Homeworld

aka: Spaghetti Ball
Moby ID: 296
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Conversion (official) Included in Special Edition

Description official descriptions

A discovery is about to turn the culture of Kharak upside down. The people, Kushan, are not native to Kharak at all. The discovery of the Guidestone is the ultimate proof that Kushan had came from another solar system, far away. And it's time to go home. The Mothership project united the world. Part base, part construction yard, the Mothership is capable of everything, as you never know what you will find in the void...

Homeworld is a 3D strategy game where you control a mothership and a fleet as you harvest resources, conduct research, and build up your fleet that can vary from small, fast, and nimble scouts to lumbering heavy cruisers. Move your camera in full 3D (up/down/around) and issue full 3D movement orders. Specify 3D formations for your ships, employ cloaked vessels to ambush enemy or employ salvage vessels to capture enemy ships, or defend against them with prox sensors and mines. There is a 17-mission single player campaign, or you can play online in true internet multi-player.

Spellings

  • 家园 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

175 People (132 developers, 43 thanks) · View all

Senior Vice President
General Manager
Producer, Ext. Development
Director of Marketing
Product Managers
PR Manager
Creative Services
QA Manager
QA Supervisor
QA Leads
QA Analysts
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 90% (based on 35 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 96 ratings with 10 reviews)

Great game, Great story

The Good
I loved the graphics, sound, music, gameplay and all of that, but what really hit me was the fact that the underlying story line was fresh and interesting. The game manual has tons of background information about the Kushan and their discovery of Hiigara. If you have the game, but ignored the manual, go read it now...if you don't have the game yet, and are an RTS/Sci-Fi fan, get it now, and RTFM. Having a story that draws you into the game makes the single-player missions even more enjoyable.

The Bad
The races aren't exactly diverse...but I'd say that's a minor concern.

The Bottom Line
Real time strategy unlike anything you've ever played before in terms of story, graphics, sound, and gameplay.

Windows · by MA17 (252) · 2000

An experience, not just a game.

The Good
The idea of a fully-three dimensional real time strategy game is, in and of itself, a bold and innovative idea. The concept of using outer space isn't difficult to foresee,then, considering this was what Relic wanted to go for, regardless of whether or not this relegates the Kushan as humanoids in their perception of space-time.

The implementation of rule sets that are both deep and yet possible to master are what make this idea worth playing. The research mechanic is shallow, resource gathering and production are centralised. But then, what they lack in immediate complexity, they return with bringing focus to the one thing no one could see without going back to those Star Wars films that were about two decades old (for the one that came out that year was the one no one wants to speak fondly about). And even those were based on the mercy of the once-hailed but now-maligned director.

The eerie feeling that you are standing at the edge of a never-ending abyss is always there. Maybe it is the claustrophobic soundtrack that gives you a glimpse of how small you really are. Maybe it is how long it takes for you to get to the land that was yours, each landing having a boundary of a 1000 kilometres at the very least. Maybe it is the Kushan meeting on the way to your land those who could not come with you and see what became of them. Maybe it is all of them, none of them and everything in between.

You are the Kushan. You are hunted by the largest empire in the known universe. And you are alone. Mostly.

The Bad
Its past and its future. Make no mistake, this game is not a Star Wars battle simulator, for that is all its screenshots would impress upon those who would remember them, whether they would like to or not. This game became a niche title, played now by those who do not necessarily flock to Lord PewDiePie and his enviable ability to provide consumable opinions to over 25 million people with one video.

It is not Star Wars and it is not part of the RTS canon of StarCraft and Total War.

The Bottom Line
Homeworld was the first true indicator of what Relic, and the video game industry in general, could do to create works of art. The combination of music that questions the notion of secure presence in any physical space just by the use of background sounds, tactical combat that subtly tells you that your units have a mind inside of them and the systemisation of the attraction a moth must feel to the brightest source of light in its vicinity to tell you where you are supposed to be going results in only one conclusion: Homeworld has yet to lose its power as a piece of art.

Windows · by Victor Joseph (9) · 2015

What is wrong with you people?

The Good
Good graphics. That's mostly it. The graphics are impressive in their own time, and almost entirely run the game. Also, it didn't seem to crash very often or have many errors, and it was possible to move in 3D, a rarity in games. Finally, resources transfer over from levels.

The Bad
It's a slow game, with complicated controls, especially difficult missions, boring music, and a token, nonsensical storyline.

To elaborate, perhaps one of the biggest, though by no means only downsides of this game is the music. First, it's slow and boring, like a lullaby, that makes you want to fall asleep, but worse. For a non-turn-based game to be good, you at least have to convey that there's some excitement involved, even if in reality space is vast and lonely. Second, there's not much choice of music, and you end up listening to the same songs over and over again. Third, it doesn’t have much variety. They all sound pretty much the same, so you really don't have much choice if you don't like it, besides turning it off. Then, there's the game itself. Its graphics will probably entice you to buy it, but after you're gotten over your amazement in the first few levels, you realize there's really not much fun in the missions. They're complicated by the dizzying array of controls and uses of keys, made even worse by the very thing that was supposed to make it better, 3D, so that you get the feeling you have no business commanding a fleet, and would be better off controlling just one or two ships, but you can't if you want to succeed. And even if you do succeed with the missions, and get over the boredom, it'll eventually become to difficult to complete at all, even if you think you've done all you could in the prior missions, making you wonder if you should go back and try those boring missions again.

