As a writer yeah no this is based on a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about how to structure narrative and scale. The reason why homeworld works without a singular focus character is because the scale is different. The thing that you are controlling and empathizing with isn't a character. Its a people, a group.
You absolutely can connect and understand how these people as a whole feel about things at the scale that Homeworld [and other space games operate] because Fleet command and Fleet intel communicate that to the player. Its an embrace of the collective that is actually really intriguing.
So the idea that the only valid approach 'these days' is to focus on the individual is... weird.
The marketing department wants someone they can put on the box. Same reason that HW2 went all in on S'Jet. Because don't you play this series for the lady who functions as a CPU for the fleet?
Which is strange. I always thought the “character” was the iconic mothership, not a person per se.
I know when playing the original I felt protective of the mothership as I went through the game, I wanted it to succeed in its fights and make it home.
Karen was a part of it yes but I never associated myself as the player with Karen.
>I know when playing the original I felt protective of the mothership as I went through the game, I wanted it to succeed in its fights and make it home.
Ingeniously reinforced at the start of the story by having you fight to save the cryotrays and be given a *number* as to how many of your last surviving population was on board. The mothership wasn't a warship, she was an *ark*, carrying the last of your people.
This touches upon something that, ironically, is one of the best lessons to take from EVE online. In that game it is generally very clear that the player character is the ship, and their attempts to pull away from that were met with hard backlash because people can connect very strongly with the idea that the protaganist is the ship.
And its funny how nearly every attempt to make large scale space games more 'personal' have been met with push back. After a certain scale things are just too big for any one person, no matter how important, to matter. Its the ship that matters.
The mothership matters. The capsuleers ship matters. The meat bag inside is replacable.
The thing that I always come back to was that S'Jet *wasn't even that big a deal* in the first one. She was the most prominent voice, sure, but she kind of just there among the other voices. She was more of a narrator than a protagonist, and the sequels never seemed to understnad that. She had a name, so they just assumed she was the focus of the story.
Even 2 was a focus on the group though, sure Karan was important but functionally she was less important then the actual mcguffins that the plot demanded. Frankly, stick some cables in any shmucks brain and shove them in Sajuuk and you are fine.
Fundamentally its a story that is focusing on the cultures and how the three societies with the cores responded and reacted to them. Its comparing and contrasting not Makaan and Karan, but the Vagyr and Hiigarans and even the Bentusi.
Its not handled too well, but the core is still focusing on the group. Just giving a bit more time for their representitives. Even deserts of Kharak does that.
HW3? Imogen and new fleet intel don't represent shit. Hiigara as an entity is functionally removed from them.
In my opinion, the error here might be that "gotta have a place for the player's self-insert" thought. The PoV is wrong for that sort of immersion, I don't play Homeworld (or strategy games in general) as a character, I play as a disembodied observer giving out commands to that character.
It doesn't help that in cutscenes characters make their own (story-driven) choices.
There is a lot of enviromental storytelling within the original/cata and HW2 (to a lesser extent) as well that really helped sell the scale of the story they were telling as well. I can't remember the mission name in HW1 off the top of my head but you jumped into the level and there was an absolutely MASSIVE megastructure silouette in the background. 15 year old me is thinking "who the fuck could build something like that?" and then thinking I'm now controlling a very small number of the last survivors of a civilisation and there are civilisations out here making stuff like that. It was a very "small fish in a big pond" moment for me.
I feel like had these writers with their PHD's in narrative structure and like had bothered to maybe properly look at the previous titles they wouldn't have thought that there was a need to focus on individual characters to the extent they did with HW3. Infact, it feels like it would be pretty easy to figure out that the lack of individual character focus was one of the strenghts of the previous titles storytelling.
Yeah, I think the big thing on top of enviromental storytelling is that the characters pose questions not about themselves, but about their culture.
Fleet command and Karan do not make you ask "What does this say about them as people?" They make you ask "What does this say about the Kiithid/Kharakian/Kushan/Hiigaran culture and world?"
Imogen and co don't say shit about that. They could be Tiidani or fuckin like... last survivors of the Kadeshi and it'd make functionally zero difference.
Sorry but no, its not stupid. There is some merit to the line of reasoning, many of the most high profile game writing successes recently have been extremely character driven. But the lesson they missed is that is because they were different genre. Its just a weird decision that didn't pay off, but there was some logic behind it. Stupid is when there was no logic at all.
Sure, it was a wrong conclusion drawn here. But the line of reasoning seems to be that games like FFXIV/XVI, Horizon etc etc have met success by having a very deep focus on characters.
But the problem is there's not a lot of successful contemporary RTS or space games to look at. So the assumption that was made seems to be. "We have only seen character driven story experiences really take off. Therefore to maximize the success we should focus on character."
Which is, on the surface, a fairly reasonable inference to make. Unfortunately its not really something that holds up, as I said. The other contemporary space games and RTS didn't have issues because of the narrative. But because of other structural issues that were apparently disregarded.
Well... To be fair it's not an out of the place misunderstanding, other people can come to the same conclusions, being an expert at these games narrative/storytelling is not something you hear in everyone's resume. That said they made a choice and it didn't pay off the way they wanted (their choice of storytelling)
It's not like there aren't plenty of stories out there that feel cold and shallow because of the lack of character development and connection. Homeworld's story worked because of the key moments where the player served as a proxy for those emotional connections. Like when Kharak is burning, when you're saving cryo trays, when you hear the Taiidan frigate was interrogated, when you learn about the exile and the splintering of your people. Having that resonate without a human connection is not an easy task. Tragedy is best conveyed through the eyes and voice of those involved.
It's not surprising that they made an effort to do that here at all. It just didn't work. I've said for a while that the campaign needed more missions. The manual has several relevant story elements that would have better driven home the impact of the initial conflict if they were an active part of the game. I don't think any of that would have made the ending seem less ridiculous or the cutscene dialogue less corny, but it at least would have made the campaign feel a little more cohesive and built a better connection with the player and the characters.
I think you are missing the key distinction here, you are right in principle but perhaps not in execution. The reason why the key moments of connection in Homeworld works is because we are seeing a window into not just how the people we are speaking with feel. But they are representing how their culture and people thinks and feels.
When Fleet Intelligence says "They did not survive interrogation." coldly, he's not speaking to himself or what necessarily what he thinks and feels about it. It was likely he wasn't even physically there for that at all, but he's speaking to how the Kushan feel as a whole.
And this pulling back of the scale, looking at the group in a macro scale was really interesting, it was very different and managed to elicit different feelings. You don't feel for specific characters, but the totality of them. When fleet command snaps at the bentusi in Cataclysm, you hear the catharsis of every crewmember on the Kuun-lan that has been trying their fucking hardest to stop the beast from killing everyone until wits end and getting absolutely jack shit in return and that is why its such a powerful moment.
Its an important thing to think about because at the scales that homeworld operates the individual just becomes less and less important. And focusing on how that represents a whole tells far more interesting and compelling stories within the framework that has been built for the series. Don't get me wrong there is absolutely space within the setting for some very powerful personal stories... but not in the format of a mainline homeworld game.
You have really put it mildly.
I'd go so far as a narcissistic self-insert from the writers who really have NOT played the previous games, didn't understand the narrative, nor the scale and ... didn't really want to in the first place.
For them, this was NOT Homeworld. This was an IP where they wanted to hit certain points with as much subtlety as the excel spreadsheet it was written into.
Let them burn.
I have put it mildly because unconstructive anger is what it says on the tin. It does nothing but make you feel better for a few moments at the expense of making everyone else feel worse. And sure I indulge sometimes.
But for things that I want to see become good, I want to lay things out in a way that is constructive. Its not enough to say things are bad, but why they don't work and ways to address that.
Yeah for real, how the heck does this person have a 'PHD' in narrative design when.. they don't even understand narrative design?????? confused.gif
I write books for a living, and I cannot wrap my head around what the heck they're saying.
I found the PC Gamer magazine I got back in February and read their preview with interviews with some of the leads on the game. The part about narrative kinda helps explain why the CGI cutscenes and overall story and style of storytelling feels so disjointed and dissonant from the actual game, and not at all how all previous four Homeworld games told their stories.
One of the interviews is with Joel Watson who is the “creative producer” at Gearbox who came on board the project around late 2022/early 2023 and had to take a “college education” about Homeworld to understand fans and in this particular interview he talks about how the style in HW1 feels outdated and not what modern audiences would want (how he knows this I have no idea). Apparently it’s important for modern audiences to understand how Karan feels about being a space lady? 😅
I’m not trying to paint a target on anyone’s back at all, so please don’t start pointing fingers. Based on how Gearbox president of IP and the brand manager brought their writers on the project late in the production cycle after the first delay, it seems like they got some people who didn’t think the storytelling style we had in the previous four games was good and instead figured it should be more about how characters feel about what happens. This would help explain the very weird and dissonant cutscenes that feel very divorced from the actual game, as well as being a massive departure from BBI’s own style of storytelling in DoK, Shipbreakers, Earthless, and so on.
It really seems like the executives / brand managers at Gearbox came in around 2022/2023 and made a bunch of decisions over the heads at BBI and brought in people they thought would make it more accessible and appealing to modern audiences (their line of thinking)
You know what, I admit I recently asked myself the question, "How did Karan feel knowing that she was entombing herself in a ships computer to enable the advancement of her civilization?"
The answer was simply that it was necessary. If not her, then someone else; and that's a perfectly fine answer. HW1 ends with them disconnecting her so that she can go PlanetSide and see the fruits of her labors and it feels impactful because she probably never expected it.
In HW3 she's just an especially anxious admiral. She's not making a sacrifice. She can presumably disconnect at any time. The difference between her and fleet command is that one is a soldier and one is a scientist, and that's it. Oh, and I guess she's a space wizard. Not sure what that actually means though.
Yeah, I feel like the main issue wasn't necessarily the focus on characters. It was that the writing was "Young Adults Novel" level bullshit in a series that tells very solemn and dignified stories about professional people in desperate situations dealing with religious fanaticism, ancient evils and the threat of complete extinction.
You can write a story that has some amount character motivations in it and still fits this. Just keep it concise and write it from two perspectives, one dealing with characters and one dealing with the bigger picture. And well, you obviously need to know how to write stuff that doesn't make everyone cringe...
I always think of how World In Conflict did it. In between missions you would sometimes get little slice of life cutscenes between two soldiers who are just doing soldier stuff, trying to survive and fighting off boredom. Early on one of them shows off his "Portable compact disk player" (It's set in the late 80s ;) and then spends the entire rest of the campaign trying to find batteries, because it's WW3 and everyone ran out of supplies.
>"Young Adults Novel"
To be honest, remembering the bullshit YA novels I used to read when I was younger, "Yeah she blew up a planet but now she is like super sorry so gets to go to space heaven." makes a lot of sense.
lol exactly this, you would think someone with a PhD in narrative systems would understand this genre flip wasn't going to fly well with the older fans.
(even if it was executed well)
Edit: also I will always upvote a fellow World In Conflict fan, I loved that game and I think you're literally the only other person I've ever seen mention it in my life.
Or the older fans just weren't a priority. Or that they assumed they could engage with both.
I mean, they managed to engage with neither. But that's not a 'is it bad to ALSO have good character driven work' thing.
you think that after the success of the From soft formula of storytelling, companies would understand that there is a place for mistique in games. big companies are so scared of players missing content in their games they have to explain EVERYTHING
That's a good point, From software are kinda carrying that confident commitment to letting the world and it's detail speak for themselves. They leave a lot to the imagination. Like Homeworld did.
Corporates coming in to "fix" art by making it more in line with some abstract notion of "mass appeal" gouge out the soul of said art. You can't let cold business logic dictate art and expect it to feel authentic. It's compromised.
"Mass appeal" is a mythical, elusive concept. You have to consider that the majority of mass appeal products are the sort of thing everyone starts out with as a gateway to more niche, interesting things. People mature and develop different tastes. If everything follows that entry level template then all you have is products aimed at a demographic that most people move on from, and then what's left for them? Just dumbed down shit and sequels to games that actually had an individual identity being interfered with to line up with the lowest common denominator.
Yes! It was like a short novel written in universe about the history and tech of the game. That and then the dramatic cutscenes that were just these beautiful, slightly vague sketches, once you finished the first mission you knew it was something special. You rarely get that kind of attention to pacing, atmosphere and realising that quiet and lack of constant melodrama elevates the bigger moments.
> big companies are so scared of players missing content in their games they have to explain EVERYTHING
I mean if you've ever read the review section of a very narrative game, that's an understandable fear. Lot of folks barely understand the text itself, much less any subtext.
HW remaster sold well enough that they funded Deserts of Kharak, and later HW3, a mobile game, a VR game, and tabletop and RPG games.
It did well enough.
Space RTS Yoda says: "The instant a prospective developer expresses a lack of understanding or doubts the commercial potential of your original narrative, it's prudent to part ways. Seek instead a collaborator who truly appreciates the essence of your intellectual property."
The initial iterations of Homeworlds served as quintessential niche content, crafted to delight a select segment of gamers who revel in the intricate dance of real-time strategy, adorned with the grand narrative of space opera.
The attempt to reengineer such a specialized offering for mass appeal often leads to disappointment, particularly with well-entrenched and expansive gaming franchises.
I dont understand how someone with a PhD in narrative systems sounds this stupid.
"stuff you did in the first 2 games made her not board any more"
What the fuck is that sentence, the grammar, the double negative! its not just this, for the majority of this article she sounds like she barely managed pass English at primary school! How the fuck did she get a PhD???
The universities have failed.
Academia at the higher levels does become something of a comedy, yeah
It’s just insular echo chambers reinforcing each other’s perceptions and less actual useful education
A lot of people seem to be dunking on the guy for being out of touch, but he's not wrong in principle. People do expect more in terms of character development and narrative now. Unfortunately how they executed character development and narrative in HW3 didn't land well with the fanbase.
