Homeworld Remakes, It's Actually Happening!!!

[Crossroads Inc.]

Pigs are flying!
Hell has frozen over!
Everything is topsy Turvy because at long last, the rights to Homeworld have been purchased!!!
Check out an article about just how much new AWESOME is happening HERE

But for a Business break down I offer the following HERE

Hi! I’m Brian Burleson, the producer whose goal it is to preserve the heritage of the classic Homeworld series while also bringing it to the modern era.

Where do I begin? Well, one day I was in (Gearbox Chief Creative Officer) Brian Martel’s office talking about the existential nature of the Twinkie resurrection when he asked me what I thought about Homeworld. My response was something along the lines of, “I remember playing that when I was younger, loved it back in the day, way ahead of its time.” His response made me do a Scooby-Doo double take. THQ was putting the franchise up for auction and we were considering bidding on it.

How ridiculously awesome was that?

This (and other images in the article below) are among the really awesome things we found while digging around the old source for the game! Not sure if these have ever been released, so enjoy!

Over the next couple of weeks we spent a good deal of time talking about all of the amazing things we could do and how we might be able to do them. The opportunity to bring Relic's amazing set of games out of limbo helped build internal support. We were determined to win the auction and started planning next steps for that eventuality.

In a nuthsell, those plans were (and remain) to:

Preserve and assemble the purest possible form of the Homeworld and Homeworld 2 for digital release.
Create HD versions of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 that can take advantage of modern technological advances that weren’t available at the time of their original releases.

All the while, the clock was ticking. Fast forward to the day of the auction. I wasn’t there, but I conjured images of a guy at a podium talking faster than John Moschitta selling Micro Machines while taking bids from all the eager bidders. Sadly, from what I heard afterwards, in place of a guy with an epic 80’s mustache, it was a just a bunch of lawyers trying to do their best to make sure that THQ’s assets were sold and transferred as cleanly as possible... Over the phone... Maybe next time...
Once the bidding finished, it turned out that… we'd won!


Imagine the insane excitement of that revelation. It was like Christmas Eve, and we'd totally just peeked in the closet and saw that we are getting that sweet Schwinn Bike in the morning. Wow. However, we still had to wait for the legal paperwork to be done and the transfer of ownership to be complete before we could get our hands on the source code and content. So, actually, it was more like THE LONGEST Christmas Eve in history. Ugh.

But still! OMG Schwinn Bike!

As we waited for our sweet ride, a lot of exciting things happened. After the initial annoucement, many former Homeworld developers reached out to us, the mod community surged with a renewed interest, and many fans showed their support by sending us stories of how Homeworld affected their lives. Inside Gearbox, we started to cement the team that would be working on it to make sure we could start running on the right foot.

When all the paperwork cleared and the source code was delivered we finally were able to unwrap what had eluded us for so long only to find that… the bike had one pedal, needed a new chain and overall was just missing parts. Granted, we knew this bike was 10-15 years old and hadn't been touched by the original owner in quite some time, but still!

That’s when the real work started, and boy howdy, did all of those people who reached out to us at the beginning come in handy!


Over the course of a couple of months we were able to find the missing pieces and started to get the bike, erm, game, working again. (I’ll drop the bike metaphor now.)

As Martel mentioned during our panel at PAX Australia, it's been a struggle to get all of the original tools working again. Just for comparison, the source drop we got from the purchase of the Homeworld property was 16.8 gigs. The sum of all the additional missing source we got from friends who had worked on the games originally was about 39 gigs. The two have almost zero overlap!

For example, Homeworld 2 was largely developed in a heavily customized version Maya 3. (Something we still haven’t located.) This means that if we wanted to update Homeworld 2 content for an HD version, we needed to turn to different tools.

Fortunately, over the past many years, fan-made mods, such as Homeworld 2 Complex, have been keeping the flame alive and have archived all of the existing tools that were released or created. Our sweet bike didn’t really come with assembly directions, but thankfully fans had done a really great job making some incredible mod tools! (Sorry for dropping a bike reference again, it just made too much sense!)

These tools and the folks behind them have been incredibly helpful as we come to understand the underlying systems that power Homeworld and begin work on some of the new tools needed for some of the HD features we are thinking about. Creating new tools is never easy, especially when you didn’t create the underlying formats / systems that they feed into, but thanks to the dedication of the community we have a really great understanding of what works and doesn’t work.

A big part of this re-release is bringing it to modern computers and finding ways to introduce an entirely new generation of gamers to the awesomeness that is classic Homeworld and Homeworld HD. We are currently still figuring out all the ways we can do this and are really eager to hear your input on what you want to see.


The spirit of the team working on this at Gearbox is very focused on not re-inventing Homeworld. A great Guidestone was given to us that we are destined to follow. Along the way, the journey might be fraught with peril, but there are a lot of good people who are determined to go down this path, as well as a lot of friends who we are encountering along the way who are our Bentusi.

I’ve been lurking in the forums for a while, waiting for an announcement to be made so that I could jump in. That time is now. Expect to see me and other Gearbox people working on Homeworld to be posting more often as we bring these awesome games to this new generation.

