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Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak - prequel from ex-Relic devs

Severian Silk

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I'm interested in finding out what changes GearBox made to HW1 remaster. I already ported a few of my HW2 mods over to the new engine, but didn't play much. If the news is good I may start playing again.
 

Chef_Hathaway

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So, I beat it last night. They definitely should not have sold it for full price.

It's worth more like $30 bux.

Story is neat, though short, and it has a couple challenging missions, but I beat it in about 6-7 hours on "hard".

Multi might be fun, skirmish is bad.

Overall, it made me wish they had gone a different direction with the game, but it's not bad, just unremarkable.
 

Dayyālu

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Overall, it made me wish they had gone a different direction with the game, but it's not bad, just unremarkable.

That's rather damning. At least it's better than C&C4, even if it has a similar pedigree. Guess I'll wait for when it will be sold under 5 bucks, then. Performance is good? The voices about below-average writing (Bob Soban and Charles S'jet, 'cause everyone is a fuckin' Anglo now) are true?

The only thing I liked about Cata was how it expanded on Kiith politics and the Kushan in general more. The space zombies were fucking stupid and as a result so was most of the campaign's premise. The Beast was dumb enough to make me glad the entire game isn't canon.


A stupid story (and we can agree that Blob In Spessh is not that great) told rather well and with good gameplay is better than the HW2 abomination any day. Plus the "canon" status of Cata has been debated to the death, and as all "canon" discussion, it's stupid. I'd prefer a version that can run on 7/10 easily, though.


And most of the people who made it went on to make SJW Of The Stars iirc. :)

I would have told you to go back shitposting in the GG thread, then I remembered the Sword of the Stars guys. The people who banned the use of "rape" in their official forums 'cause it was triggering. SotS was fun (if simple), but the lore (that they liked to the death, they employed it in three games) was seriously stupid. SPEESH DOLPHINS

Bar the Zuul. I liked the Zuul.

How the fuck the same people who wrote Cata/HW backstory managed to write such a pretentious and trite thing, it's a mistery....
 
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A stupid story (and we can agree that Blob In Spessh is not that great) told rather well and with good gameplay is better than the HW2 abomination any day.
HW2 was pretty disappointing. It had the right atmospherics and the missions in it were good, but the encounter scaling was just fffffnnnnnnnnn grrrrrrrr aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Overall I actually preferred HW2's gameplay though. Sue me. Its main failings for me from a story perspective were that it just didn't really seem to have very much to do with the first game. Makaan and the Vaygr are cool (my preferred race) but you don't learn much about them.

I would have told you to go back shitposting in the GG thread, then I remembered the Sword of the Stars guys.
Some comedy gold from Dembo's blog after the botched SotS2 launch, wherein she compares them failing to deliver a product that people paid for on time and in a completed state to... a miscarriage. Man, they were all really desperate to blame everybody but themselves for it.

I really dislike Mecron, too. Really, I dislike all of their major forum personalities, but him especially. His responses to modders trying to fix his broken game (SotS2) reminding them to "don't forget to put us in the credits for making the game" are absolutely amazing. Especially the smug way he adds it like a short comment
"And us for making the game, of course!'

Bar the Zuul. I liked the Zuul.
>not being the MORRO-KHAN
>not ANSWERING INSULTS
 

Chef_Hathaway

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The Vaygr theme is one of my favorite themes of all time, and, honestly, I really enjoy HW2 despite the flak it always gets.

I like its aesthetic much more than HW1s, at least more than the Kushan designs. Taiidani ships were always p cool, save for their mothership.
 
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Infinitron

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/01/21/homeworld-deserts-of-kharak-review/

Wot I Think – Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak

kharak1.jpg


Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak [official site] is a prequel to the legendary Homeworld space real-time strategy games, but this time – heresy! – set on land, as the Kushan race battle angry clans to reclaim ancient technologies found on the sandy planet they currently call home. While some of its developers (including studio boss and former Relic art lead Rob Cunningham) worked on the original games, this first began life as the unrelated ‘Hardware: Shipbreakers’, before morphing into the free to play multiplayer ‘Homeworld: Shipbreakers’ and then finally to the traditionally-sold, singleplayer and multiplayer package it is now. Deserts of Kharak has some bloody big boots to fill – can it possibly manage it?


