It’s a real-time strategy game, a complex genre that has always been most at home on PCs with precise mouse control and near-unlimited keyboard commands. There wasn’t much like Homeworld when it came out in 1999, and there isn’t much like it today either. And then lastly we ran the ships by Rob Cunningham, and he gave the artist on the Remastered team tons of amazing and helpful art direction." Gearbox also updated the cinematics and audio of the two games, which were constrained and compressed to fit onto CDs back in the day. "We tried to infer a lot of the details from the low pixel information in the original textures. "We tried very hard not to alter it much at all," says Martel. Homeworld still stands out for its beautiful spaceship design, but boosting the fidelity ran the risk of altering the blueprints too much - a fear of which Gearbox was cognizant. And then after that, it was all about getting the best modern rendering capabilities into the engine." Since the ships were the stars of the game, they had to be amazing. "So we knew we had to keep the ships the same for sure. "Our goal was to make sure that the feelings of the original games would stay true to the originals when updating," says Martel. "Since the ships were the stars of the game, they had to be amazing." But, like the new versions of Halo and Halo 2 included in The Master Chief Collection, it’s never overdone to the point where you forget what game you’re playing. "We were actually trying to have it feel like you always remembered it." Homeworld Remastered includes major visual updates like vastly improved ship textures and lighting, alongside neat touches like an effect where resource-collecting spacecraft appear to suck the life out of asteroids. We think it looked like it does now, but back then," says Brian Martel, chief creative officer at Gearbox Software, the studio that handled the remasters. It brings the two games up to date in meticulous detail, while also including the original versions so you can see how far we’ve come. And that’s how Homeworld Remastered Collection, a new re-release of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 that’s out tomorrow, looks. Homeworld rendered space warfare as gorgeous, balletic battles, with every movement made by your fleet etching rainbow lines against a backdrop of psychedelic nebulae.Īt least, that’s how I remember it looking. Whoever’s call it was to make the spaceships emit colorful light trails in their wake made a pretty amazing decision, because it helped solidify one of the most distinctive art styles in the history of gaming. Homeworld, a space-based strategy game first released in 1999, is one example of this. And while as a player it’s impossible to know the reality behind a game’s production, sometimes individual decisions do stand out in their power to make a major impact on a title. It’s a long, complex process that can involve hundreds of people making thousands of decisions, all in the hope of creating a coherent product at the end.
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