Then, to make a long review longer, there's the storyline, which is a whole topic in itself. You can read the entire manual (which I did), listen carefully to every word said in the beginning movie and in-game, and play more than halfway through, but it won't make a difference. You still won't get it. You can start as either of two factions, though I think there's only one or two differences between them, then fight the other side when you play. But you never figure out why you're fighting. Which is fine for the first few missions, but then it starts getting really, really frustrating as you go on and start struggling, not knowing who you're fighting. You don't even get to see people's faces, so you don't know what you look like, but soon you start thinking "Hey, I've dragged in almost a dozen ships with their pilots still alive, how come no one simply asked them why they're shooting at us?" It makes a player angry, like playing a text adventure where there's an obvious answer, but the program can't seem to recognize it. You're some race living on a desert planet, leave it for your homeworld...but someone wants to stop you? WHY? Maybe you find out in the end, maybe not, but I was fed up before that happened. I finally snapped when it came to an asteroid level, about halfway through the game. For some reason not explained in the game, your mothership must fly through an asteroid field at a constant speed. No reason why, no explanation for why you can't just go around, above, or below it, why you can't stop, clear a path, and continue when it's clear, or why you can't harvest their resources (by the way, it also doesn't make sense that you can find all the resources necessary to make ships in just a few asteroids. Last I checked, most asteroids were made of just a few elements and compounds, so unless your people, whoever they are, know alchemy, I don't see how you can turn iron into uranium, radon, or whatever materials you need to build spacecraft), for which the asteroid belt seems to contain a wealth of, and use them to make a huge fleet and fully upgraded Mothership. That just took the cake for me, and I stopped playing the game.

The Bottom Line
A waste of money. It beacons you to buy it with it's fancy graphics and the feeling it's a "new" game, then entices you further with it's token plot, but when you get down to it, the game hardly makes any sense, and its faults combine to make it a boring, stupid, difficult game, that stops being fun after the initial shock at its newness wears off around level 3 or 4. You'd have to have a mighty strong suspension of disbelief, and a very weak sense of adventure to enjoy this game, plus be either superhuman or have massive perseverance to finish this game. I can't comprehend why this game got a 3.9 out of 5, unless the people here rated it after just playing the first two levels, or just looking at the box.

Windows · by kvn8907 (173) · 2007

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Not a 4X game SharkD (425) Feb 4, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Homeworld appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cut content

When asked, the development team at Relic said the game will feature 5 different races: Taiidan, Kushan,Turanic Raiders, Kadeshi, and T-mat. In the final version, the T-mat was absent. Although the modders community have found a reference to some of their ships in the source, Relic never released more info about them.

Music

The British rock band Yes approached Alex Garden to have their coming song put into an idea for the game. They both came into an agreement liking the idea of how Homeworld is pretty down to reality ('we're all finding a way home') and for this specially this game, Yes produced the song Homeworld / The Ladder which was the newest single of 1999 and the opening song for their album The Ladder. On the album was a Homeworld trailer.

Online servers

The game's online servers (which were hosted on World Opponent Network, or WON) were shut down on 1 November 2008 in the wake of WON's total closure.

References

The game contains a reference to the movie Blade Runner. After playing past mission 7, look at your autosaves. Some of them will have a prefix of "Tenhauser Gate," which is part of the dying words of replicant Roy Batty.

Source code

On 26 September 2003, the Homeworld source code and accompanying documentation was released by Relic on their Relic Developer Network. It has been stripped of code not owned by Relic Entertainment (including but not limited to the Bink SDK). On 21 February 2004, the code was released to the public

Awards

  • CNET GameCenter
    • 1999 - Strategy Game of the Year
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Strategy Game of the Year
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Best Manual of the Year
  • Gamepower
    • 1999 - Top 5 Strategy Games
  • Gamespot
    • 1999 - Best Music of the Year
  • GameSpy
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #98 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • Gonegold
    • 1999 - '99 Must Have
  • I.D. Magazine
    • 2000 - Silver Award (Interactive Media Design)
  • PC Gamer
    • 1999 - Game of the Year
    • April 2005 - #46 on the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/2000 - Most Original Game in 1999
  • PC Zone
    • 1999 - Game of the Year
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/2000 – Most Innovative Game in 1999

Information also contributed by Carlos Aquino, DarkDante; Henry Aloni, Indra was here, Maw; PCGamer77, Sciere and Scott Monster

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Related Sites +

  • Homeworld
    Relic's website for reference of the game. Includes screenshots, concept art, ships descriptions...
  • Homeworld @ GamingHaven.com
    Game reviews, links, screenshots and more.
  • Pilotview How-To
    View the battles from a pilot's point of view! Right click your Homeworld shortcut and add the switch /pilotView to homeworld.exe. In game, focus on any unit and press "Q". This even works for enemy units! The pilotView functionality requires Homeworld version 1.4 or greater.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 296
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Rynok.

Additional contributors: Kasey Chang, Unicorn Lynx, Arvin Chandra, Scott Monster, DarkDante, cow, Patrick Bregger, Plok, FatherJack.

Game added September 30, 1999. Last modified March 28, 2024.