Around the turn of the century, PC strategy games were thriving across a variety of franchises and developers. Blizzard Entertainment was building its legacy with multiple game and expansion launches across both the Warcraft and Starcraft series, while Westwood Studios found two different paths of success for its newly-birthed Command & Conquer franchise, split between the mainline Tiberium entries and the less serious Red Alert titles, both of which were received well by fans and critics alike.
During that same period, fledgling developer Relic Entertainment had their own desires to enter the strategy space and did so with the release ofHomeworldin 1999. Drawing inspiration from both Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica,Homeworldestablished players as the leader of the exiled Kushans, who were sent into space and must now try to reclaim their planet Kharak while dealing with various ally and enemy factions. The original title pushed boundaries by being the first real-time strategy game to allow players to move their spaceships in three-dimensional spaces, and performed well enough to receive a standalone expansion in 2000 and a sequel in 2003, which primarily served as a presentational upgrade with enhanced visuals and audio.
How Blackbird and Gearbox Brought Homeworld Back After THQ’s Demise
In 2004, THQ acquired Relic Entertainment and decided to shift their focus away from Homeworld, instead pushing the studio to continue working on real-time strategy games but across new licenses and IP, including Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. This series pause would continue through 2012, when THQ ultimately filed for bankruptcy. While the developers at Relic Entertainment were bought out by SEGA, the team was separated from the IP that helped establish its reputation in the first place, as therights to Homeworld were purchased by Gearbox Softwarethe following year.
Fortunately, Gearbox made plans to bring back Homeworld after over a decade, with the release of the internally-developed Remastered Collection in 2015 that featured both of the original games, and a spin-off prequel with the subtitleDeserts of Kharakin 2016, which exchanged the space battles for those fought on the planet ground with troops and vehicles. The team that created this spin-off, Blackbird Interactive, was founded by one of the former co-founders of Relic, Rob Cunningham, who attempted to purchase the rights to Homeworld during the 2012 THQ auction. Although Gearbox was ultimately the owner, the publisher worked with Blackbird to help its debut title become part of the Homeworld series, and this partnership would continue to evolve as work finally began on a proper third entry.
Initial development forHomeworld 3kicked off in 2016, but major buzz surrounding the game’s announcement emerged alongside the reveal of a Fig crowdfunding and investment campaign in 2019. With the game already being fully funded by Gearbox, Blackbird used this financial opportunity to not only increase the game’s scope, but to receive feedback from donors on how they’d like Homeworld to evolve for the modern era. Although the financial investments were ultimately canceled after Gearbox was purchased by Embracer Group in 2021, the valuable responses from dedicated fans were taken into consideration throughout the game’s development. Along the way, Homeworld 3 suffered severaldelaysthat pushed it back from releasing in 2022 to May of this year, but after ademoof the game was released as part of the latest Steam Next Fest, players now have a good sense of what to expect upon release.
Homeworld 3will take place 100 years after the “Age of S’Jet,” a golden age across the galaxy that began after Karan S’Jet unlocked an ancient hyperspace gate network. But during the opening, Karan vanished and a dark presence known only as “The Anomaly” emerged to disrupt this long-held peace and threaten life as we know it. In the solo campaign, players will take control of Karan’s successor, Imogen S’Jet, as she sends out a fleet to investigate the Anomaly and begin to understand how it operates. Perhaps the biggest feature being introduced toHomeworld 3is the ability to deploy huge megaliths and trenches, which smaller spacecraft can navigate and use for cover to get closer to the enemy or stay protected from oncoming fire.
In addition to traditional multiplayer,Homeworld 3is also introducing a brand-new War Games mode, offering randomized fleet battles for solo players or squads of up to three which rewards survivors with artifacts to enhance your ships for the next encounter. With key developers from Relic returning to the franchise after twenty years, and valuable feedback from longtime players being integrated into the development,Homeworld 3seems to be putting together all the right pieces for the comeback of a PC strategy classic when it launches on May 13.