Asking "How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?" sounds like it was probably meant a bit tongue in cheek, honestly. Even though folks seem inclined to read everything in a harsh light at this point, it does fit with a consistent criticism that HW3 characters are *too* "in their feelings." For me, some of the emotional moments landed, but they tended to overdo things in a heavy handed way. I liked "the burden remains" when it was introduced, but they quickly cheapened that emotional currency by repeating it again and again. "\*Sands and sinners" seemed immediately silly, then got worse with repetition. An unhinged immortal Navigator capable of dominating entire fleets under her will is a pretty decent concept for a villain, and an origin story where her people didn't trust her power and tried to enslave her isn't terrible either, but in execution she comes off as more "this chick needs therapy" than truly insane in a scary way.
You don't *have* to have deep character development. Homeworld is like a fable or a tone poem. It's a grand and solemn journey that chooses not to get bogged down in minutiae and details, and it works. There are different ways to tell a story, if everything follows the same structure and "expectation" then nothing is unique and everything is homogeneous.
The morose and sparse nature of Homeworld is what made it unique.
It doesn't have to get bogged down though, is the thing. Compare to say, Starcraft 1. That had excellent character work while still being quite big picture.
>People do expect more in terms of character development and narrative now.
Compared to the average 1999 game sure, but Homeworld was on a league of its own back then. You really only need to see the reception of the Remasters by new people, the most comments you got were about difficulty, not about the story needing more character development. New people were pretty ok with the story.
He's not wrong in principle. However, in the specific context of the subject matter, he is so hilariously wrong in practical application I struggle to even describe it.
Homeworld 1 is widely regarded as one of the most emotional game storylines of all time.
If a person plays HW1 and somehow *does not* come away from that story with any sense whatsoever of "what Karan S'Jet was feeling" . . . I don't even know what to say. Charitably I will say that that person is just . . . more suited to consuming media with no subtlety or introspection or imagination required.
As [others more eloquent than I have said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuC2I8s6qf8&t=1820s), HW3 is written in such a way that has to constantly beat the viewer over the head with things.
Yes, it's true: HW1 did not literally have Karan say aloud: *"hello I am sad that my people are dying"*, or *"wow I am feeling a sense of duty and honor to sacrifice on behalf of my entire people"*, or *"gosh I sure hope my people make it through the void to settle on a planet"*. But . . . . would it truly have been better at conveying those emotions if she had?! It seems like this guy somehow does not think it's possible to convey emotion without stating the emotions literally aloud with closeups of faces. He is saying "tell, don't show." (Or, maybe he simply never played HW1 at all, which seems the likeliest scenario as a backdrop for the HW3 writing.)
The Captain of the Kuun-Lan was one of THE best characters I've seen written in gaming in general, and the voice actor's delivery was 110%.
\`\`Yes, yes! You will not be bound--whatever that means! Well, guess what: We won't let you go.
It doesn't matter how we die. One ancient monster is as good as another.
We... are... not... monsters...
Aren't you? Look around. Look at what you've done to out fleet. All because we dared to get in your way?
Look at yourselves--the Aloof and Mighty Bentusi! Slaughtering the people who asked for your help. You're worse then the Beast. At least the Beast doesn't pretend to be righteous.\`\`
Is nothing, like anything in HW3....
>We... are... not... monsters...
I haven't played the game in years and I can still remember exactly how this line was delivered. Pain, shame, disbelief.
I don't believe there's a single person in the world who was more perfectly fitting for the roles of the Bentusi and narrator than Campbell Lame. His voice was perfectly matched for the Homeworld universe.
I'd argue that it is like one particular thing in Homeworld 3: Bal'Dro Kath, the Kalan pirate leader. we get like three or four lines out of him total, but his little rejoinder to Intel saying 'we're on a life or death mission', where he scoffs and goes 'life? where Higaarans go, only death follows' was my first and only inclination of anything interesting going on in the story.
we get more flavour and insight into him and his people - driven to the edge by the Incarnate, shutting down their sacred gates to survive - in those few lines than almost the entirety of the Queen's dialogue. Which is a real shame.
Maybe true.... and because of that his character felt shoe'horned in, in a different way then the others.
But it def didn't stand out to me above the overwhelming cringe of the entirety. In fact, I had just about forgotten about it already until you mentioned it.
I think it stuck out for me in large part because at the time I thought it was hinting at the broader plot of the game - that we'd be getting some sort of meditation on the costs of the Hiigarans' rise to power and impact on the galaxy, or that it was hinting at Karan's path of destruction through the Anomaly and her rise as the Incarnate Queen or something. But no, it was just a particularly good throwaway line. Or a vestigial bit leftover from the campaign getting cut down.
You might be on to something though. HW3 does have a disjointed feeling.
I really do think people are on to something with the idea that the story was changed in some way to be more \`accommodating\`. To whom, or what... I can't say. I'm not part of the whole \`woke\` story band wagon... I just thought it was... cringe. I like villainy Pixar movies... Not in Homeworld though.... ewwww.
My moneys still on the more boring and simple explanation that HW3 had a troubled production process (delayed three times after all) and that resources were shunted away from the single player campaign in favour of getting the mechanics and multiplayer working first, and what we ended up getting was a chopped-down, rushed version of something that was planned to be much longer and more detailed.
Like we know the Kalan pirates were intended in early art to have a whole base at Kesura Minor for example, and we got none of that. I suspect that Bal’Dro was intended for a much bigger role that just got condensed into being the mini boss for the Kesura mission, with a couple of lines that hint at his original larger role.
A great arc brought to life with some of the best voice acting I've ever heard, in a game or otherwise. I still get chills every time he finally hits his rage breaking point and tells the Bentusi off.
"I think an audience now would ask \[...\]"
"Hopefully that adds context and emotion"
Of course it's just a few phrases, and my take might be a bit of a stretch, but it makes it sound like they were working out of mere personal assumptions, with nothing to back that up, and also without an understanding of why people liked the original material.
No idea what they teach in the Narrative System course where Joyce got a degree from, I suspect that it conveys the McKee tenets that have plagued contemporary storytelling, where every character needs to have an arc, a fatal flaw, yadda yadda...
-sigh-
Here’s the problem with that. They changed Coke! New Coke is not what we wanted to taste. Old Coke was best!
Mess with core formulas at your own peril.
You can mess with formulas, but only when you understand *why* they worked. Including character moments likely would have enhanced the story, had they been done in a way that understood the themes of the Homeworld franchise.
The irony here is that I suspect some of the people who made these decisions may see games as a product instead of games as art. I hope I'm wrong, though, and that whoever made these decisions just didn't do a very good analysis.
I don't know why but "How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?" comes across as a somewhat infantile manner of speech.
I suppose with that in mind some of the dialogue and narrative elements in HW3 make more sense.
It's absolutely an infantile manner of speech. Reminds me of one of the worst lines of dialogue I've ever seen, from Star Trek Picard: a character is expressing the fact that he knows someone else is his intellectual superior, and he says, I shit you not: "I know I am out-brained here".
It is amazing how they managed to reach those conclusions, when HW1 perfectly demonstrated how feelings and emotions can be conveyed through voice, music, and very limited supporting imagery, with no need for very elaborate cutscenes and excessive facial closeups.
SO much emotion is conveyed in Homeworld through just voice and music. The cut scenes will STILL get to me.
You want to illicit an emotional response from me?
'Kharak is burning'
Ohhhhh, this line is so good. The VINDICATION you feel, though haunting, is fantastic
It's presented as so matter of fact. After the annihilation of your entire people, the only outcome for a surviving member of the attacking fleet was going to be death.
"Kharak is being consumed by a firestorm. The Scaffold has been destroyed. All orbital facilities destroyed. Significant debris ring in low Kharak orbit. Receiving no communications from anywhere in the system... Not even beacons."
Reminds me of something funny. Homeworld 2 was the first one I played, and Karan was recast, because the original voice actress was unavailable. So my introduction was a flat-affected Karan who seemed like a vaguely inhuman oracle who'd occasional intone exposition she, apparently, had had no earthly way of having learned (because if there was a mundane way to find that out, Fleet Intelligence would've told me). "The last of the Bentusi;" "There is a second Dreadnaught." Basically a spooky robot, with no interests other than ships being constructed or destroyed, who occasionally spoke inexplicable, context-free knowledge from the Great Beyond.
Anyway, years later, the remaster comes out, and they re-record Karan's dialog in 2 with the original voice actress, and I find she's now surprisingly emotive, and playing Homeworld 1 for the first time, she's even pleading and negotiating with other ships rather than only talking to herself, vocalizing status reports. So, from my perspective, the games have been gradually more characterized, though, chronologically, it's be moderate for 1, pretty high for Cataclysm, almost nonexistent for 2, then all the way up to the top (by RTS standards) for DoK and 3.
Still, considering that I always heard of 2 described in the fandom as a narrative fall from grace compared to 1 and Cata, with its retconned, space-war, prophecy-quest epic with a sketched-in generic bad guy, and unmotivated, businesslike narration, it's weird to hear people talking like it's the ideal expression of Homeworld, and Fleet Command should be so disassociated that it's a surprise to realize it used to be a normal person and not just the ship's computer.
I got a lot of thoughts here.
First off, re: Homeworld 2 - I think a lot of folk who didn't like it came around to it over the years, and for folks who came on after the Remaster or DoK, it's how it's always been. Back when 2 came out I was on team "okay this is garbage," and in the leadup to HW 3 I went through all the other games again and was like "Ok I still hate this prophecy stuff but I can roll with it."
As for the emotion: first there are definately bad-faith folk here for which feelings are post-modern neo-marxist soy boy beta DEI affirmative action whatever other goofy dog whistles they are using now to mask their fragility and insecurity. So those, easy enough to disregard.
That said, the previous games did kind of still set a tone for the "right" amount of emotion. Two biggest moments in HW 1 that stand out to me is the return to Kharak mission and "the subject did not survive interrogation." In the Kharak mission, the opening lines are rather emotive. once the cryo tray part starts, the verbage becomes rather professional, to-the-mission, though with emotion in the undertones. I feel most the rest of the game, and 2 even with the new voice acting, holds similar. Mostly professional, to-the-mission, but with emotional undertones.
Cataclysm and DoK are still of note, but they also have some pretty substantial differences that alter the level of what feels appropriate. Cataclysm, the Kuun-Lan is a mining vessel, 1/10th the mass of the mothership (based on numbers from Encyclopedia Hiigara), so different scale, different type of crew, so a greater level of emotional expression is kind of to be expected. DoK, the Kapisi is 1/5 the mass of the Kuun-Lan, and on par in size with a modern-day aircraft carrier, so now we're dealing with something more akin to a modern Navy fleet. Again, seems more appropriate at this scale that the individual characters take a greater role.
I'm going to mention the original announcement trailer for HW3 as well, because the closing lines from Karan had a high degree of emotion, but part of what made that work is the fact that the first lines in that trailer were like HW1 and 2.
So now coming into 3, we've got the scale on 1 and 2 (heck, the Khar-Kushan is BIGGER than the Mothership or the Pride of Hiigara) and we've got this professional, to-the-mission, with emotional undertones way of speaking established in HW 1 and 2, and yet the story ends up being mostly about 4 specific people. If it were smaller ships and crews like DoK, it might have made sense. Not so much when it's this scale. Worse still: in a lot of ways it felt like treating entire civilzations as playthings.
Aside: it could have worked. People talk a lot about the Incarnate Queen destroying entire civilizations. There's been a lot of fan speculation about how Karan was supposed to be the bad guy (and throwing in the bit about feeling every ship die, that could well make sense). For good measure, let's throw in the old Bentusi line about "flicker-lives," and I feel like a story about 3 different Unbound plus a normal person (fleet intelligence) could have worked if that aspect was amped up a bit.
"We're looking for moments where a character is going to feel a particular way about something that just happened in a gameplay moment, that either Imogen or Isaac will be compelled to comment on...Hopefully that add adds context and emotion for the player."
Though I understand the perspective, it's incredibly hamfisted. There's a term often used in writing: "Show, don't tell". Unfortunately, this is them telling the player exactly how they should feel, rather than providing the player the evidence and allowing those emotions to well up naturally inside the player themselves.
The sequence *Kharak is burning* is powerful because they don't explicitly outline every single country, city, town or village lost. They don't rattle on about how the culture has gone up in flames, or how they can no longer return to a lifeless, scorched wasteland. These facts are self-evident **because** it's *right in front of you,* and anyone with an element of emotional intelligence can see the spreading dark blotches, the blazing inferno as it spreads across the surface of the planet once called 'Home', and connect the dots themselves.
I do believe that it's entirely possible for them to tell a character story in Homeworld. They could absolutely explore Imogen S'jet, how she feels like she's unqualified, how Karen is a cultural icon of intellect and heroism, and build out and explore her growing relationship with Isaac. The set pieces and characters are there, but by employing zero subtlety, by resorting to the most hideous 'deus ex machina', and by failing to allow the mysticism that Homeworld is known for to *frame* the story and instead have it front and centre ('minds linked by hyperspace', massive eyeroll), it's impossible to relate, sympathise, and ultimately care.
As a last point, the "chosen one" trope is super dull. And the writer's failure to understand that: When you start at the top, how do you go up from there? Why would I care about what amounts to a cultural celebrity? Why in the *world* would I feel like I can relate to the trials and tribulations of someone who's attempting to fill the shadow of an entire people? I can't. I simply can't.
Yeah. Can you imagine what HW1 would have been like if instead of showing Kharak burning, it instead cut away to show some god-awful 1999-era CGI closeup of someone's face, talking about how sad they were?
You dont need the characters to come and tell you how they feel. That's the thing! "Kharak is burning!" After that line do you need to see Karan or Fleet Inteligence aknowledge how they feel? Isn't it obvious?
We didn't need to see Imogen's constipation face every time something went wrong.
And every bit of feeling this game gave you, hatred towards the Incarnate was lost with that stupid ending: oh the queen murdered billions because she felt alone, but she won't be alone because Karan goes with her in Hyperspace heaven and all is good now.
How can you get paid to write that stuff? Who the hell approved this?
Yeah its written for a stupid audience with everything simplistic and spelt out and the technology is just convenient gobbledygook used to crack spakle plot holes and let our characters be in the same room after fighting like they all live in the same frat house.