This is Brian signing off. I’ll be in our forums under the handle BurlesonGBX -- feel free to shoot me a Private Message there or, if you'd rather, e-mail your suggestions (be they for Homeworld or what you want to see here on Inside the Box in the future) to insidethebox@gearboxsoftware.com

[Eternal_Freedom]

Right, for the record, I do not care how much the collectors edition with the art book will cost, I am getting it. I'll live off super noodles and orange squash for a month if necessary.

[Borgholio]

Huh...

Is this an actual remake or just essentially re-vamping the original code to work on modern computers with updated graphics and all? Not that I disapprove, I too will sell quite a few souls and firstborn children for this. But I'm wondering if it'll just be the original game with better graphics, or if they'll be "stripping it down to it's frame and re-building from the ground up"?

[Steel]

I'm looking forward to this. It has been in the works for a while already, I saw an announcement for this a couple of months ago.

I believe there is more than just a graphics update going in to it. Originally it was called HD, and now its remastered.

There seems to be much hyperbole flying around, and not too much information about what they're actually doing to the game. Presumably there will be a bit of a UI overhaul to HW1, although nothing too drastic I hope. I've also seen quotes like "we're going to make it look better than 4k [resolution]" and... what could that possibly mean? Presumably we'll need to wait and see if they'll tinker and break everything horribly or if we'll get a streamlined but authentic and prettier experience.

I was playing HW1 trying to salvage every capital ship I came across frigate and bigger. Ended up with over half a dozen heavy cruisers along with myriad destroyers and frigates. I remember playing the mission where there is the hyperspace inhibitor, but there is a sphere of probably a hundred ion cannon frigates surrounding it. I stole 68. This is very powerful, although not terribly easy to actually get them into a fight. In any formation except wall the formation is so spread out that it takes an age to turn anywhere. When you hyperspace in to a mission you start with them all in a line that stretches halfway across the map, and then have to reassemble them into a proper formation. They did manage to destroy that asteroid that is sent against you in about 10 seconds, so they served a purpose.

[Terralthra]

I did the same thing, Steel, but I managed to get so many that when they tried to line up to hyperspace out at the end of the mission, the line went past the map-sphere and broke the game. I had to go back to a previous save and decomission some in order to hyper out.

[Steel]

Ouch, I don't think I ever had that many. I hope they retain this feature! I don't recall being swimming in resources, I think being a salvage corvette or decoy was a pretty hazardous job, so this wasn't a path to infinite ships trivially, more a hard slog past the fleet size cap.

In HW2 doing that seemed impossible with the new mechanics. I was trying to steal a destroyer, but it was able to missile the salvage ships as they did their final docking approach so they all died well before the boarding action could complete. Most enemy fleets seemed to be too well escorted or have too many point defence or missiles of their own to be boarded.

I heard that the cataclysm source was lost so it can't be part of the updated release, which is unfortunate if true. There were some good speeches in that. I wasn't too keen on the wanky super ion cannon escorts and things of that ilk, but overall it was a solid experience.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I used to go all-out on capturing the 14 multi-beam frigates in missions 8 and 9. That made future engagements sooo much easier. I also managed to nick the entire Taidan fleet you're supposed to destroy in mission 5. Including the carrier, destroy, frigates and resource ships heh heh.

[Zaune]

Yeah... I can see why they decided to actually fix that bug for Cataclysm; you were only supposed to be able to grab a ship with salvage corvettes after battering it down to 50% health or less.

[Purple]

I don't consider that to have been a bug. Capturing ships was NOT easy by any stretch of the word. The salvage corvettes can die easily and they cost enough that you newer have enough resources to just waste them. So if you are skilled enough to take a large fleet of ships than you deserve it.

[Temjin]

Yeah, I heard about this a few months ago. I was glad to see that a lot of the same team that did the first Homeworld game were the ones that were making the third one. Shame about no Cata though. While it wasn't as good as the first, I quite enjoyed it.

Also, I have you all beat on the salvaging. I used to come out of mission 2 with about 14-16 missile corvettes. And not by using the scout suicide bug. Instead I would give the order to the Salvette to kamikaze the Missile corvette and then cancel the order at the last second and order it instead to salvage. Took practice and great timing, and used to take me at least two hours to get them all.

But fuck was it worth it to see a wall of those things dump all their missiles at once at a target. Slows the game to about a couple of frames a second, but entertaining as hell.

[Covenant]

The Salvages were cool but they shouldn't have operated the way they did. As soon as you had them hooked on (and you could send hordes of them out, and had no reason not to) the enemy ship was mostly boned. They might have been expensive but I had so many ships and so much money even without worrying about the salvages that it never felt like I was in any major danger... except when, you know, they throw crazily unfair things at you.

While the manufacturing/refurbishing facilities of the Mothership were the main point of the game, I do think the Salvage Corvettes ended up making the game skewed. I too swarmed out to capture the ion frigates because their lack of point defenses made them easy pickings. Most of the game didn't make them have that much of an impact (which is bad, since they were mostly useless then) and then at certain points they were insane (which is also bad, since they have an outsize impact at that point).

