CHENNAI: Today, we’re taking a look at Homeworld, which originally released in 1999. So why are we talking about a game that came out in the last century? For two reasons — first, both Homeworld and its sequel were remastered in 2015 for PC and secondly, though they’ve had 21 years to do so, very few strategy games have been able to even come close to what Homeworld managed all those years ago.
Homeworld is the story of the Kushan, who built a massive Mothership to carry half a million people on a journey halfway across the galaxy to the fabled planet of Hiigara — or ‘home’, in the Kushan tongue. The Mothership’s maiden voyage ends in tragedy, however, as Kharak comes under attack and it is forced to flee. With a planet in ruins behind you, pursued by an implacable enemy with only the distant hope of Hiigara to aim for, you have to lead the remnants of the Kushan home.
It’s not unheard of for a real-time strategy game to have a strong story — it wasn’t just the gameplay of Warcraft/Starcraft that earned them deserved places on the all-time-great list. What is rare, however, is to come across a story that shapes the gameplay quite so much. Every mission hammers home the fact that you’ve got nothing left behind you and all you can do is try to survive, keep going and hope.
Add to that the fact that your fleet is persistent — if you’ve built up a veteran squad of Assault Frigates in one mission, they’ll be with you in the next. This has the potential to create stories within a story — I still remember somehow managing to hijack an enemy capital ship in an early mission (much more powerful than anything I could build at that point) by sneak-rushing it with Salvage Corvettes, which resulted in that ship becoming the backbone of my fleet in future missions.
The obvious flip side of that coin, however, is that it matters when you lose a frigate that was with you from the very beginning — which is part of what makes Homeworld great. Far too often, strategy games impose a certain detachment on you as you send hundreds of units to their virtual death — raising those stakes makes for more meaningful decisions and a better game.
It wasn’t just the story, however, Homeworld’s gameplay was also ahead of its time. Proper 3D space combat — you’d think that would be necessary for a good space RTS and you’d be right, but nobody managed to pull it off quite like Homeworld. All your units will begin in roughly the same elliptic plane, but you’re under no obligations whatsoever to keep them that way, and neither are your enemies. It won’t be long before you’re distracting enemy forces with a head-on assault from ‘above’ while a flanking force curves up from ‘below’ to attack while their defences are pointed the other way. It’s not easy, but Homeworld will make you feel like a strategic genius if you can pull it off.
The best part is, thanks to that remastered edition I mentioned earlier, you can play Homeworld and Homeworld 2 in high-definition (and they looked pretty great to begin with!). And that’s something you should do because, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned so far and quite a few besides, there’s nothing quite like Homeworld.
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(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)