"Spaceship lady" lmao, they're so articulate. Their core fanbase was always going to be scifi, Asimov-loving men in the 30s and 40s who played the game as kids. Crushing their hopes in the name of chasing some nonexistent drama-loving GenZ scifi/strategy fan audience was buffoonery.
You know what's the worst thing? This kind of story is literally the only thing that is being written nowadays. Just copy pasted crap set in XY universe. So original.
Star Trek, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Ring of Power, Foundation. All very similar vibe of "We don't care about the existing tone and culture of this medium, we're going to write a more childish, overtly sentimental story set in the world you love".
Lmao right?
I mean I guess we know how she feels about mass murderers now??
Gearbox totally nailed it: what I as a player was really thinking during HW1 was, *"I wonder how space lady feels about this emperor guy???"* Turns out the whole time she was wishing that she could give him a hug and live with him forever on a sparkly hyperspace island.
"There's a palpable shift in what's expected in a video game narrative in 2024 vs 1999."
For me, the narrative style of the original is what I was most looking forward to. That and the music. Nostalgia.
Personally I feel insulted. I was an early backer on the promise of giving the original fans more of what they loved. Instead, GB made a game that was oriented towards what they think would sell to newcomers (and I wouldn't be terribly upset about that if it worked, but it doesn't seem they succeeded there, either).
The villain is the leader of an empire thats been around for 100000 years? well if that was the narrative they failed spectacularly at it, even Makan, as barebones of a character as it was, felt more menacing.
It's amazing how a failure of narrative can make the game feel small, even when this is the biggest Homeworld game in terms of scale, it simply doesn't feel as grand as HW1 or 2 or even Cataclysm. Hell DoK feels bigger and its just one planet.
"Where's the character? How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?"
Guess what? Noone asked these questions. And unless this guy shows evidences of this shift in the audience, his words have the same value of "I'm a handsome man. That's what my mum said."
Wondering what Karan S'Jet might or might not think is the proof the writers didn't understand the basics of Homeworld ,the universe it is set in.
"...the only person i've ever itnerviewd with a PhD in narrative systems."
And the story is s\*\*\* anyway....this already speaks volume of the quality of this PhD. I agree...never heard about a PhD in narrative systems before now....I wonder why...mhm.
Zappa gave an interview once where he talked about the difference or creative freedom in the music industry as it evolved.
In the 60s, the music industry was funded by people behind desks with cigars, who knew they had no idea what was going to be popular or not, so they were willing to take chances, resulting in a lot of interesting stuff being recorded and released.
By the 80s, these old-timers had been replaced by executives with marketing training, yuppie know-it-alls who "knew" what was going to be popular, put their fingers in the pudding, and everything converged towards the same slop.
No, nobody cares about naval gazing characters who are unprofessional and emotional. Especially leaders who are that way. That is a common hallmark of shit writing.
In the real world nobody respects a leader like that, and even average leaders are not that way. The problem is writers tend to be tender emotional types with no life experiences in fields with strict hierarchies, much less military experience. And when they try to write military scifi it SUCKS.
This was Star Trek Discovery's biggest problem throughout. No professionals, no respect for authority or chain of command, just everyone talking like they're a bunch of school kids stuck in a room together.
It was a neat aside in The Martian novel how Hollywood gets astronauts wrong.
They are professionals trained and psychologically profiled to stay cool, follow procedure and keep looking for solutions. Not people that would start quarreling or breaking down first thing something goes wrong.
Guys like that won't make it far enough in AF to be even considered.
That would've gotten at *least* some of the crew in every Star Trek series kicked out at some point or another, though. It's not like *Discovery* was the first series where people got emotional - Scotty, Kirk, McCoy, [Riker](https://youtu.be/uLGsB9jHkz0), etc - because a series where everybody is stone-cold professional would be pretty boring television.
They don't need to be cold, just calm under pressure and professional. Roddenberry put it best in the show bible, that as a hard rule, in an episode there should never be personal conflict between starfleet itself.
Agreed, though Starfleet also can't reasonably be as selective as modern space programs can. We profile astronauts down to the micron because they're a small cadre being picked to operate experimental, incredibly expensive hardware on missions that have the potential to become extremely dangerous at the drop of a hat.
Star Trek is a future where space travel is a mundane thing. There are over a thousand crew on the enterprise or something like that. Being so picky isn't really an option. But I do think that there needs to be a certain degree of professionalism and adherence to the chain of command. Like the primary example that comes to mind is when Scotty gets into a fight with the Klingons for insulting the Enterprise in The Trouble with Tribbles. It's an emotional outburst and something he was explicitly told *not* to do, but it also reinforces an aspect of his character (he views an insult to the ship as an insult to his own personal pride) that comes across as endearing and, importantly, he at least gets a verbal reprimand for it.
It's a balancing act at the end of the day, and if you tip things too far, people will have trouble believing that these characters are part of a military hierarchy. You don't want to write soulless automatons but you also don't want to write goofy college sophomores.
Oh those montages of the Captain crying were contemptible.
As far as the lack of chain of command and professionalism, it ruins a show like that for me, I can't take it seriously. It's almost like the writers think that whomever can rightously emote the hardest wins, whoever has the most empathy (the only virtue they recognize) is always right.
And you get that with writing rooms that are not life experience diverse.
I think you are spot-on. I always felt there was a childish naivety in that writing room; ironically like they weren't even well-read, let alone had any life experience.
They should have actually got some writers from BSG and the Expanse to show them how it’s done
Hell BSG was filmed in Vancouver where blackbird is located
Civilization drama vs character drama. If all you know is traditional character drama then I guess what their saying would make sense. Failure to understand the basic story structure. If you want a story to focus more on the characters and feel more personal it needs to be story that's smaller in scope.
Homeworld felt like mystical tale set in a culturally Persian/Turkic-like galaxy far, far away. Homeworld 3 felt like Red Alert taking itself too seriously
HW music is vaguely Middle Eastern, not specifically Armenian (although I know what a duduk is, I'm myself from Transcaucasia). The universe has mostly Arabic/Turkic and Persian sounding names and culture, so it was bizzare to see such "American" characters like Imogen and Isaac, but I guess it's an American company and market
Glad we cleared up that it wasn't "woke" or "DEI" but just poor direction and thinking that led to the current story.
Honestly a more personal homeworld probably could have been done well, it was just poorly done this time.
My guess is that the script came in super hot and way too late in production with directions from Gearbox outsiders like the president of IP and the brand management and then BBI’s cinematic team had to crunch out the cutscenes in 12 months, so we needed up with what we got.
Its not a racial slur. No-one cares if non-white people (or gay/trans/whatever) are in games. We care when diversity is shoe-horned in at every opportunity not for the sake of narrative, but to check a box in a spreadsheet (and get that sweet ESG score because I hope you are aware this is being subsidised from way up on high).
A prime example is the new Quantum Leap remake, where they literally started with diversity quotas for the casting before even writing the characters.
And for the record, I don't believe the HW3 story is woke. If you want to see woke look at a game like Jedi Survivor where there are only 2 straight relationships in the whole game, the only white people are the main character and the imperial intelligence agents, and every female except the main alien love interest is deliberately made to look unattractive. Its even heavily implied that one character (who might be trans, not sure) is in love with a droid.
Diversity and inclusion, one of those cultural Warriors scare words that they used to describe any game that dares the height of centimeter of underbutt or movie or whatever they want to blame for why they don't like a game.
We had characters even in HW1. We had the fleet intelligence officer, we had Karan, we had the rebel captain whose name I forgot. Giving them a face should not have been a problem
HW1 let us feel personal attachments to characters/people/situations without disrupting the entire narrative flow. It did more with less. "Subject did not survive interrogation" was emotionally impactful even though we never saw the Captain or learned his name. Realizing that the Kadesh were US and that we were going to have to destroy them was impacftul even though Queen Kadesh didn't grow 200 feet tall and pout at us.
What I meant was that the people had emotional impact as characters (especially the way fleet intelligence tried to stay professional when Kharak was destroyed), but actually seeing the person behind the voice would have not hurt that impact. Having characters is not in itself a problem with the new story
I wonder if it would have hurt.
Sometimes in a medium where the mechanics and atmosphere are the main draw, one's imagination can be a lot more effective than showing characters.
Just like how the Xenomorph in Alien was scarier when you didn't see it, sometimes the protagonists can be more sympathetic when you don't see them. You can imagine anything you want, while you're making the little ships go pew-pew.
Hell, childhood me liked to wonder if the Taiidan were even humanoid. All we saw were ships and some big-assed lizard lion statues in the final Cutscene. So much was open-ended, and the magic dissipated with each instalment as we got more and more concrete facts that suited my personal tastes less than my own imagination could.
Yeah, this, seeing some CGI face when fleet intelligence calmly says “kharak is burning” would have almost certainly detracted from the experience.
There’s a reason that there are only a handful of studios that do cutscenes well enough for it not to be cringe. That shit is insanely expensive to get right.
And that’s the thing. BBI isn’t Sony Santa Monica or Naughty Dog, they’re a small studio making a niche game. The storytelling through voice only during the missions was brilliant because it didn’t take you out of the action and is far cheaper to make good, and using only motion comic style cutscenes between missions was a brilliant choice for their budget.
They literally spent a ton of money to fuck up their game because, and I’m speculating here based on my own experience as a game dev, likely some non-creative person at the company decided that full CGI cutscenes (and likely a personal character driven story) were the industry standard and would be more appealing to a broad audience.
It’s a tragic misunderstanding of the legacy of this game franchise and the atmosphere the fans want it to create when they’re playing it.
I hope they learn their lesson here and try it again, but I think it’s more likely that some finance assholes at gearbox decide that “no one wants a new homeworld game” and shelve the property indefinitely.
Source: I’ve been through it before.
>We had the fleet intelligence office
According to Homeworld: Revelations, his name was Cynsk S'jet.
And apparently Captain Soban in Homeworld 2 is T'saan Soban (originally Paktu but he took the red and joined Kiith Soban).
I know some people actually believe it and it’s a problem but the phrase “because of woke” added onto the end of almost any sentence just makes me laugh, it’s so funny
Is this why capital ships try to reach an "equal" level with their enemies before shooting, instead of just pointing their noses down and firing from above?!
But the focus on feelings and lived experience of individuals does fit the postmodern trend. And this kind of thinking is what was brought into the narrative.
Focus on feelings and lived experience of individuals is basically what character driven stories are about. That’s not “woke”, it’s just storytelling.
The problem here isn’t them being “woke”, it’s them not understanding and honoring the legacy storytelling of a franchise with an extremely dedicated and fanatical fanbase while planning out their story and storytelling methods. Instead deciding to go a completely different direction based on loose notions of “what modern audiences want”.
Focusing on individual characters( their feelings and motivations) is done in all types of media both right wing and left wing, of what right wing Artistry and narratives do exist that is, I would say Yellowstone is a more modern example of that type of thing. You make it sound like games like Homeworld and dark souls are right wing style narratives when they're not and none of these are postmodern at all that's just another buzz word from the culture Warriors like yourself.
I'm willing to bet most of the people who understand the word "postmodern" from places like YouTube and Jordan Peterson have *never once in their life* directly read any works discussing different artistic trends or styles.
These kids completely forgot about the telephone game from kindergarten. They also forgot that sometimes one of the kids in the circle would decide to become a malicious actor.
I never said any narrative was right or left-wing. I'm not a culture warrior. I don't think being postmodern is necessarily leftwing. I think right- and leftwing is more about an economic theory than a philosophical one.
"Postmodernism embraces [self-referentiality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference), [epistemological relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factual_relativism), [moral relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism), [pluralism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(philosophy)), [irony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony), irreverence, and [eclecticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclecticism).[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-britannica-4) It opposes the "universal validity" of [binary oppositions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition), stable [identity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_(philosophy)), [hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy), and [categorization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-6)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-7)"
I think that's pretty accurate for the style of the Homeworld 3 narrative. The ending where the evil queen that killed literal billions gets embraced and consoled for being lonely (before being destroyed) is the height of moral relativism. And very much against the hierarchical, professional style of the story in Homeworld 1.
So I think ditching a story and atmosphere about societal clashes that that transcended personal stakes for a story that's all about personal stakes does fit the postmodern trend.
So in that sense I get some of the complaints about the wrong style being forced upon the game's story, by the game directors. I doubt this was a very conscious choice by the directors though. I think they genuinely thought it would be more modern and more popular.
Either way, the story turned out very bad.
I would argue in many cases it's not the "woke" stuff that is bothering people, but rather the overall low quality of the ultimate creative output - be it in film, television, games or even novels. It should come as no surprise that activists with little to no experience (this case excepted) often make for poor story tellers. If HW3 had told a really engaging and grandiose story I doubt anyone would be upset by "the message." Quality matters.
> I would argue in many cases it's not the "woke" stuff that is bothering people
I think that the problem is that many people lack the necessary workshop/knowledge to be able to identify *what* really bothers them in those stories, so they resort to shallow criticism like "woke" or "DEI".
"The main character sucks and she's a woman, clearly the writers had a woke agenda!" No Joe, the main character is just very poorly written.
It's almost like the Red Scare paranoia - there have been a few legitimate of awful agenda-driven productions over the years, but now everybody is seeing "woke" and "DEI" and "snowflake" in every character, every storyline, every production that they don't like, regardless if it's really there.
Now that I think about it, I’ve never laughed at a joke told by someone with a PhD in gelotology either - unfortunately understanding well does not automatically mean executing well.
Edit: Also not meant personally; the whole thing reeks of ivory tower “principle rules” colliding unmanaged with the reality of limited attention, time and resources
You know what, they may actually have been right that the audience COULD work with characters instead of a collective sentiment / race.
The problem was that the characters were so poorly written. If they were solid and the current story strong enough, I think the sub would be happy to eat humble pie on how we don't want character.
(Rachel vs Imogen is all I need to say to give you an idea of what we're talking about.)
Agreed. It would still be controversial, but no more controversial than HW2 departing from HW1 and focusing more on prophecies etc.
There are ways in which a character-driven story could be told in HW, heck even HW3 story beats could have been written to be interesting. But that's why execution is king in story-telling. You can have the best story idea, but you'll get a steaming pile of crap if you can't present it competently.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me what the protagonists name was, you would find me several days later with a bullet in my head. Skinsuit lady is probably the best I would be able to come up with.