Note: This piece primarily focuses on the solo campaign, as there wasn’t much multiplayer to be had pre-release.

I do admire the wanton self-destructiveness of taking one of the most quintessential space games then removing space from it. As well as being mischievous, hopefully it also speaks to a determination to only take Homeworld to space again once they’re sure they can do it absolutely right. Deserts of Kharak, you see, is a landlubbing prequel to Relic’s much-loved Homeworld series, starring giant sandcrawlers and assorted buggies, tanks and jets as they battle across the titular, entirely arid planet. It manages to be more Homeworldy than one might have suspected, as well as evoking fond memories of Dune II and the sudden realisation that someone really should make a Mad Max RTS.

kharak2.jpg


It’s UI, soundtrack and craft design which primarily make a game mostly about tanks fighting in the desert feel most like Homeworld, but Kharak also shares a certain sense of scale and refreshingly slow pacing with its great ancestor. There are several flies in its gently undulating ointment, but the unhurried, almost dreamlike speed of its action is what I most like about it – a welcome change of pace, a break with current RTS tradition to become ever-more frantic.

This is not to say that Kharak doesn’t become extremely tense and involved, but rather that you’re not going to be punched into the ground if you’ve not been all go, all the time. However, despite its unhurried stride, it’s pretty big on the keyboard shortcuts and the use of a Supreme Commander-style tactical map, plus you will find yourself fighting the awkward camera controls on a regular basis, so don’t expect an easy ride even if it’s not making you all panicky and sweaty moment-to-moment.

kharak9.jpg


Going back to commonalities with Homeworld, I think in this case its pretty but abstracted UI – all icy blue geometric shapes for the build actions – works against Kharak. It made some sense for the inherent unfamiliarity of various different spaceship classes, but scout buggies and tanks and fighter planes are well-worn terrain, and I’d really rather be clicking a little aeroplane icon than going “um, so were they the diamond or the parallelogram?”

Some UI aspects also look pretty fuzzy if you’re playing above 1080p, and while clearly that’s not an issue for most people, it all goes into the pot – my overall sense is that interface clarity and presentation has been sacrified in favour of clawing back more Homeworldiness. I spent more time than I’d like playing on the well-implemented tactical map, partly because the big-picture was simply more practical on what are often very large levels, but mostly because the main-game camera wasn’t what it could be.

kharak3.jpg


Add in unskippable cutscenes (of which there are a great many, before, during and after missions), sporadically malfunctioning unit AI and a few glitches (for instance, I had to restart a mission because the game camera got itself locked into cutscene mode), a limited number of maps and a total dependence on sandy environments, and what’s otherwise a pretty and thoughtful strategy game does occasionally fall into frustration or even tedium.

Kharak’s absolutely on the side of the angels despite this. While what it’s doing is fairly routine for strategy game, how it feels is not. It might not quite have the visual impact of its forefather, but it does a solid job of making its desert planet feel large, lost and lonely, and its hovering, oddly-angled units eschew conventional tankiness in favour of spaceshipy design cues from the original games. The Carriers, your mobile headquarters, are a joy – giant, mobile runways or docking bays, in some ways scaled down versions of Homeworld motherships, but at the same time even more bizarro-industrial. They play a more active role than the motherships too – rolling deathwagons as much as bases.

kharak4.jpg


And, without wanting to give away too much plot, spaceships of a sort do make an appearance, provoking the same Chris Fossish techno-joy of the original games. While the between-mission cutscenes are a mixed bag of concept art and rotoscope-esque pseudo-animation, the in-engine ones make dramatic use of the crafts and their desolate environment, aided by the same judicious use of cinematic camera angles and cuts as the original Homeworlds were renonwed for. The vast majority of screenshots in this piece come from those scenes, because grabbing shots of them was irresistible. If nothing else, Deserts of Kharak is a strong riposte to the idea that a sci-fi RTS can only be beautiful if it’s in space.

