COVER FEATURE
Homeworld was the first RTS to concern itself with the epic,” says narrative director Martin Cirulis, who seems like he could talk about Homeworld for days. He has, after all, been writing its stories for two decades now, in the original, its prequel Deserts of Kharak and now Homeworld 3. As a grizzled writer of RTS unit barks, though, he knows sometimes a few words are all you need. “The theme of Homeworld 1 is primarily survival, and destiny. By the end of it, they have found their true place,” he says. “Homeworld 3 is: What are you willing to do in the face of someone else’s destiny?”
Can you hear it, when you close your eyes and think of Homeworld? Can you hear Adagio for Strings, the awe and hope and mourning in the voices of the choir as the Mothership leaves orbit over Kharak in search of a better life?
There was a grandeur to Homeworld that other real-time strategy games weren’t attempting in 1999. The year’s big hit, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, leaned into dark satire and FMV camp. Age of Empires II’s century-spanning historical campaigns may have been epic in scope, but Homeworld – Homeworld echoed the timelessness of myth.
“When I joined Homeworld 1, Kharak burned offscreen,” Cirulis says, referring to the razing of your home planet in the original campaign. “It was a radio transmission. We sat down and went, ‘no, this is a cinematic piece as well as a wargame. We have to go back to Kharak. We have to be there while she’s burning and rescue people’. That’s part of what made Homeworld epic; that acknowledgement that it’s not just killing the pixels.”
So then. How do you make a sequel to a myth? After playing a good chunk of Homeworld 3’s campaign, I’ve surmised that Blackbird Interactive has come up with a bold, even innovative strategy: making a new videogame.
I’ve completed missions with objectives like capturing control points and hiding my mothership from enemy forces in a nebula. I’ve put my fighters into wedge’s campaign is still peppered with unfinished cinematics, temp voice lines and jagged framerates not yet optimised for my Core i5 and RTX 3070, but it has a certain air to it – a now-endangered fully 3D RTS ripped out of time from the early 2000s, but looking and playing the way I remember them rather than the way they actually were. The hard sci-fi tone hasn’t changed much in , which begins generations after the first two games. A young scientist, Imogen S’Jet, has spent her life preparing to serve as the organic computer at the heart of a new mothership, becoming the brain for a fledgling fleet, their hulls her new metal flesh. After living through years of peace and prosperity, Imogen is unexpectedly thrust into battle and cut off from the rest of Hiigaran society, charged with dealing with mysterious invaders from beyond the known galaxy.