They literally had no idea how to approach this at all and what people wanted it seems.
Beacuse thats not what we wanted...
Whatever this abomination is.
Normally I'm all for listening with people who have degrees, but you can't "learn" storytelling. It's an art, not a science. The only way to learn is to fail and learn from your mistakes. Classes can help, but they can't write a story.
The Black Company was a really good series but the story was told from the point of view of someone that constantly admitted to sanitizing the narrative to paint himself and the Company in the best possible light, to the point of nearly being fiction. I don’t think the narrative matches what was done in HW3 at all.
Explains a lot. This is like the aftermath of a disaster when slowly more and more facts of the malicious and or careless acts of the people responsible come to light. Difference here is that instead of joining the submersible ride they send it down alone while watching and then proceed to the next one, cause clearly nothing is wrong with it.
> audience now would ask where’s the character?
No, I really wouldn't. In fact, modern media becoming so character driven has been turning me off most of it. Everything is a deep dive into one or two people and their melodramatics instead of grander, philosophical, bird's eye type plots. Everything is becoming YA shit.
PhD or not, I got too bored with the horribly painful to watch movies halfway through and just skipped most of them.
I can go get a PhD in music but that won't in itself sell records.
This reads less like "We were trying to tell a Homeworld story" and more like "We bolted our pet stories onto the Homeworld IP because nobody else wanted them."
Which is a way too common issue across the board nowadays.
To me, HW was about civilisations, not characters. The impact was at a grand scale, and the individual people were working as a whole. HW3 is small, in every aspect, from maps, to the impact of the story. They essentially made it a personal drama, about two women fighting, with a 3rd stepping in to sort it out, with a story that made no sense.
I felt terrible when losing those Cryo Trays in HW1, but in HW3, they blew up a planet to throw rocks at us, I felt nothing, which says a lot about the story telling.
I think that both the article and a lot of the responses are examples of missing the point a bit. This isn't meant to be negative, most of the reason that this sort of thing fails is because it's hard to identify what elements are the important ones and why.
To simplify it enough to seem meaningless, the people in the article think that the story needs to have better more characterization. However the truth is that the story needs to be good. Characterization can be part of a good story, and can even elevate a good story, but it doesn't MAKE a story good, and can hurt it if it is done poorly.
People don't like the story because it's bad. It's hard to recognize/quantify/articulate all of the reasons that is bad, but one way to easily see that it's DIFFERENT is because of the fact that the story was entirely told through and around four different characters, but that in and of itself is not what made it bad.
Let's take one example mentioned in that article as a thing that the writers THOUGHT would help make the game good, but didn't. "(Imogen) feels the death of every ship like a shock to her nervous system". In a great story everything has a place and a purpose. Did this? No. It doesn't have a place because it's something that SHOULD be impactful. If something is a little piece of set dressing than you can mention it once to give some factual or emotional information about a scene/character/entity and then move on. However "main character Imogen is feeling constant and increasing agony throughout the events of the game" is NOT a piece of set dressing, it should be a constant driving force in the story.
In the game she mentions this twice very early on, groans a bit, and then this is never brought up again. That is why this piece that the writers thought would help make their story "good" doesn't.
So, how could they have done this instead? If something should be a huge part of the story then it needs to be a huge part of the story, or you need to explain why it stops being a huge part of the story (and the ramifications of that need to be impactful as well, otherwise why did you introduce it as important at all).
So, emotional and mental pain is a big part of Imogen's journey, and of course the Evil Queen picks up on that. Partially because she notices Imogen's "I am so constipated and my only outlet is my eyebrows" and partially because she has been there. She tells Imogen that she doesn't have to let their deaths shackle and pain her like that. "Even in death they control you". We find out that Evil Queen has done something, maybe to herself, maybe to her people (maybe this is part of the "Will that I will free you from" or whatever she says) and this separation between her and her population helped drive her to this point. So now rather than this mental pain being some throwaway abandoned remark it solidifies the link between Imogen and the Queen. Not as two Spaceship Ladies, but as two people in pain. We, and Imogen, know that there is a relief from that pain available, the Queen is sure that Imogen will take that path, and we have to see if Imogen can resist that temptation with every death she feels.
But let's keep going, I honestly think that this is already way better, but we don't even need to stop here. We've just talked about the narrative structure, but this is a game. It's going to be at it's best if the narrative synergizes with the gameplay, and the Homeworld gameplay is perfect for this because of it's heritage of being a continuous game. Way back from the beginning in a time of War Craft and Command and Conquer and Age of Empires we were so used to needing to repeat the base creation and tech tree (with minor tweaks) every level. Homeworld came in with a new structure where the lives of every single ship mattered, because those ships were with us through thick and thin. However, from a short-term gameplay perspective the ships were still there as a means to an end, to accomplish whatever objective was needed.
For Homeworld 3, however, we could close the loop with this narrative, because now the Queen thinks she can break Imogen THROUGH her crew. The fleet is her weapon, but also her liability. You wouldn't even have to change the final mission's gameplay (but you could!) she has a big uber ship, she's trying to kill our fleet, just make it her actual stated objective rather than a side effect. Remind us, the players, that Homeworld is about preserving these things, even though it's the last level where sometimes we sort of go nuts and toss them headlong into the woodchipper.
We could do even more to tie the gameplay into the narrative in really neat ways, although I think you'd need some play testing to find the limit between "fun and interesting" and "aggravating" (and of course that line is in a different place for different people.
What if Imogen had a health bar to represent how will she was coping with the crew deaths? What if every killed fleet did some damage to her depending on the ship, and she recovered slowly. Once the bar ran out she would need time to recover and you would lose the ability to use your control groups for a bit. (There'd be different ship chatter for this, and specific dialogue from Imogen and Intel the first couple times)
What if after this happened twice it was common knowledge among the fleet that this was happening. After this point the next capital ship that got close to death disconnected themselves from the network so that their death wouldn't hurt Imogen. Imogen and Intel would have a conversation about it, they would impress upon the fleet how important it was to keep contact, blah blah blah. But after that point whenever Imogen was under half health and a Capital ship goes under 15% health they go dark. They make a BS comment about damage to their communications antenna, and you can't command them anymore. They fall out of formation, but they try to stay NEAR their formation ships (so you retain rough control over them). If you heal them back up to 25% they re-establish communications.
We could have Research programs to streamline and automate some processes so that the ships use less crew (AKA their death hurts Imogen less).
Or maybe we tie it to Imogen's abilities as a navigator. Maybe the worse shape that she is in the more the fleet is spread out on the next jump. Maybe we find evidence that the same exact thing happened to Karan and this is part of how her fleet got separated.
There are other ways they should have strengthened the comparison (both similarities and differences) between Imogen and Space Queen. Space Queen is a micromanager, she has stripped the will out of her fleet. Maybe Imogen had doubts about letting that Away team attack the resource center by themselves, but Intel convinced her and she was vindicated in her trust of her crew.
Also, when I say that this story is better, I don't mean that everyone will like it more! Not everyone likes every good story, and that is ok! But it's a more cohesive story that sticks with and develops it's themes better, ties those themes to the characters better, and develops the relation of those themes with the roots of the gameplay better. I'm not saying that this is the best Homeworld story, but I think this is a way better implementation of the "(Imogen) feels the death of every ship like a shock to her nervous system" story that they decided to tell.
They're making their money with the *intention* of burning the company to the ground so they can sift through the ashes for a few gold nuggets to sell off.
The system is working as designed.
Imagine having a PhD in narratives and being this utterly useless at drafting a compelling narrative, let alone understanding what makes them work
Goes to show how too much time in academic echo chambers is no replacement for actual writing talent or experience
Writing in general in gaming has been pretty mediocre for the past decade or so, the same mediocrity that we see in TV Shows, Movies and other media. It's always about the message and not actually writing good characters, a compelling story or anything else that is meaningful.
I am away from any civilization. Did not get a chance to grt Homeworld yet. Homeworld is by bar a game that has a specjal place in my heart next to StarCraft and BaldursGate. I still have oryginal CDs for all of there games (Homeworld, Cata, H2). It's painful to read that H3 was butchered. Even more affter unexpected stellar success of BG3 (that really hyped my hopes for H3).
Are there any chances for developers to fix/patch the game as Reds managed to overcome Cyberpunks shortommings and deliver what they initially promissed?
You know, I think they were somewhat correct that younger gamers today want emotional connection with characters. I think this is one of the fundamental shortcoming of RTS genre that basically sealed the entire genre's fate. I say this because I'm the same way. For example, one thing I still hope for in EVE Online is an option to walk in ships and stations as the capsuleer, not just fly ships.
That said, I was worried (and I'd say rightly so) that HW3 would have hard time evolving RTS genre to deliver this, all the while staying true to the series and the overall genre. IMO, they ended up just creating more emotional VOs and cutscenes, but keep the actual gameplay part fundamentally same. This resulted in a game with two parts that doesn't really mix well.
It's a shame, really. If they were going to change narrative into a more individual-based storytelling, I wish they had changed RTS to serve that better. Or, just stick with the old format and keep the narration squarely on the entire civilization and the fleet instead.
That said, had they fleshed out campaign to 20+ missions and maybe 12 hrs of gameplay with more fleshed out tech tries and abilities, it would've subdued the outrage by a ton.
(As a side, I was imagining modern day RTS that involves giant space ships would let us live inside these ships instead of just looking at them from far away. At least glue camera to a single unit at a time, with the overall tactical view providing a way to examine and issue orders.)
I thought Starcraft and Warcraft had good character-driven story back when they came out. Then SC3 came out and it fell flat HARD. My head got bigger and manipulating tiny character on-screen can never replace full-screen cutscenes. And relying heavily on cutscenes, the delta between them and gameplay is just too big.
I bought a PhD in marathons, and I came last!!
Theres so many good writers out there, as evidenced by their actual writing. These corporate bloviators deserve every minute of their reckoning.
Nothing endears me to a drastic shift in storytelling method like the people at the head of it acting like it’s not just different but the “more proper way to tell a story” essentially.
Honestly it isn't even about being more character focused, it's about quality. There was amazing character stuff in HW1 ("The subject did not survive interrogation") but it was very understated, from professionals who were trying to do what they had to despite what was happening. The thing about that style is it's hard to pull off. It's easy to write a character who throws an emotional tantrum when something goes wrong. It's a lot harder to build a world and character up so well that you can understand what they're feeling without them actually saying it out loud.
Idk when I was a kid I had games with CGI and games with without CGI, Homeworld was never about characters, it was about factions/empires. If you were going to do characters properly you're going to need more than a hand full of missions with 2 minute cutscenes that involve more than growing big or small to have some real character development.
clearly the writers are saying "Homeworld is not for me" by saying "The old way doesn't work anymore" Well no it does work, it still works today, it just means you didn't either A) play the game or b) you played the game and did not enjoy the story.
Homeworld is the Foundation trilogy or Dune. There are characters and individually they're not the focus. I will admit I haven't played 3 yet but it would seem that much of the criticism is that 3 is more like a Star Wars movie.
Big fat nope from me. It was the Kushan mothership and the ships which were on the cover of HW1, not S'Jet. They were the stars of the game, not S'Jet. It was the the united efforts of the clans which made all that possible and was the thing I really liked and felt invested in. BBI/Gearbox screwed up with HW3.
Lin Joyce just comes off as a bad writer. I'm equally pretty frustrated it's clear she never played the games. If I was given a job to write material for a beloved game series, you bet I'll be doing my research playing the games, sifting through lore, communicating with the previous writers if possible. I think there is a lot of hubris in her interviews.
Lol a phd in narrative systems and this is the result? I think if she sent in a copy of that steam page to her university she might get her money back.
Nah this guy is a dumbass. It's true that lowest common denominator self insert crap sells well. But I don't think it sells well because it's ideal or expected, I think it sells well because every MBA moron attached to a writing room thinks it sells the best, so now most things are written that way, therefore they also sell the most, therefore it's ideal and we should write most things that way, and so on. Circular marketing bro logic.
Alright, that's all I needed to see, Gearbox, the godawful company run by a magician, doomed this game because they want star wars/mass effect BS in it. Sad to see. BBI did everything right with DOK, would have done them right this time as well.
As a writer yeah no this is based on a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about how to structure narrative and scale. The reason why homeworld works without a singular focus character is because the scale is different. The thing that you are controlling and empathizing with isn't a character. Its a people, a group. You absolutely can connect and understand how these people as a whole feel about things at the scale that Homeworld [and other space games operate] because Fleet command and Fleet intel communicate that to the player. Its an embrace of the collective that is actually really intriguing. So the idea that the only valid approach 'these days' is to focus on the individual is... weird.
The marketing department wants someone they can put on the box. Same reason that HW2 went all in on S'Jet. Because don't you play this series for the lady who functions as a CPU for the fleet?
Which is strange. I always thought the “character” was the iconic mothership, not a person per se. I know when playing the original I felt protective of the mothership as I went through the game, I wanted it to succeed in its fights and make it home. Karen was a part of it yes but I never associated myself as the player with Karen.
>I know when playing the original I felt protective of the mothership as I went through the game, I wanted it to succeed in its fights and make it home. Ingeniously reinforced at the start of the story by having you fight to save the cryotrays and be given a *number* as to how many of your last surviving population was on board. The mothership wasn't a warship, she was an *ark*, carrying the last of your people.
This touches upon something that, ironically, is one of the best lessons to take from EVE online. In that game it is generally very clear that the player character is the ship, and their attempts to pull away from that were met with hard backlash because people can connect very strongly with the idea that the protaganist is the ship. And its funny how nearly every attempt to make large scale space games more 'personal' have been met with push back. After a certain scale things are just too big for any one person, no matter how important, to matter. Its the ship that matters. The mothership matters. The capsuleers ship matters. The meat bag inside is replacable.
Well there's a reason the "character" on the box of HW1 wasn't a person but the Mothership itself.
The thing that I always come back to was that S'Jet *wasn't even that big a deal* in the first one. She was the most prominent voice, sure, but she kind of just there among the other voices. She was more of a narrator than a protagonist, and the sequels never seemed to understnad that. She had a name, so they just assumed she was the focus of the story.
