Overall Feedback: Story and Gameplay (Up to Mission 12)

[restive frigate]

Hi all,

I've been playing Homeworld and all the sequels since around the year 2000. I'm also a day 1 Fig backer. I've been thinking about this game and I want to offer my feedback. I ended up writing a lot more than expected, so apologies.

First, I'm on the 12th mission, and I wanted to stop here to leave feedback because the truth of it is, I'm having a hard time wanting to press on.

I think one of the main reasons is that from a story perspective, I'm not really inspired at all. Previous games had a story that always sucked me in enough to motivate me to finish. Right now I feel I'm grinding through. Imogen and Isaac are alright...the constant in and out of Imogen opening and closing her chamber doors I feel should have been replaced with the older slideshow type presentation we had in previous games, with the impactful narration. And save the animation for the most dramatic scenes. I gotta say though, most of the time I get the feeling that they are going to cry. Like, all the time. It's a bit of a change from the previous game's grim determination in the voices of Fleet Commmand and "the S'Jet" type, with occasional cracks of emotion. Instead it feels like tons of emotion with the occasional crack of grim determination, if that makes sense? I donno. I think there's a lot of potential with these two, this feels almost like a direction type of thing. It's nice to have a face on Fleet Command though.

That said, my main problem is the main villian of the game, who I can't even name off the top of my head, just is kinda boring. Where I think she's trying to be intimidating, instead she comes off as a child throwing a temper tantrum most of the time. She's like a saturday morning cartoon villian.
Compared to DoK or even HW2, I just feel that the previous games had so much heart. Even the villains. In HW2, which I felt had the weakest story of them all prior to HW3 (for a lot of the same reasons...suddenly there are 3 magic hyperspace cores and the cliched old "original race that mysteriously abandoned the galaxy" trope, which was less played out in 2003 than it is today), Makaan at least came off an intimidating warrior, rarely raising his voice while grimly stating his intentions.
DoK's random Gaalsien mini bosses (such as the first Gaalsien captain you fight) just oozed more character than the Queen.

Regarding gameplay...

1. All these enclosed maps....and I'm sick of the limit on how far I can zoom in. I want to be able to zoom in so far on a focused unit I can literally read the book one of the crew is reading through a cabin window. Instead there's an aritrary limit on how far I can zoom in, which is super frusterating since nearly every map plays like we're actually in an indoor arena and I cannot zoom in without clipping into a wall.
2. Why no open space maps? The most fun I've had so far are the most open maps. The least fun have been maps like when I had to hide the mothership "underwater" along with the rest of my fleet. Part of what made that so frusterating is because the ship AI has a mind of its own, and ships would wander off and reveal the mothership....I beat it by keeping the mothership at the beginning of the stage and just using 4 wings of stealth bombers to blow up the sensors. Then moving only the mothership to the objective.
3. Why is setting the Z axis so frusterating? I can't remember it being this frusterating to work with in previous games. I just want the ships to go up, or to go down sometimes. I don't want them to go at an angle, and I don't want to somehow click on the other side of the map. I just want them to go 90 degrees up so I can set up a pincer or to go over an obstacle.
4. Terrain masking. Like going through tunnels. For something that was emphasized so much in the trailers, getting the ships to actually go into the tunnels (without there being a giant "go into the tunnel" button on the sensor manager is so frusterating I hate to even bother with it. Once they are in the tunnel, it's super difficult to manage where I want to send my ships because of the artificial zoom limit being set.

5. Odd balance choices such as, why is the Battle Cruiser's engagement range so short? Short as in, I gotta get within broadside distance short. On the flip side, why do I have to fight the Torpedo Frigate's AI so they don't line up on the other side of the map to just launch a simple, slow moving torpedo?
6. Mouse Dragging my entire fleet does not select my entire fleet. Yes I know there's a "select entire fleet" button. But it's annoying when I'm trying to select everything in a box and it only selects certain units.
7. Peformance degradation from Denuvo is obvious. We all know Denuvo creates clear performance hits on any game it's saddled with, it's very easy to find benchmarks of games before and after Denuvo is removed. My machine is a beast too (13900KS, 4900 GTX, 64 GB RAM), and I get stutters that I only get when a game comes with the virus that is Denuvo.

Things I did like:

1. Open maps with some terrain to play with, such as the map where we have to free the Khar Kushan, was pretty fun. Also the cutscene where the Kushan breaks free of the ice was probably the best cutscene in the game. Gave me that old school feel to it.

2. Deployable turrets are a fun addition.

3. Thank you for making projectiles actual projectiles.

4. Mining is much less of a chore now. It's nice not having to juggle both a mine controller and mining vessels.

5. Destroyers.

6. Art and Sound direction are very good. If the game was judged on the art alone, then I would say it's a worthy addition.

I'm sorry this was so long. I just have a lot of passion for this franchise, and I want to see it succeed in modern times.

[lost nymph]

Have you also been noticing how the bombers and railgun corvettes approach (typical for bombers) get as close as possible to their targets? Good luck keeping any of them alive when engaging targets that blow-up or where you're trying to specifically stay out of range...

[ancient ferry]

Great summary OP. I feel the same way about the game. Not just the cons, the pros too.
It's clearly given a lot of love, but falls short in the most silly/frustrating ways.

[frozen seal]

Yea, the story and narrative are the worst thing in this game. It's just bad. The writers should be ashamed of themselves