The stand-out element, however, is the sound design. Over long years, we’ve miserably adjusted to the idea that all you can do with unit chatter is have each guy say something funny or militaryesque when you click on them, but Kharak casually rewrites the rules. Either by selecting units or by just hanging around and listening, you’ll hear the units talk amongst themselves. Select a unit and while sometimes they’ll just give an ‘acknowledged’, other times a more involved, context-sensitive reaction to whatever you’ve ordered them to do. An endangered unit might thank you for sending in air support. A ship which has spotted incoming enemies will tell you what type of craft they are. Idle units will chatter amongst themselves at length about faults and tactics.

kharak5.jpg


As well as successfully giving you a general sense of what’s going via audio alone, it sounds natural and responsive, rather than mechanical and repetitive – all adding to that sense that this is a large and well-oiled military machine, not just some cute little guys who popped out of a magic factory. Kharak might not otherwise be a landmark moment for the genre, but its unit audio does set new standards. It’s going to be so disappointing to play a strategy game filled with tinned quips after this.

It’s a very pleasant thing to have on one’s screen and speakers then, but despite its aesthetic successes Kharak’s greatest shortcoming is that the experience becomes over-familiar mid-way through the campaign. That the maps all look so similar isn’t really the cause of this (especially if I’m arguing that Kharak brings back fond Dune II memories), and in any case they do wring some surprising visual variety from the setting, but rather that it’s so often about long, glacial treks through sandy valleys, sporadically facing off against the same handful of enemy types and micro-managing the collection of arbitrarily-located resources. The rock-paper-scissors unit balancing works well and leads to some dramatic skirmishes, the skies peppered with glorious vapour trails of elegantly deadly missiles, but there’s a lot of rinse and repeat here.

kharak6.jpg


There are some novel units and clearly a lot of effort has been made to bless each singleplayer mission its own structure with its own tactical twists, but sitting back from it after a couple of days of play, I do feel that, moment-to-moment, Kharak feels pretty much the same. While, for me, that moment is a far more thoughtful and more aesthetically-pleasing one to that offered by most in its genre, I did sometimes feel as though I was grinding through the levels, waiting for some pay-off that never quite came. It’s a smallish game on a large stage, basically, and while by and large it gets away with it, sometimes you can tell how stretched it is.

I particularly wish it had more character to it beyond the craft designs: its sands evoke Dune but it doesn’t pursue the strangeness or the deadliness, while some of its vehicles and camera angles seem to come from the Mad Max playbook but aren’t paired with any of the raucousness. The characters in the cutscenes are few and short on personality; it might not have the posturing of Starcraft II but it does share its lore-trumps-all sensibility.

kharak7.jpg


There’s a very solid core here though – this is not the quickfire cash-in or licensed-after-the-fact awkwardness it could have been, given its origins. It really does feel like a Homeworld game, despite the transition from a galactic scale to a terrestrial one. I fear the relative lack of variety handicaps its potential to be a multiplayer hit and thus enjoy the sort of lifespan that the Homeworlds did/do, but as a singleplayer offering it’s substantial and satisfying, so long as you can put up with some AI wobbles and a certain amount of going through the motions. As for its part in Homeworld lore, well, there’s a lot for fans to pick over/yell about, but if you’re into spaceships-as-mythology you should get something out of it.

In terms of being an RTS you can play even if you’ve never been anywhere near a Homeworld, yep, it is. Some of the major cutscenes won’t mean as much, but then again they’re so dry that I’m not sure they’d connect even were they about a brand new universe, and in any case you don’t need any of that to justify or explain war machines fighting in the desert, which is what this game really is. And it’s damn good at it.

kharak8.jpg


Deserts of Kharak does manage to be standalone as well as prequel to an old series, and if you’re tired of the twitchy frenzy which grips so many latter-day RTSes, Kharak is a smart and beautiful destination whether or not you still dream of Hiigara. It might be set on land, but by recent RTS standards it’s nonetheless reaching for the stars.
 