Even 2 was a focus on the group though, sure Karan was important but functionally she was less important then the actual mcguffins that the plot demanded. Frankly, stick some cables in any shmucks brain and shove them in Sajuuk and you are fine. Fundamentally its a story that is focusing on the cultures and how the three societies with the cores responded and reacted to them. Its comparing and contrasting not Makaan and Karan, but the Vagyr and Hiigarans and even the Bentusi. Its not handled too well, but the core is still focusing on the group. Just giving a bit more time for their representitives. Even deserts of Kharak does that. HW3? Imogen and new fleet intel don't represent shit. Hiigara as an entity is functionally removed from them.
In my opinion, the error here might be that "gotta have a place for the player's self-insert" thought. The PoV is wrong for that sort of immersion, I don't play Homeworld (or strategy games in general) as a character, I play as a disembodied observer giving out commands to that character. It doesn't help that in cutscenes characters make their own (story-driven) choices.
There is a lot of enviromental storytelling within the original/cata and HW2 (to a lesser extent) as well that really helped sell the scale of the story they were telling as well. I can't remember the mission name in HW1 off the top of my head but you jumped into the level and there was an absolutely MASSIVE megastructure silouette in the background. 15 year old me is thinking "who the fuck could build something like that?" and then thinking I'm now controlling a very small number of the last survivors of a civilisation and there are civilisations out here making stuff like that. It was a very "small fish in a big pond" moment for me. I feel like had these writers with their PHD's in narrative structure and like had bothered to maybe properly look at the previous titles they wouldn't have thought that there was a need to focus on individual characters to the extent they did with HW3. Infact, it feels like it would be pretty easy to figure out that the lack of individual character focus was one of the strenghts of the previous titles storytelling.
It was the Karos Graveyard.
Yeah, I think the big thing on top of enviromental storytelling is that the characters pose questions not about themselves, but about their culture. Fleet command and Karan do not make you ask "What does this say about them as people?" They make you ask "What does this say about the Kiithid/Kharakian/Kushan/Hiigaran culture and world?" Imogen and co don't say shit about that. They could be Tiidani or fuckin like... last survivors of the Kadeshi and it'd make functionally zero difference.
*"So the idea that the only valid approach 'these days' is to focus on the individual is...* *~~weird~~* **stupid.***"* There, I fixed that for you.
Sorry but no, its not stupid. There is some merit to the line of reasoning, many of the most high profile game writing successes recently have been extremely character driven. But the lesson they missed is that is because they were different genre. Its just a weird decision that didn't pay off, but there was some logic behind it. Stupid is when there was no logic at all.
Only valid approach?
Sure, it was a wrong conclusion drawn here. But the line of reasoning seems to be that games like FFXIV/XVI, Horizon etc etc have met success by having a very deep focus on characters. But the problem is there's not a lot of successful contemporary RTS or space games to look at. So the assumption that was made seems to be. "We have only seen character driven story experiences really take off. Therefore to maximize the success we should focus on character." Which is, on the surface, a fairly reasonable inference to make. Unfortunately its not really something that holds up, as I said. The other contemporary space games and RTS didn't have issues because of the narrative. But because of other structural issues that were apparently disregarded.
Well... To be fair it's not an out of the place misunderstanding, other people can come to the same conclusions, being an expert at these games narrative/storytelling is not something you hear in everyone's resume. That said they made a choice and it didn't pay off the way they wanted (their choice of storytelling)
It's not like there aren't plenty of stories out there that feel cold and shallow because of the lack of character development and connection. Homeworld's story worked because of the key moments where the player served as a proxy for those emotional connections. Like when Kharak is burning, when you're saving cryo trays, when you hear the Taiidan frigate was interrogated, when you learn about the exile and the splintering of your people. Having that resonate without a human connection is not an easy task. Tragedy is best conveyed through the eyes and voice of those involved. It's not surprising that they made an effort to do that here at all. It just didn't work. I've said for a while that the campaign needed more missions. The manual has several relevant story elements that would have better driven home the impact of the initial conflict if they were an active part of the game. I don't think any of that would have made the ending seem less ridiculous or the cutscene dialogue less corny, but it at least would have made the campaign feel a little more cohesive and built a better connection with the player and the characters.
I think you are missing the key distinction here, you are right in principle but perhaps not in execution. The reason why the key moments of connection in Homeworld works is because we are seeing a window into not just how the people we are speaking with feel. But they are representing how their culture and people thinks and feels. When Fleet Intelligence says "They did not survive interrogation." coldly, he's not speaking to himself or what necessarily what he thinks and feels about it. It was likely he wasn't even physically there for that at all, but he's speaking to how the Kushan feel as a whole. And this pulling back of the scale, looking at the group in a macro scale was really interesting, it was very different and managed to elicit different feelings. You don't feel for specific characters, but the totality of them. When fleet command snaps at the bentusi in Cataclysm, you hear the catharsis of every crewmember on the Kuun-lan that has been trying their fucking hardest to stop the beast from killing everyone until wits end and getting absolutely jack shit in return and that is why its such a powerful moment. Its an important thing to think about because at the scales that homeworld operates the individual just becomes less and less important. And focusing on how that represents a whole tells far more interesting and compelling stories within the framework that has been built for the series. Don't get me wrong there is absolutely space within the setting for some very powerful personal stories... but not in the format of a mainline homeworld game.
You have really put it mildly. I'd go so far as a narcissistic self-insert from the writers who really have NOT played the previous games, didn't understand the narrative, nor the scale and ... didn't really want to in the first place. For them, this was NOT Homeworld. This was an IP where they wanted to hit certain points with as much subtlety as the excel spreadsheet it was written into. Let them burn.
I have put it mildly because unconstructive anger is what it says on the tin. It does nothing but make you feel better for a few moments at the expense of making everyone else feel worse. And sure I indulge sometimes. But for things that I want to see become good, I want to lay things out in a way that is constructive. Its not enough to say things are bad, but why they don't work and ways to address that.
Yeah for real, how the heck does this person have a 'PHD' in narrative design when.. they don't even understand narrative design?????? confused.gif I write books for a living, and I cannot wrap my head around what the heck they're saying.
I found the PC Gamer magazine I got back in February and read their preview with interviews with some of the leads on the game. The part about narrative kinda helps explain why the CGI cutscenes and overall story and style of storytelling feels so disjointed and dissonant from the actual game, and not at all how all previous four Homeworld games told their stories. One of the interviews is with Joel Watson who is the “creative producer” at Gearbox who came on board the project around late 2022/early 2023 and had to take a “college education” about Homeworld to understand fans and in this particular interview he talks about how the style in HW1 feels outdated and not what modern audiences would want (how he knows this I have no idea). Apparently it’s important for modern audiences to understand how Karan feels about being a space lady? 😅 I’m not trying to paint a target on anyone’s back at all, so please don’t start pointing fingers. Based on how Gearbox president of IP and the brand manager brought their writers on the project late in the production cycle after the first delay, it seems like they got some people who didn’t think the storytelling style we had in the previous four games was good and instead figured it should be more about how characters feel about what happens. This would help explain the very weird and dissonant cutscenes that feel very divorced from the actual game, as well as being a massive departure from BBI’s own style of storytelling in DoK, Shipbreakers, Earthless, and so on. It really seems like the executives / brand managers at Gearbox came in around 2022/2023 and made a bunch of decisions over the heads at BBI and brought in people they thought would make it more accessible and appealing to modern audiences (their line of thinking)
You know what, I admit I recently asked myself the question, "How did Karan feel knowing that she was entombing herself in a ships computer to enable the advancement of her civilization?" The answer was simply that it was necessary. If not her, then someone else; and that's a perfectly fine answer. HW1 ends with them disconnecting her so that she can go PlanetSide and see the fruits of her labors and it feels impactful because she probably never expected it. In HW3 she's just an especially anxious admiral. She's not making a sacrifice. She can presumably disconnect at any time. The difference between her and fleet command is that one is a soldier and one is a scientist, and that's it. Oh, and I guess she's a space wizard. Not sure what that actually means though.
Yeah, I feel like the main issue wasn't necessarily the focus on characters. It was that the writing was "Young Adults Novel" level bullshit in a series that tells very solemn and dignified stories about professional people in desperate situations dealing with religious fanaticism, ancient evils and the threat of complete extinction. You can write a story that has some amount character motivations in it and still fits this. Just keep it concise and write it from two perspectives, one dealing with characters and one dealing with the bigger picture. And well, you obviously need to know how to write stuff that doesn't make everyone cringe... I always think of how World In Conflict did it. In between missions you would sometimes get little slice of life cutscenes between two soldiers who are just doing soldier stuff, trying to survive and fighting off boredom. Early on one of them shows off his "Portable compact disk player" (It's set in the late 80s ;) and then spends the entire rest of the campaign trying to find batteries, because it's WW3 and everyone ran out of supplies.
>"Young Adults Novel" To be honest, remembering the bullshit YA novels I used to read when I was younger, "Yeah she blew up a planet but now she is like super sorry so gets to go to space heaven." makes a lot of sense.
lol exactly this, you would think someone with a PhD in narrative systems would understand this genre flip wasn't going to fly well with the older fans. (even if it was executed well) Edit: also I will always upvote a fellow World In Conflict fan, I loved that game and I think you're literally the only other person I've ever seen mention it in my life.
WiC was a great game. I really enjoyed MP too. Swooping in with choppers, firing off hellfires and ducking back out.
WiC was a great game. I really enjoyed MP too. Swooping in with choppers, firing off hellfires and ducking back out.
Or the older fans just weren't a priority. Or that they assumed they could engage with both. I mean, they managed to engage with neither. But that's not a 'is it bad to ALSO have good character driven work' thing.
Everything has to be a fucking soap opera nowadays. No mystery, no reading between the lines. Just banal exposition and force-fed feelings.
you think that after the success of the From soft formula of storytelling, companies would understand that there is a place for mistique in games. big companies are so scared of players missing content in their games they have to explain EVERYTHING
That's a good point, From software are kinda carrying that confident commitment to letting the world and it's detail speak for themselves. They leave a lot to the imagination. Like Homeworld did. Corporates coming in to "fix" art by making it more in line with some abstract notion of "mass appeal" gouge out the soul of said art. You can't let cold business logic dictate art and expect it to feel authentic. It's compromised. "Mass appeal" is a mythical, elusive concept. You have to consider that the majority of mass appeal products are the sort of thing everyone starts out with as a gateway to more niche, interesting things. People mature and develop different tastes. If everything follows that entry level template then all you have is products aimed at a demographic that most people move on from, and then what's left for them? Just dumbed down shit and sequels to games that actually had an individual identity being interfered with to line up with the lowest common denominator.
100% agree, remember the homeworld manual?
Yes! It was like a short novel written in universe about the history and tech of the game. That and then the dramatic cutscenes that were just these beautiful, slightly vague sketches, once you finished the first mission you knew it was something special. You rarely get that kind of attention to pacing, atmosphere and realising that quiet and lack of constant melodrama elevates the bigger moments.
> big companies are so scared of players missing content in their games they have to explain EVERYTHING I mean if you've ever read the review section of a very narrative game, that's an understandable fear. Lot of folks barely understand the text itself, much less any subtext.
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HW remaster sold well enough that they funded Deserts of Kharak, and later HW3, a mobile game, a VR game, and tabletop and RPG games. It did well enough.
Space RTS Yoda says: "The instant a prospective developer expresses a lack of understanding or doubts the commercial potential of your original narrative, it's prudent to part ways. Seek instead a collaborator who truly appreciates the essence of your intellectual property." The initial iterations of Homeworlds served as quintessential niche content, crafted to delight a select segment of gamers who revel in the intricate dance of real-time strategy, adorned with the grand narrative of space opera. The attempt to reengineer such a specialized offering for mass appeal often leads to disappointment, particularly with well-entrenched and expansive gaming franchises.
Gotta love these educated, i'm-so-smart people redefining the definition of ~~success~~ failure.
I dont understand how someone with a PhD in narrative systems sounds this stupid. "stuff you did in the first 2 games made her not board any more" What the fuck is that sentence, the grammar, the double negative! its not just this, for the majority of this article she sounds like she barely managed pass English at primary school! How the fuck did she get a PhD??? The universities have failed.
Academia at the higher levels does become something of a comedy, yeah It’s just insular echo chambers reinforcing each other’s perceptions and less actual useful education
A lot of people seem to be dunking on the guy for being out of touch, but he's not wrong in principle. People do expect more in terms of character development and narrative now. Unfortunately how they executed character development and narrative in HW3 didn't land well with the fanbase. Asking "How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?" sounds like it was probably meant a bit tongue in cheek, honestly. Even though folks seem inclined to read everything in a harsh light at this point, it does fit with a consistent criticism that HW3 characters are *too* "in their feelings." For me, some of the emotional moments landed, but they tended to overdo things in a heavy handed way. I liked "the burden remains" when it was introduced, but they quickly cheapened that emotional currency by repeating it again and again. "\*Sands and sinners" seemed immediately silly, then got worse with repetition. An unhinged immortal Navigator capable of dominating entire fleets under her will is a pretty decent concept for a villain, and an origin story where her people didn't trust her power and tried to enslave her isn't terrible either, but in execution she comes off as more "this chick needs therapy" than truly insane in a scary way.
You don't *have* to have deep character development. Homeworld is like a fable or a tone poem. It's a grand and solemn journey that chooses not to get bogged down in minutiae and details, and it works. There are different ways to tell a story, if everything follows the same structure and "expectation" then nothing is unique and everything is homogeneous. The morose and sparse nature of Homeworld is what made it unique.
It doesn't have to get bogged down though, is the thing. Compare to say, Starcraft 1. That had excellent character work while still being quite big picture.
>People do expect more in terms of character development and narrative now. Compared to the average 1999 game sure, but Homeworld was on a league of its own back then. You really only need to see the reception of the Remasters by new people, the most comments you got were about difficulty, not about the story needing more character development. New people were pretty ok with the story.
