Homeworld 3 Devs Discuss How the Game Builds on the Series'…

Summary

Homeworld 3 addresses past campaign difficulties with a new selectable difficulty system for strategic gameplay.
The addition of a War Games mode brings a unique roguelike experience to the RTS genre, offering cooperative challenges not seen elsewhere in RTS games.
With a focus on fleet persistence and varied gameplay options, Homeworld 3 stays true to its roots while introducing new elements to captivate fans.

Homeworld 3 has quite a legacy to live up to: its predecessors revolutionized 3D strategy gameplay and introduced a generation of gamers to the strategy genre. In the 20 years since the series' last mainline entry, the Homeworld games have continued to serve as a basis for comparison when discussing strategically deep or atmospheric sci-fi games, and expectations for Blackbird Interactive's sequel have been understandably high.

In an interview with The Best War Games, Homeworld 3 Game Director Lance Mueller and Lead Producer Iain Myers-Smith weighed in on how they looked to past Homeworld games for ideas to elevate the series for its latest entry. They were particularly interested in some of the common complaints regarding Homeworld 1's campaign and its adaptive difficulty, meanwhile, the new War Games mode was a way of taking the Homeworld series and the RTS genre into completely new territory.

Homeworld 3 Review

While it may have a few frustrations, Homeworld 3 once again reminds fans just why this RTS franchise has been met with such acclaim.

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By Max Borman

A New Approach to Difficulty Addresses An Old Homeworld Campaign Problem

Homeworld veterans may recall how the game's adaptive difficulty system would throw proportionally larger fleets at the player depending on what they brought into the mission. Although surviving with a persistent fleet throughout the campaign is a major selling point, actually growing and maintaining the same fleet from mission to mission could lead to some brutally difficult late-game encounters. This leads to players "gaming the system" by outright deleting ships between missions to soften up the difficulty curve.

We heard a lot of the feedback from Homeworld 1. "If you do this mission with no units, and then build them, you get to win that mission" or whatever. Knowing the tricks that were done in the previous games, we didn't want to have to recreate that problem. We really wanted to have people be able to enjoy the experience and the vibes and story of a Homeworld game, so we decided to do a difficulty system.

We have story, easy, medium, and hard. We actually also have custom difficulties, so you can go in and turn on a bunch of things like make your mothership invulnerable, instant build, and all these things for people who want to just play the experience how they want to.

To bring the focus back to strategic gameplay rather than strategic metagaming, Homeworld 3 opted for a selectable difficulty system instead. With a static difficulty level across the campaign, players can focus more on their fleet composition and tactics, knowing that the next mission won't be either impossible or trivial just because the player happens to have a certain number of ships on hand. Going one step further, customizable difficulty options make the campaign easily accessible to players who want to experience the story with minimal hassle.

The War Games Roguelike Mode Is A MIcrocosm of Homeworld's Classic Campaign Structure

With a series that earned its stripes by bringing something completely new to the RTS genre, it's on-brand for Homeworld 3 to try out something that's almost never seen in the genre: roguelike gameplay. The War Games mode may be hit or miss among players depending on how much crossover there is between Homeworld fans and roguelike fans, but it can't be denied that this new mode is a novel twist on the classic formula.

It was interesting for us to figure out how to bring something new to Homeworld and RTS that some people aren't doing in RTS. So for us, that's the War Games mode, a cooperative roguelike RTS. I don't even know who else is doing that right now, but it is really an awesome challenge.

We were looking at the mode and what we wanted to do with it, and we thought, "This fits so well into the franchise of Homeworld. I go persistently from one mission to the next with my fleet, that fleet is powered up, and not only do I get to do that myself but now I get to do that with my friends," which is just next level. It came down to "How can we push a new game mode or the RTS genre in a really cool way?"

The roguelike War Games mode also feels like a microcosm of a Homeworld campaign with its persistent fleet traveling from mission to mission. This resemblance to Homeworld's well-established campaign structure is perhaps why the War Games mode makes so much sense in Homeworld 3, and Blackbird Interactive appears to be doubling down on the mode with additional content in store from its Year One Pass.

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