment will soon release a tabletop game for role-playing and a boardgame. Meanwhile, Homeworld MobileApps for iOS and Android are still being used. After so many decades of a franchise they love being essentially dormant, you can see the joy written all over McGuire’s and Neale’s faces as they finally get to share their work with the world. Fans of Homeworld see it as a narrative tour-de-force, an opera in space comparable to Star Trek and the current incarnation. Battlestar Galactica. The team at Blackbird Interactive will tell you what story this time. The pair was coy during our interview.

“If Homeworld 3Picked up exactly where Homeworld 2 left off — we could do that,” McGuire said. “But we could also speak to the fact that there has been this gap. We’re trying to create an experience that, for a fan that has been waiting, it feels familiar but also fresh and surprising, and that they’re caught off guard by some of the things in a delightful way.”

All he’ll say is that players are searching for Karan S’jet, the powerful fleet commander who left her people on a journey to unlock a series of galaxy-spanning gates.

“Homeworld is a very emotional experience for a lot of people,” Neale said. “That’s what draws you, and keeps you, is this feeling that you’re on that ‘hero’s journey’ — pushing through and succeeding despite everything being against you — and that’s always going to be something that players can relate to. With all of that said, without digging into the details, we want to make the players feel like they’re kind of up to this.”

Homeworld 3This game will arrive in 2023 and can be pre-ordered on Steam or the Epic Games Store. A collector’s edition, which includes three model starships, is also available for $174.99.

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