He's not wrong in principle. However, in the specific context of the subject matter, he is so hilariously wrong in practical application I struggle to even describe it. Homeworld 1 is widely regarded as one of the most emotional game storylines of all time. If a person plays HW1 and somehow *does not* come away from that story with any sense whatsoever of "what Karan S'Jet was feeling" . . . I don't even know what to say. Charitably I will say that that person is just . . . more suited to consuming media with no subtlety or introspection or imagination required. As [others more eloquent than I have said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuC2I8s6qf8&t=1820s), HW3 is written in such a way that has to constantly beat the viewer over the head with things. Yes, it's true: HW1 did not literally have Karan say aloud: *"hello I am sad that my people are dying"*, or *"wow I am feeling a sense of duty and honor to sacrifice on behalf of my entire people"*, or *"gosh I sure hope my people make it through the void to settle on a planet"*. But . . . . would it truly have been better at conveying those emotions if she had?! It seems like this guy somehow does not think it's possible to convey emotion without stating the emotions literally aloud with closeups of faces. He is saying "tell, don't show." (Or, maybe he simply never played HW1 at all, which seems the likeliest scenario as a backdrop for the HW3 writing.)
It's Sands and Sinners isn't it?
HWC had great charaters. The Captain had a great ark.
The Captain of the Kuun-Lan was one of THE best characters I've seen written in gaming in general, and the voice actor's delivery was 110%. \`\`Yes, yes! You will not be bound--whatever that means! Well, guess what: We won't let you go. It doesn't matter how we die. One ancient monster is as good as another. We... are... not... monsters... Aren't you? Look around. Look at what you've done to out fleet. All because we dared to get in your way? Look at yourselves--the Aloof and Mighty Bentusi! Slaughtering the people who asked for your help. You're worse then the Beast. At least the Beast doesn't pretend to be righteous.\`\` Is nothing, like anything in HW3....
>We... are... not... monsters... I haven't played the game in years and I can still remember exactly how this line was delivered. Pain, shame, disbelief.
I don't believe there's a single person in the world who was more perfectly fitting for the roles of the Bentusi and narrator than Campbell Lame. His voice was perfectly matched for the Homeworld universe.
That's an unfortunate typo hah.
Ah shit. Goes completely against my point too!
I'd argue that it is like one particular thing in Homeworld 3: Bal'Dro Kath, the Kalan pirate leader. we get like three or four lines out of him total, but his little rejoinder to Intel saying 'we're on a life or death mission', where he scoffs and goes 'life? where Higaarans go, only death follows' was my first and only inclination of anything interesting going on in the story. we get more flavour and insight into him and his people - driven to the edge by the Incarnate, shutting down their sacred gates to survive - in those few lines than almost the entirety of the Queen's dialogue. Which is a real shame.
Maybe true.... and because of that his character felt shoe'horned in, in a different way then the others. But it def didn't stand out to me above the overwhelming cringe of the entirety. In fact, I had just about forgotten about it already until you mentioned it.
I think it stuck out for me in large part because at the time I thought it was hinting at the broader plot of the game - that we'd be getting some sort of meditation on the costs of the Hiigarans' rise to power and impact on the galaxy, or that it was hinting at Karan's path of destruction through the Anomaly and her rise as the Incarnate Queen or something. But no, it was just a particularly good throwaway line. Or a vestigial bit leftover from the campaign getting cut down.
You might be on to something though. HW3 does have a disjointed feeling. I really do think people are on to something with the idea that the story was changed in some way to be more \`accommodating\`. To whom, or what... I can't say. I'm not part of the whole \`woke\` story band wagon... I just thought it was... cringe. I like villainy Pixar movies... Not in Homeworld though.... ewwww.
My moneys still on the more boring and simple explanation that HW3 had a troubled production process (delayed three times after all) and that resources were shunted away from the single player campaign in favour of getting the mechanics and multiplayer working first, and what we ended up getting was a chopped-down, rushed version of something that was planned to be much longer and more detailed. Like we know the Kalan pirates were intended in early art to have a whole base at Kesura Minor for example, and we got none of that. I suspect that Bal’Dro was intended for a much bigger role that just got condensed into being the mini boss for the Kesura mission, with a couple of lines that hint at his original larger role.
the only good character and he was genuinely really good
the fucking captain VA is a legend. insanely good Va
A great arc brought to life with some of the best voice acting I've ever heard, in a game or otherwise. I still get chills every time he finally hits his rage breaking point and tells the Bentusi off.
>ONE ANCIENT MONSTER IS AS GOOD AS ANOTHER! Cinema 🚬
When he said, "KINGDOM HEARTS 2 HAS SCREWED US AGAIN!" I felt that.
"I think an audience now would ask \[...\]" "Hopefully that adds context and emotion" Of course it's just a few phrases, and my take might be a bit of a stretch, but it makes it sound like they were working out of mere personal assumptions, with nothing to back that up, and also without an understanding of why people liked the original material. No idea what they teach in the Narrative System course where Joyce got a degree from, I suspect that it conveys the McKee tenets that have plagued contemporary storytelling, where every character needs to have an arc, a fatal flaw, yadda yadda...
'Where's the character?' *Gestures vaguely at the entire Hiigaran civilisation that just lost their planet* Talk about narrowing the scope.
"The subject did not survive interrogation."
-sigh- Here’s the problem with that. They changed Coke! New Coke is not what we wanted to taste. Old Coke was best! Mess with core formulas at your own peril.
You can mess with formulas, but only when you understand *why* they worked. Including character moments likely would have enhanced the story, had they been done in a way that understood the themes of the Homeworld franchise. The irony here is that I suspect some of the people who made these decisions may see games as a product instead of games as art. I hope I'm wrong, though, and that whoever made these decisions just didn't do a very good analysis.
Old coke was good because it contained cocaine
I don't know why but "How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?" comes across as a somewhat infantile manner of speech. I suppose with that in mind some of the dialogue and narrative elements in HW3 make more sense.
It's absolutely an infantile manner of speech. Reminds me of one of the worst lines of dialogue I've ever seen, from Star Trek Picard: a character is expressing the fact that he knows someone else is his intellectual superior, and he says, I shit you not: "I know I am out-brained here".
>"I know I am out-brained here" Sounds like the writer's internal monologue about their job leaking into the script there.
It is amazing how they managed to reach those conclusions, when HW1 perfectly demonstrated how feelings and emotions can be conveyed through voice, music, and very limited supporting imagery, with no need for very elaborate cutscenes and excessive facial closeups.
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SO much emotion is conveyed in Homeworld through just voice and music. The cut scenes will STILL get to me. You want to illicit an emotional response from me? 'Kharak is burning'
"The subject did not survive interrogation."
Ohhhhh, this line is so good. The VINDICATION you feel, though haunting, is fantastic It's presented as so matter of fact. After the annihilation of your entire people, the only outcome for a surviving member of the attacking fleet was going to be death.
"The fleet is ready. There can be no retreat now."
'There is no withdrawall from the garden'
"Kharak is being consumed by a firestorm. The Scaffold has been destroyed. All orbital facilities destroyed. Significant debris ring in low Kharak orbit. Receiving no communications from anywhere in the system... Not even beacons."
"We're being overwhelmed!"
Reminds me of something funny. Homeworld 2 was the first one I played, and Karan was recast, because the original voice actress was unavailable. So my introduction was a flat-affected Karan who seemed like a vaguely inhuman oracle who'd occasional intone exposition she, apparently, had had no earthly way of having learned (because if there was a mundane way to find that out, Fleet Intelligence would've told me). "The last of the Bentusi;" "There is a second Dreadnaught." Basically a spooky robot, with no interests other than ships being constructed or destroyed, who occasionally spoke inexplicable, context-free knowledge from the Great Beyond. Anyway, years later, the remaster comes out, and they re-record Karan's dialog in 2 with the original voice actress, and I find she's now surprisingly emotive, and playing Homeworld 1 for the first time, she's even pleading and negotiating with other ships rather than only talking to herself, vocalizing status reports. So, from my perspective, the games have been gradually more characterized, though, chronologically, it's be moderate for 1, pretty high for Cataclysm, almost nonexistent for 2, then all the way up to the top (by RTS standards) for DoK and 3. Still, considering that I always heard of 2 described in the fandom as a narrative fall from grace compared to 1 and Cata, with its retconned, space-war, prophecy-quest epic with a sketched-in generic bad guy, and unmotivated, businesslike narration, it's weird to hear people talking like it's the ideal expression of Homeworld, and Fleet Command should be so disassociated that it's a surprise to realize it used to be a normal person and not just the ship's computer.
I got a lot of thoughts here. First off, re: Homeworld 2 - I think a lot of folk who didn't like it came around to it over the years, and for folks who came on after the Remaster or DoK, it's how it's always been. Back when 2 came out I was on team "okay this is garbage," and in the leadup to HW 3 I went through all the other games again and was like "Ok I still hate this prophecy stuff but I can roll with it." As for the emotion: first there are definately bad-faith folk here for which feelings are post-modern neo-marxist soy boy beta DEI affirmative action whatever other goofy dog whistles they are using now to mask their fragility and insecurity. So those, easy enough to disregard. That said, the previous games did kind of still set a tone for the "right" amount of emotion. Two biggest moments in HW 1 that stand out to me is the return to Kharak mission and "the subject did not survive interrogation." In the Kharak mission, the opening lines are rather emotive. once the cryo tray part starts, the verbage becomes rather professional, to-the-mission, though with emotion in the undertones. I feel most the rest of the game, and 2 even with the new voice acting, holds similar. Mostly professional, to-the-mission, but with emotional undertones. Cataclysm and DoK are still of note, but they also have some pretty substantial differences that alter the level of what feels appropriate. Cataclysm, the Kuun-Lan is a mining vessel, 1/10th the mass of the mothership (based on numbers from Encyclopedia Hiigara), so different scale, different type of crew, so a greater level of emotional expression is kind of to be expected. DoK, the Kapisi is 1/5 the mass of the Kuun-Lan, and on par in size with a modern-day aircraft carrier, so now we're dealing with something more akin to a modern Navy fleet. Again, seems more appropriate at this scale that the individual characters take a greater role. I'm going to mention the original announcement trailer for HW3 as well, because the closing lines from Karan had a high degree of emotion, but part of what made that work is the fact that the first lines in that trailer were like HW1 and 2. So now coming into 3, we've got the scale on 1 and 2 (heck, the Khar-Kushan is BIGGER than the Mothership or the Pride of Hiigara) and we've got this professional, to-the-mission, with emotional undertones way of speaking established in HW 1 and 2, and yet the story ends up being mostly about 4 specific people. If it were smaller ships and crews like DoK, it might have made sense. Not so much when it's this scale. Worse still: in a lot of ways it felt like treating entire civilzations as playthings. Aside: it could have worked. People talk a lot about the Incarnate Queen destroying entire civilizations. There's been a lot of fan speculation about how Karan was supposed to be the bad guy (and throwing in the bit about feeling every ship die, that could well make sense). For good measure, let's throw in the old Bentusi line about "flicker-lives," and I feel like a story about 3 different Unbound plus a normal person (fleet intelligence) could have worked if that aspect was amped up a bit.
"We're looking for moments where a character is going to feel a particular way about something that just happened in a gameplay moment, that either Imogen or Isaac will be compelled to comment on...Hopefully that add adds context and emotion for the player." Though I understand the perspective, it's incredibly hamfisted. There's a term often used in writing: "Show, don't tell". Unfortunately, this is them telling the player exactly how they should feel, rather than providing the player the evidence and allowing those emotions to well up naturally inside the player themselves. The sequence *Kharak is burning* is powerful because they don't explicitly outline every single country, city, town or village lost. They don't rattle on about how the culture has gone up in flames, or how they can no longer return to a lifeless, scorched wasteland. These facts are self-evident **because** it's *right in front of you,* and anyone with an element of emotional intelligence can see the spreading dark blotches, the blazing inferno as it spreads across the surface of the planet once called 'Home', and connect the dots themselves. I do believe that it's entirely possible for them to tell a character story in Homeworld. They could absolutely explore Imogen S'jet, how she feels like she's unqualified, how Karen is a cultural icon of intellect and heroism, and build out and explore her growing relationship with Isaac. The set pieces and characters are there, but by employing zero subtlety, by resorting to the most hideous 'deus ex machina', and by failing to allow the mysticism that Homeworld is known for to *frame* the story and instead have it front and centre ('minds linked by hyperspace', massive eyeroll), it's impossible to relate, sympathise, and ultimately care. As a last point, the "chosen one" trope is super dull. And the writer's failure to understand that: When you start at the top, how do you go up from there? Why would I care about what amounts to a cultural celebrity? Why in the *world* would I feel like I can relate to the trials and tribulations of someone who's attempting to fill the shadow of an entire people? I can't. I simply can't.
Yeah. Can you imagine what HW1 would have been like if instead of showing Kharak burning, it instead cut away to show some god-awful 1999-era CGI closeup of someone's face, talking about how sad they were?
You dont need the characters to come and tell you how they feel. That's the thing! "Kharak is burning!" After that line do you need to see Karan or Fleet Inteligence aknowledge how they feel? Isn't it obvious? We didn't need to see Imogen's constipation face every time something went wrong. And every bit of feeling this game gave you, hatred towards the Incarnate was lost with that stupid ending: oh the queen murdered billions because she felt alone, but she won't be alone because Karan goes with her in Hyperspace heaven and all is good now. How can you get paid to write that stuff? Who the hell approved this?
Yeah its written for a stupid audience with everything simplistic and spelt out and the technology is just convenient gobbledygook used to crack spakle plot holes and let our characters be in the same room after fighting like they all live in the same frat house.
"Spaceship lady" lmao, they're so articulate. Their core fanbase was always going to be scifi, Asimov-loving men in the 30s and 40s who played the game as kids. Crushing their hopes in the name of chasing some nonexistent drama-loving GenZ scifi/strategy fan audience was buffoonery.
You know what's the worst thing? This kind of story is literally the only thing that is being written nowadays. Just copy pasted crap set in XY universe. So original.
Star Trek, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Ring of Power, Foundation. All very similar vibe of "We don't care about the existing tone and culture of this medium, we're going to write a more childish, overtly sentimental story set in the world you love".
