It very much lived up to the name, despite the change in setting, while not being beholden to it. There was a big gap, but eventually we got Blackbird Interactive's Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, a prequel set in the desert instead of in space. More Homeworld has, at least, been a nice consolation prize. Esports and MOBAs took over, and now Homeworld looks more like an evolutionary dead end than the future of RTS games. The biggest RTS success story has undoubtedly been StarCraft 2, which has dominated the genre for over a decade, and it's great, but it's also just more StarCraft. For all the impressive stuff that's come since, nothing has ever seemed quite as bold. I'm trying to think of another time I was more excited about what was in store for the genre and coming up short. It's a big job, saving your species, and Homeworld never lets you forget that the odds are stacked against you. The 2015 remaster made it more accessible, but it remains a game where you really have to work for your victories. It's challenging to the point of occasionally being punishing, and it turns out that managing fleets in a vast 3D space is pretty tricky. ![]() You can actually save all 600,000 people, but chances are you'll lose a lot of them. To really hammer things home, it gives you the numbers. ![]() This is brutally established in the game's third mission, which throws you into a harrowing rescue attempt where you have to secure cryo trays with slumbering passengers above your burning world, all while enemies are trying to wipe them out. Tragedy is always nipping at your engines. You're trying to preserve your species, trying to build a huge armada to keep them all safe, so taking a beating stings, and there are consequences. If you get through a mission by the skin of your teeth, you'll have a whole other mission ahead of you where you'll really feel those losses. Loss and desperation run all the way through the game, and they're made more tangible by their mechanical impact. If all these words about Homeworld have got you ravenous for more nostalgia, why not read our mammoth history of the strategy game (opens in new tab) feature, where we go all the way back to the '70s and chart the genre's course. The genre started to evolve rapidly, but in the mid-90s there was no way I could have imagined where things would end up just a few years down the line. It didn't change a whole lot, aside from the setting, but then Westwood responded with Command & Conquer and the competition began. It took three years for it to spawn a challenger, which came in the form of Blizzard's Warcraft. Westwood's Dune 2 was the RTS that really founded the genre, though it wasn't the first one. Then Homeworld arrived, and it was like staring into the future. There was the rivalry between Westwood and Blizzard pushing things forward, and then around them so many experiments, like the mind-bogglingly massive battles of Total Annihilation and Age of Empire's attempts to make a Civ-scale RTS. With every new game I could get my sweaty little hands on, there were dramatic leaps as some of the best developers of the day conjured up new systems, more elaborate conflicts and started to flex their storytelling muscles. ![]() During my formative PC gaming years, the RTS was king.
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