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I dunno if we can really fault them for that since the project was a F2P social media game that got re-named and re-branded as a full release with a campaign and a proper multiplayer component halfway through development.
 

DwarvenFood

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Am I the only one to think that a six hour SP campaign (x2) is just crazy for it's price, the times of multiplayer with just two factions are long over guys, people shouldn't pay for this.
 

ArchAngel

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I got a old i5 750 and GTX 960 and game runs fine.


So you don't get fps drops at all?


The game runs OK for me. FPS did drop some in some bigger battles but that is expected due to my old CPU (and rts are all CPU hungry). But I didn't get them in normal situations, the game ran very well for me (but I play the swedish version :) )

It is probably a bug with certain configurations and not lack of optimization. I am sure they will fix it eventually.
But even with that, the game is not worth the full price. It has nice narrative between missions but missions themselves are even weaker than GG or AoA (at least the first 6 I played so far).
And MP is two factions that are even more similar than Beta and Humans in GG. 5 maps only but they are also all so similar it might as well be 1 map.
And people said AI in skirmish is bad.
No replays, no observer mode, no map maker or any way to make custom game modes. On day 2 some people had to wait 9+ minutes in 2v2 queue to find a match and I seen 4 player games run terrible due to lag problems.
 
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DramaticPopcorn

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(and rts are all CPU hungry).

Which is another great reason why Unity should be avoided like the plague.
Blizzard SC2 engine is no better. My GPU is strong enough to run that on full details but the game runs like ass because of my CPU.
Uh, having played SC2 in MP on:
- 1st gen i3 CPU
- 2nd gen i5 CPU
- Terrible AMD laptop CPU
- Intel Pentium CPU

I can safely say that this is bullshit. SC2 is like on of the better optimized engines out there.
 

ArchAngel

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(and rts are all CPU hungry).

Which is another great reason why Unity should be avoided like the plague.
Blizzard SC2 engine is no better. My GPU is strong enough to run that on full details but the game runs like ass because of my CPU.
Uh, having played SC2 in MP on:
- 1st gen i3 CPU
- 2nd gen i5 CPU
- Terrible AMD laptop CPU
- Intel Pentium CPU

I can safely say that this is bullshit. SC2 is like on of the better optimized engines out there.
Not on Very High details :D

It worked well on my CPU when it was first release but they added effects to the game with expansions and now it does not run well on Very High Details.
 

DeepOcean

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My impressions:
Pretty well done low budget cutscenes, the game is pretty atmospheric and well written. I enjoy this "realistic" tone the game has, wish more developers had this care for detail on presentation.
The story is okayish, the major problem is that we already know what will happen and there is very little new story to tell.
The worldbuilding seems very light, most enemies had been vaguely middle eastern inspired mooks to kill, there is no burning of Kharak or Gardens of Kadesh or other high impact moments so far.
There are a few interesting mechanics, line of sight, position and movement are really important, you can wreck enemies with superior numbers if you ambush them but I dunno if this will be enough to keep multiplayer alive.
Skirmish mode is just crap, only serves as basic training for multiplayer.
Game is very short, I reached the halfway point of the campaign on 2 hours or something.
So far this is Homeworld's poor cousin, only worthy buying at discount.
 

Kem0sabe

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I enjoyed the single player campaign, the story ties in nicely with the rest of the games but it's extremely short, easy, and very anticlimactic.

Not worth the price, not even at 50% discount.
 

ArchAngel

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I played it on Hard and didn't find it easy. I had to load a save here and there and on last mission I was down to 2 battleships, 2 supports, 6 or so fighters no money and depended on Ion cannon to help me win.
I did make a mistake of
killing first enemy carrier too soon so the main one spawned before I mined enough to get my forces up to reasonable level.

Most of the situations of needing to load a save was due to using Rachel in first line of combat so I can take over enemy units :D
 

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