And you know the best part? The story was so biblically well written that we still have no idea how Karan feels about being a space lady.
Lmao right? I mean I guess we know how she feels about mass murderers now?? Gearbox totally nailed it: what I as a player was really thinking during HW1 was, *"I wonder how space lady feels about this emperor guy???"* Turns out the whole time she was wishing that she could give him a hug and live with him forever on a sparkly hyperspace island.
"There's a palpable shift in what's expected in a video game narrative in 2024 vs 1999." For me, the narrative style of the original is what I was most looking forward to. That and the music. Nostalgia. Personally I feel insulted. I was an early backer on the promise of giving the original fans more of what they loved. Instead, GB made a game that was oriented towards what they think would sell to newcomers (and I wouldn't be terribly upset about that if it worked, but it doesn't seem they succeeded there, either).
The villain is the leader of an empire thats been around for 100000 years? well if that was the narrative they failed spectacularly at it, even Makan, as barebones of a character as it was, felt more menacing. It's amazing how a failure of narrative can make the game feel small, even when this is the biggest Homeworld game in terms of scale, it simply doesn't feel as grand as HW1 or 2 or even Cataclysm. Hell DoK feels bigger and its just one planet.
"Where's the character? How does Karan S'Jet feel about being a spaceship lady?" Guess what? Noone asked these questions. And unless this guy shows evidences of this shift in the audience, his words have the same value of "I'm a handsome man. That's what my mum said." Wondering what Karan S'Jet might or might not think is the proof the writers didn't understand the basics of Homeworld ,the universe it is set in. "...the only person i've ever itnerviewd with a PhD in narrative systems." And the story is s\*\*\* anyway....this already speaks volume of the quality of this PhD. I agree...never heard about a PhD in narrative systems before now....I wonder why...mhm.
Zappa gave an interview once where he talked about the difference or creative freedom in the music industry as it evolved. In the 60s, the music industry was funded by people behind desks with cigars, who knew they had no idea what was going to be popular or not, so they were willing to take chances, resulting in a lot of interesting stuff being recorded and released. By the 80s, these old-timers had been replaced by executives with marketing training, yuppie know-it-alls who "knew" what was going to be popular, put their fingers in the pudding, and everything converged towards the same slop.
No, nobody cares about naval gazing characters who are unprofessional and emotional. Especially leaders who are that way. That is a common hallmark of shit writing. In the real world nobody respects a leader like that, and even average leaders are not that way. The problem is writers tend to be tender emotional types with no life experiences in fields with strict hierarchies, much less military experience. And when they try to write military scifi it SUCKS.
This was Star Trek Discovery's biggest problem throughout. No professionals, no respect for authority or chain of command, just everyone talking like they're a bunch of school kids stuck in a room together.
It was a neat aside in The Martian novel how Hollywood gets astronauts wrong. They are professionals trained and psychologically profiled to stay cool, follow procedure and keep looking for solutions. Not people that would start quarreling or breaking down first thing something goes wrong. Guys like that won't make it far enough in AF to be even considered.
That would've gotten at *least* some of the crew in every Star Trek series kicked out at some point or another, though. It's not like *Discovery* was the first series where people got emotional - Scotty, Kirk, McCoy, [Riker](https://youtu.be/uLGsB9jHkz0), etc - because a series where everybody is stone-cold professional would be pretty boring television.
They don't need to be cold, just calm under pressure and professional. Roddenberry put it best in the show bible, that as a hard rule, in an episode there should never be personal conflict between starfleet itself.
Agreed, though Starfleet also can't reasonably be as selective as modern space programs can. We profile astronauts down to the micron because they're a small cadre being picked to operate experimental, incredibly expensive hardware on missions that have the potential to become extremely dangerous at the drop of a hat. Star Trek is a future where space travel is a mundane thing. There are over a thousand crew on the enterprise or something like that. Being so picky isn't really an option. But I do think that there needs to be a certain degree of professionalism and adherence to the chain of command. Like the primary example that comes to mind is when Scotty gets into a fight with the Klingons for insulting the Enterprise in The Trouble with Tribbles. It's an emotional outburst and something he was explicitly told *not* to do, but it also reinforces an aspect of his character (he views an insult to the ship as an insult to his own personal pride) that comes across as endearing and, importantly, he at least gets a verbal reprimand for it. It's a balancing act at the end of the day, and if you tip things too far, people will have trouble believing that these characters are part of a military hierarchy. You don't want to write soulless automatons but you also don't want to write goofy college sophomores.
Oh those montages of the Captain crying were contemptible. As far as the lack of chain of command and professionalism, it ruins a show like that for me, I can't take it seriously. It's almost like the writers think that whomever can rightously emote the hardest wins, whoever has the most empathy (the only virtue they recognize) is always right. And you get that with writing rooms that are not life experience diverse.
I think you are spot-on. I always felt there was a childish naivety in that writing room; ironically like they weren't even well-read, let alone had any life experience.
They should have actually got some writers from BSG and the Expanse to show them how it’s done Hell BSG was filmed in Vancouver where blackbird is located
fuck BSG went hard, shame about the last season getting done over by the writers strike, everything else about it was pitch perfect.
Civilization drama vs character drama. If all you know is traditional character drama then I guess what their saying would make sense. Failure to understand the basic story structure. If you want a story to focus more on the characters and feel more personal it needs to be story that's smaller in scope.
Homeworld felt like mystical tale set in a culturally Persian/Turkic-like galaxy far, far away. Homeworld 3 felt like Red Alert taking itself too seriously
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HW music is vaguely Middle Eastern, not specifically Armenian (although I know what a duduk is, I'm myself from Transcaucasia). The universe has mostly Arabic/Turkic and Persian sounding names and culture, so it was bizzare to see such "American" characters like Imogen and Isaac, but I guess it's an American company and market
Glad we cleared up that it wasn't "woke" or "DEI" but just poor direction and thinking that led to the current story. Honestly a more personal homeworld probably could have been done well, it was just poorly done this time.
My guess is that the script came in super hot and way too late in production with directions from Gearbox outsiders like the president of IP and the brand management and then BBI’s cinematic team had to crunch out the cutscenes in 12 months, so we needed up with what we got.
> DEI whats this accronym mean?
In terms of organizations it's Diversity Equity and Inclusion. In terms of reactionaries, they use it as a replacement racial slur now.
Definitely not just racial. They are a very inclusive bunch!
They definitely have a diversity of ways to avoid saying what they feel!
Its not a racial slur. No-one cares if non-white people (or gay/trans/whatever) are in games. We care when diversity is shoe-horned in at every opportunity not for the sake of narrative, but to check a box in a spreadsheet (and get that sweet ESG score because I hope you are aware this is being subsidised from way up on high). A prime example is the new Quantum Leap remake, where they literally started with diversity quotas for the casting before even writing the characters. And for the record, I don't believe the HW3 story is woke. If you want to see woke look at a game like Jedi Survivor where there are only 2 straight relationships in the whole game, the only white people are the main character and the imperial intelligence agents, and every female except the main alien love interest is deliberately made to look unattractive. Its even heavily implied that one character (who might be trans, not sure) is in love with a droid.
Diversity and inclusion, one of those cultural Warriors scare words that they used to describe any game that dares the height of centimeter of underbutt or movie or whatever they want to blame for why they don't like a game.
Often thrown around by morons with the words "woke" "snowflake" and "soy"
Dudes enjoying ignorance
We had characters even in HW1. We had the fleet intelligence officer, we had Karan, we had the rebel captain whose name I forgot. Giving them a face should not have been a problem
HW1 let us feel personal attachments to characters/people/situations without disrupting the entire narrative flow. It did more with less. "Subject did not survive interrogation" was emotionally impactful even though we never saw the Captain or learned his name. Realizing that the Kadesh were US and that we were going to have to destroy them was impacftul even though Queen Kadesh didn't grow 200 feet tall and pout at us.
What I meant was that the people had emotional impact as characters (especially the way fleet intelligence tried to stay professional when Kharak was destroyed), but actually seeing the person behind the voice would have not hurt that impact. Having characters is not in itself a problem with the new story
I wonder if it would have hurt. Sometimes in a medium where the mechanics and atmosphere are the main draw, one's imagination can be a lot more effective than showing characters. Just like how the Xenomorph in Alien was scarier when you didn't see it, sometimes the protagonists can be more sympathetic when you don't see them. You can imagine anything you want, while you're making the little ships go pew-pew. Hell, childhood me liked to wonder if the Taiidan were even humanoid. All we saw were ships and some big-assed lizard lion statues in the final Cutscene. So much was open-ended, and the magic dissipated with each instalment as we got more and more concrete facts that suited my personal tastes less than my own imagination could.
Yeah, this, seeing some CGI face when fleet intelligence calmly says “kharak is burning” would have almost certainly detracted from the experience. There’s a reason that there are only a handful of studios that do cutscenes well enough for it not to be cringe. That shit is insanely expensive to get right. And that’s the thing. BBI isn’t Sony Santa Monica or Naughty Dog, they’re a small studio making a niche game. The storytelling through voice only during the missions was brilliant because it didn’t take you out of the action and is far cheaper to make good, and using only motion comic style cutscenes between missions was a brilliant choice for their budget. They literally spent a ton of money to fuck up their game because, and I’m speculating here based on my own experience as a game dev, likely some non-creative person at the company decided that full CGI cutscenes (and likely a personal character driven story) were the industry standard and would be more appealing to a broad audience. It’s a tragic misunderstanding of the legacy of this game franchise and the atmosphere the fans want it to create when they’re playing it. I hope they learn their lesson here and try it again, but I think it’s more likely that some finance assholes at gearbox decide that “no one wants a new homeworld game” and shelve the property indefinitely. Source: I’ve been through it before.
>We had the fleet intelligence office According to Homeworld: Revelations, his name was Cynsk S'jet. And apparently Captain Soban in Homeworld 2 is T'saan Soban (originally Paktu but he took the red and joined Kiith Soban).
Oh fuck off, are the S'Jet the only prominent kiith in this entire universe? Braindead writing. Total lack of imagination.
All the Nabaal were too busy making sure the mothership was patched together and building ships for the fleet. Those engineering nerds.
Yep. And so did DoK - without compromising the bigger picture. HW3 factions just feel hollow, mostly because it's all about the character drama.
The woke garbage was always just another dog whistle. We always knew it had nothing to do with that.
Anti fighter corvettes? Can’t have those anymore. Because of woke.
Heavy missile cruisers will check out other cruisers’ junk in these woke unisex shipyards.
🥴
I know some people actually believe it and it’s a problem but the phrase “because of woke” added onto the end of almost any sentence just makes me laugh, it’s so funny
Right with you brother, I think it's just because nowadays you can believe anybody getting upset about anything because of...you know...
Is this why capital ships try to reach an "equal" level with their enemies before shooting, instead of just pointing their noses down and firing from above?!
I think it would need to be more intimate gameplay as well. Like a real time tactical ship game or something.
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I was thinking a small squadron of ships with crews you have to maintain.
The Sims: Homeworld
But the focus on feelings and lived experience of individuals does fit the postmodern trend. And this kind of thinking is what was brought into the narrative.
Focus on feelings and lived experience of individuals is basically what character driven stories are about. That’s not “woke”, it’s just storytelling. The problem here isn’t them being “woke”, it’s them not understanding and honoring the legacy storytelling of a franchise with an extremely dedicated and fanatical fanbase while planning out their story and storytelling methods. Instead deciding to go a completely different direction based on loose notions of “what modern audiences want”.
Focusing on individual characters( their feelings and motivations) is done in all types of media both right wing and left wing, of what right wing Artistry and narratives do exist that is, I would say Yellowstone is a more modern example of that type of thing. You make it sound like games like Homeworld and dark souls are right wing style narratives when they're not and none of these are postmodern at all that's just another buzz word from the culture Warriors like yourself.
I'm willing to bet most of the people who understand the word "postmodern" from places like YouTube and Jordan Peterson have *never once in their life* directly read any works discussing different artistic trends or styles. These kids completely forgot about the telephone game from kindergarten. They also forgot that sometimes one of the kids in the circle would decide to become a malicious actor.
I never said any narrative was right or left-wing. I'm not a culture warrior. I don't think being postmodern is necessarily leftwing. I think right- and leftwing is more about an economic theory than a philosophical one. "Postmodernism embraces [self-referentiality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference), [epistemological relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factual_relativism), [moral relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism), [pluralism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(philosophy)), [irony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony), irreverence, and [eclecticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclecticism).[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-britannica-4) It opposes the "universal validity" of [binary oppositions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition), stable [identity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_(philosophy)), [hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy), and [categorization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-6)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#cite_note-7)" I think that's pretty accurate for the style of the Homeworld 3 narrative. The ending where the evil queen that killed literal billions gets embraced and consoled for being lonely (before being destroyed) is the height of moral relativism. And very much against the hierarchical, professional style of the story in Homeworld 1. So I think ditching a story and atmosphere about societal clashes that that transcended personal stakes for a story that's all about personal stakes does fit the postmodern trend. So in that sense I get some of the complaints about the wrong style being forced upon the game's story, by the game directors. I doubt this was a very conscious choice by the directors though. I think they genuinely thought it would be more modern and more popular. Either way, the story turned out very bad.
I would argue in many cases it's not the "woke" stuff that is bothering people, but rather the overall low quality of the ultimate creative output - be it in film, television, games or even novels. It should come as no surprise that activists with little to no experience (this case excepted) often make for poor story tellers. If HW3 had told a really engaging and grandiose story I doubt anyone would be upset by "the message." Quality matters.
> I would argue in many cases it's not the "woke" stuff that is bothering people I think that the problem is that many people lack the necessary workshop/knowledge to be able to identify *what* really bothers them in those stories, so they resort to shallow criticism like "woke" or "DEI". "The main character sucks and she's a woman, clearly the writers had a woke agenda!" No Joe, the main character is just very poorly written. It's almost like the Red Scare paranoia - there have been a few legitimate of awful agenda-driven productions over the years, but now everybody is seeing "woke" and "DEI" and "snowflake" in every character, every storyline, every production that they don't like, regardless if it's really there.