The Cataclysm resource harvesters also had healing and salvage capabilities, which is a tidy bundle that seems sensible to me. The invasion frigates were a different way of doing it, but they felt clunky and I never liked them. While I do like the idea of invaders damaging ship crew to either take it over or to render the ship neutralized, I don't think the way it worked out did work out very well, especially since their armament was entirely inadequate to the task. By the time you're capable of capturing an enemy vessel you're way better off just blowing it away.

[Steel]

Yeah salvaging was a bit of a strange design decision to allow capture of full health vessels instantaneously.

As for HW2, I really hope they change the difficulty scaling. It might have been fixed in one of the later patches, but the way the enemy fleets were dynamically created mid mission proportionate to your own fleet size + resources banked made some missions entirely insane. I managed to win a playthrough a couple of years ago, then noticed in some patch notes that a couple of the missions that were just insane had had the difficulty lowered. I recall in mission 11(?) advancing my full fleet and then getting some new sensor contacts which basically blotted out the sun. I counted 14 enemy battlecruisers along with dozens of destroyers and smaller ships. Your fleet cap only allows you 2 battlecruisers. As the enemy ships were spread out I managed to win eventually, but I ended up losing basically everything and rebuilding it. I tried the same mission again initially advancing only a portion of my fleet and the enemy only spawned 6 battlecruisers, which is absolutely ludicrous.

On the one hand, it makes sense that there be some difficulty to the game, but to instantaneously reinforce the enemy based on your current fleet kind of removes any incentive to do well, as you'll just be twice as screwed later on. I can buy some kind of mechanic whereby the enemy would have larger starting forces, or perhaps have some explicit mobilisation/reinforcement mechanic where the enemy tracks how badly you stomp them and increases garrisons over the campaign. Even then, fights against your fleet will basically always end in defeat with no survivors for your enemies, so they should be reacting either the same regardless of how badly you beat them and increasing their forces as much as possible, or alternatively just running away on sight given what happened to every ship to ever face you before.

[Wing Commander MAD]

So which version of the banna did they end up going with in the end, the 6" die cast one at $75.00 or the 12'' resin one with LEDs for $100.00?

[Steel]

The website doesn't seem to have updated the survey, which is still going. I don't think I'll get either of the physical things. I don't really go in for that sort of thing. It looks like the options are between a 6in tall bare metal one, and a foot tall resin painted version with lights and ac power supply. I kind of feel a middle ground with a smaller one that was coloured would be better, as how many people are going to want to have a foot tall mothership sitting on their desk?

[Borgholio]

how many people are going to want to have a foot tall mothership sitting on their desk?

*raises hand*

I'll put it next to my foot-tall Godzilla toy from when I was a kid, a massive pewter dragon statue, and a rubber pirate chicken squeak toy (don't ask).

[Eternal_Freedom]

It would sit next to my F-15 and Titan-II launch key.

Damn, the thought of how cool that would look is both awesome and depressing at how sad I am sometimes

[Nephtys]

Cataclysm did a lot right, so I'll be sad if it won't come back too. The Mothership as an actual entity instead of a mostly immobile target was pretty damn cool, and both Motherships could defend themselves pretty decently.

Having the fighters also be upgradable with one-shot strike missiles was a really cool thing too, as it added to their flexibility and made 'carrier' operations actually matter.

The frigates and capital ships were a bit too flexible though. Had a weapon for every occasion, which made them less interesting than the old style ones. But I very much preferred the resourcers and resource bases and how they behaved in Cata, as also being the capture ships as well as asteroid tugs.

[Steel]

Yeah, I think that's a good design point. There is a limit to how much complexity you can put in a game, and so you should spend it on making a rich combat experience as this is the focus of the game.

You really want specialists for combat to encourage diversity of forces and tactical opportunities, but generalists for support, as nobody wants to have to build half a dozen ship types just to get coverage of the most basic activities, and still never have a repair ship around when you need it.

[Rekkon]

Boo. I always played the campaign as Taiidan, so theirs is the only Mothership I would want on my desk. Even then I would rather have a model of one of the actual warships.

[Purple]

Boo. I always played the campaign as Taiidan, so theirs is the only Mothership I would want on my desk. Even then I would rather have a model of one of the actual warships.

This. I would love to have models of the Taiidan fighter craft. They just had something about them that felt right. They felt like space fighters.

[orderud]

Wow, this is awesome! Looking forward to take control of the banana mothership again! I think I still got the (awesome) soundtrack CD from HW1 here somewhere.

[phongn]

I don't consider that to have been a bug. Capturing ships was NOT easy by any stretch of the word. The salvage corvettes can die easily and they cost enough that you newer have enough resources to just waste them. So if you are skilled enough to take a large fleet of ships than you deserve it.

The AI was broken so you could distract ships with a scout while the salvage corvettes did their business unmolested.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I still remember the first time I reached Mission 3 and found out Kharak was gone. I thought I'd fucked up somehow in Mission 2 and went back to re-play it to see if I could reach a better outcome...and still the planet burned. That was a punch to the gut.

[Executor32]

...Not even beacons.

[White Haven]

The subject did not survive interrogation.