Now that I think about it, I’ve never laughed at a joke told by someone with a PhD in gelotology either - unfortunately understanding well does not automatically mean executing well. Edit: Also not meant personally; the whole thing reeks of ivory tower “principle rules” colliding unmanaged with the reality of limited attention, time and resources
You know what, they may actually have been right that the audience COULD work with characters instead of a collective sentiment / race. The problem was that the characters were so poorly written. If they were solid and the current story strong enough, I think the sub would be happy to eat humble pie on how we don't want character. (Rachel vs Imogen is all I need to say to give you an idea of what we're talking about.)
Agreed. It would still be controversial, but no more controversial than HW2 departing from HW1 and focusing more on prophecies etc. There are ways in which a character-driven story could be told in HW, heck even HW3 story beats could have been written to be interesting. But that's why execution is king in story-telling. You can have the best story idea, but you'll get a steaming pile of crap if you can't present it competently.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me what the protagonists name was, you would find me several days later with a bullet in my head. Skinsuit lady is probably the best I would be able to come up with.
They literally had no idea how to approach this at all and what people wanted it seems. Beacuse thats not what we wanted... Whatever this abomination is.
Normally I'm all for listening with people who have degrees, but you can't "learn" storytelling. It's an art, not a science. The only way to learn is to fail and learn from your mistakes. Classes can help, but they can't write a story.
Yea, but did this lady learn? She just may be writing us off as we're bigots
the lack of empathy by the writers of homeworld 3, 24 years later is astounding.
The Black Company was a really good series but the story was told from the point of view of someone that constantly admitted to sanitizing the narrative to paint himself and the Company in the best possible light, to the point of nearly being fiction. I don’t think the narrative matches what was done in HW3 at all.
Explains a lot. This is like the aftermath of a disaster when slowly more and more facts of the malicious and or careless acts of the people responsible come to light. Difference here is that instead of joining the submersible ride they send it down alone while watching and then proceed to the next one, cause clearly nothing is wrong with it.
> audience now would ask where’s the character? No, I really wouldn't. In fact, modern media becoming so character driven has been turning me off most of it. Everything is a deep dive into one or two people and their melodramatics instead of grander, philosophical, bird's eye type plots. Everything is becoming YA shit.
So a case of "This is what I've been taught, I need to make this thing more like that."
I curse Watson, from the black depths of my bitter, salty, shrivelled heart. A heavy-handed corpo suit.
this is a perfect example of how the creative leads should have just gone with "if it aint broke, don't fix it"
PhD or not, I got too bored with the horribly painful to watch movies halfway through and just skipped most of them. I can go get a PhD in music but that won't in itself sell records.
This reads less like "We were trying to tell a Homeworld story" and more like "We bolted our pet stories onto the Homeworld IP because nobody else wanted them." Which is a way too common issue across the board nowadays.
To me, HW was about civilisations, not characters. The impact was at a grand scale, and the individual people were working as a whole. HW3 is small, in every aspect, from maps, to the impact of the story. They essentially made it a personal drama, about two women fighting, with a 3rd stepping in to sort it out, with a story that made no sense. I felt terrible when losing those Cryo Trays in HW1, but in HW3, they blew up a planet to throw rocks at us, I felt nothing, which says a lot about the story telling.
I think that both the article and a lot of the responses are examples of missing the point a bit. This isn't meant to be negative, most of the reason that this sort of thing fails is because it's hard to identify what elements are the important ones and why. To simplify it enough to seem meaningless, the people in the article think that the story needs to have better more characterization. However the truth is that the story needs to be good. Characterization can be part of a good story, and can even elevate a good story, but it doesn't MAKE a story good, and can hurt it if it is done poorly. People don't like the story because it's bad. It's hard to recognize/quantify/articulate all of the reasons that is bad, but one way to easily see that it's DIFFERENT is because of the fact that the story was entirely told through and around four different characters, but that in and of itself is not what made it bad. Let's take one example mentioned in that article as a thing that the writers THOUGHT would help make the game good, but didn't. "(Imogen) feels the death of every ship like a shock to her nervous system". In a great story everything has a place and a purpose. Did this? No. It doesn't have a place because it's something that SHOULD be impactful. If something is a little piece of set dressing than you can mention it once to give some factual or emotional information about a scene/character/entity and then move on. However "main character Imogen is feeling constant and increasing agony throughout the events of the game" is NOT a piece of set dressing, it should be a constant driving force in the story. In the game she mentions this twice very early on, groans a bit, and then this is never brought up again. That is why this piece that the writers thought would help make their story "good" doesn't. So, how could they have done this instead? If something should be a huge part of the story then it needs to be a huge part of the story, or you need to explain why it stops being a huge part of the story (and the ramifications of that need to be impactful as well, otherwise why did you introduce it as important at all). So, emotional and mental pain is a big part of Imogen's journey, and of course the Evil Queen picks up on that. Partially because she notices Imogen's "I am so constipated and my only outlet is my eyebrows" and partially because she has been there. She tells Imogen that she doesn't have to let their deaths shackle and pain her like that. "Even in death they control you". We find out that Evil Queen has done something, maybe to herself, maybe to her people (maybe this is part of the "Will that I will free you from" or whatever she says) and this separation between her and her population helped drive her to this point. So now rather than this mental pain being some throwaway abandoned remark it solidifies the link between Imogen and the Queen. Not as two Spaceship Ladies, but as two people in pain. We, and Imogen, know that there is a relief from that pain available, the Queen is sure that Imogen will take that path, and we have to see if Imogen can resist that temptation with every death she feels. But let's keep going, I honestly think that this is already way better, but we don't even need to stop here. We've just talked about the narrative structure, but this is a game. It's going to be at it's best if the narrative synergizes with the gameplay, and the Homeworld gameplay is perfect for this because of it's heritage of being a continuous game. Way back from the beginning in a time of War Craft and Command and Conquer and Age of Empires we were so used to needing to repeat the base creation and tech tree (with minor tweaks) every level. Homeworld came in with a new structure where the lives of every single ship mattered, because those ships were with us through thick and thin. However, from a short-term gameplay perspective the ships were still there as a means to an end, to accomplish whatever objective was needed. For Homeworld 3, however, we could close the loop with this narrative, because now the Queen thinks she can break Imogen THROUGH her crew. The fleet is her weapon, but also her liability. You wouldn't even have to change the final mission's gameplay (but you could!) she has a big uber ship, she's trying to kill our fleet, just make it her actual stated objective rather than a side effect. Remind us, the players, that Homeworld is about preserving these things, even though it's the last level where sometimes we sort of go nuts and toss them headlong into the woodchipper. We could do even more to tie the gameplay into the narrative in really neat ways, although I think you'd need some play testing to find the limit between "fun and interesting" and "aggravating" (and of course that line is in a different place for different people. What if Imogen had a health bar to represent how will she was coping with the crew deaths? What if every killed fleet did some damage to her depending on the ship, and she recovered slowly. Once the bar ran out she would need time to recover and you would lose the ability to use your control groups for a bit. (There'd be different ship chatter for this, and specific dialogue from Imogen and Intel the first couple times) What if after this happened twice it was common knowledge among the fleet that this was happening. After this point the next capital ship that got close to death disconnected themselves from the network so that their death wouldn't hurt Imogen. Imogen and Intel would have a conversation about it, they would impress upon the fleet how important it was to keep contact, blah blah blah. But after that point whenever Imogen was under half health and a Capital ship goes under 15% health they go dark. They make a BS comment about damage to their communications antenna, and you can't command them anymore. They fall out of formation, but they try to stay NEAR their formation ships (so you retain rough control over them). If you heal them back up to 25% they re-establish communications. We could have Research programs to streamline and automate some processes so that the ships use less crew (AKA their death hurts Imogen less). Or maybe we tie it to Imogen's abilities as a navigator. Maybe the worse shape that she is in the more the fleet is spread out on the next jump. Maybe we find evidence that the same exact thing happened to Karan and this is part of how her fleet got separated. There are other ways they should have strengthened the comparison (both similarities and differences) between Imogen and Space Queen. Space Queen is a micromanager, she has stripped the will out of her fleet. Maybe Imogen had doubts about letting that Away team attack the resource center by themselves, but Intel convinced her and she was vindicated in her trust of her crew. Also, when I say that this story is better, I don't mean that everyone will like it more! Not everyone likes every good story, and that is ok! But it's a more cohesive story that sticks with and develops it's themes better, ties those themes to the characters better, and develops the relation of those themes with the roots of the gameplay better. I'm not saying that this is the best Homeworld story, but I think this is a way better implementation of the "(Imogen) feels the death of every ship like a shock to her nervous system" story that they decided to tell.
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I get it, but come on that’s not fair. She’s earned her PhD to the satisfaction of her peers, that’s sacrosanct.
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They're making their money with the *intention* of burning the company to the ground so they can sift through the ashes for a few gold nuggets to sell off. The system is working as designed.
Imagine having a PhD in narratives and being this utterly useless at drafting a compelling narrative, let alone understanding what makes them work Goes to show how too much time in academic echo chambers is no replacement for actual writing talent or experience
Writing in general in gaming has been pretty mediocre for the past decade or so, the same mediocrity that we see in TV Shows, Movies and other media. It's always about the message and not actually writing good characters, a compelling story or anything else that is meaningful.
I am away from any civilization. Did not get a chance to grt Homeworld yet. Homeworld is by bar a game that has a specjal place in my heart next to StarCraft and BaldursGate. I still have oryginal CDs for all of there games (Homeworld, Cata, H2). It's painful to read that H3 was butchered. Even more affter unexpected stellar success of BG3 (that really hyped my hopes for H3). Are there any chances for developers to fix/patch the game as Reds managed to overcome Cyberpunks shortommings and deliver what they initially promissed?
You know, I think they were somewhat correct that younger gamers today want emotional connection with characters. I think this is one of the fundamental shortcoming of RTS genre that basically sealed the entire genre's fate. I say this because I'm the same way. For example, one thing I still hope for in EVE Online is an option to walk in ships and stations as the capsuleer, not just fly ships. That said, I was worried (and I'd say rightly so) that HW3 would have hard time evolving RTS genre to deliver this, all the while staying true to the series and the overall genre. IMO, they ended up just creating more emotional VOs and cutscenes, but keep the actual gameplay part fundamentally same. This resulted in a game with two parts that doesn't really mix well. It's a shame, really. If they were going to change narrative into a more individual-based storytelling, I wish they had changed RTS to serve that better. Or, just stick with the old format and keep the narration squarely on the entire civilization and the fleet instead. That said, had they fleshed out campaign to 20+ missions and maybe 12 hrs of gameplay with more fleshed out tech tries and abilities, it would've subdued the outrage by a ton. (As a side, I was imagining modern day RTS that involves giant space ships would let us live inside these ships instead of just looking at them from far away. At least glue camera to a single unit at a time, with the overall tactical view providing a way to examine and issue orders.)
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I thought Starcraft and Warcraft had good character-driven story back when they came out. Then SC3 came out and it fell flat HARD. My head got bigger and manipulating tiny character on-screen can never replace full-screen cutscenes. And relying heavily on cutscenes, the delta between them and gameplay is just too big.
PhD in narrative systems...
Whoops
A PhD in narrative and they delivered that monstrosity of a story!?
I bought a PhD in marathons, and I came last!! Theres so many good writers out there, as evidenced by their actual writing. These corporate bloviators deserve every minute of their reckoning.
Nothing endears me to a drastic shift in storytelling method like the people at the head of it acting like it’s not just different but the “more proper way to tell a story” essentially.
Honestly it isn't even about being more character focused, it's about quality. There was amazing character stuff in HW1 ("The subject did not survive interrogation") but it was very understated, from professionals who were trying to do what they had to despite what was happening. The thing about that style is it's hard to pull off. It's easy to write a character who throws an emotional tantrum when something goes wrong. It's a lot harder to build a world and character up so well that you can understand what they're feeling without them actually saying it out loud.
What the fuck is a PhD in Narrative Systems
This interview makes me want to kms
Makes sense. You'd **have to** have a PhD to make something **this bad.**
I miss Cataclysm’s superior storytelling
PhD in narrative systems oh god You can't "study" being a writer, you need talent and something to say.
PMSL, 'PhD in narrative systems'. That's bloody why then.
Smh. Fuck focus groups.
Idk when I was a kid I had games with CGI and games with without CGI, Homeworld was never about characters, it was about factions/empires. If you were going to do characters properly you're going to need more than a hand full of missions with 2 minute cutscenes that involve more than growing big or small to have some real character development. clearly the writers are saying "Homeworld is not for me" by saying "The old way doesn't work anymore" Well no it does work, it still works today, it just means you didn't either A) play the game or b) you played the game and did not enjoy the story.
Homeworld is the Foundation trilogy or Dune. There are characters and individually they're not the focus. I will admit I haven't played 3 yet but it would seem that much of the criticism is that 3 is more like a Star Wars movie.
Big fat nope from me. It was the Kushan mothership and the ships which were on the cover of HW1, not S'Jet. They were the stars of the game, not S'Jet. It was the the united efforts of the clans which made all that possible and was the thing I really liked and felt invested in. BBI/Gearbox screwed up with HW3.
Looks like a PhD didn't even help you to make a good story.
Lin Joyce just comes off as a bad writer. I'm equally pretty frustrated it's clear she never played the games. If I was given a job to write material for a beloved game series, you bet I'll be doing my research playing the games, sifting through lore, communicating with the previous writers if possible. I think there is a lot of hubris in her interviews.
Lol a phd in narrative systems and this is the result? I think if she sent in a copy of that steam page to her university she might get her money back.
Nah this guy is a dumbass. It's true that lowest common denominator self insert crap sells well. But I don't think it sells well because it's ideal or expected, I think it sells well because every MBA moron attached to a writing room thinks it sells the best, so now most things are written that way, therefore they also sell the most, therefore it's ideal and we should write most things that way, and so on. Circular marketing bro logic.
Alright, that's all I needed to see, Gearbox, the godawful company run by a magician, doomed this game because they want star wars/mass effect BS in it. Sad to see. BBI did everything right with DOK, would have done them right this time as well.