Homeworld 2 was a dud

[Shahadem]

Ugh, what can I say about this game?

The nonstop attacks from enemy ships during missions simply is not fun. Players need breathing room in between, something which you knew how to give us in HW1 but completely forgot about in HW2. The autobalancing introduced in HW2 was the stupidest concept you ever conceived of.

The setting for HW2 makes ZERO sense. What happened to the HUGE fleet I had at the end of HW1? What happened to the united galatic forces that existed at the end of the HW1? We whipped the Taidan's ♥♥♥, now they are back somehow because? Did you completely forget about the rebellion that was also being launched by the Taidan against their own corrupt government to overthrow the emperor and replace the monarchy with a representative government? Why were there zero ships defending the new Mothership while it was being constructed even though the Higaraans were well aware that there was an enemy on the way? How did they completely forget how to build capital ships, frigates, everything? I'm just imagining the Honest Trailer treatment here and it would probably look an awful lot like the Honest Trailers for Afterearth where the narrator simply stormed off because he could not take it anymore.

While we are talking about serious plot holes, what about the plot holes regarding the jump drive BS in HW2? The ship they found on Kushan at the beginning of HW1 was a Higaraan generation ship. It was one of a large fleet of identical generation ships and was the only generation ship which managed to make the journey from Higaraa to Kushan. It wasn't using some amazing billion old lost technology, it was using the same jump drive that all the other Higaraan generation ships were using. If you had actually replayed HW1 and watched the cutscenes you would have known this. So the whole lost technology BS simply doesn't work because there was not only zero precedent for this in HW1, and the actual story of HW1 completely contradicts this concept by outright showing us that the ship found on Kushan at the beginning of HW1 was one of about 10 identical generation ships. So that ship did not have this amazing billion year old lost technology on it. And there is another reason why that ship could not have amazing lost technology on it, because the Taidan were the ones who oversaw the construction of the Higaraan generation ships after they defeated them. Do you honestly think they would let the Higaraans place this ancient lost technology into one of the ships? And even if you do, what are the chances that the only generation ship which made completed the journey was the one with the ancient jump drive in it? That's super lucky.

I could go on and on, but in the end the verdict will be the same. HW2 sucks. There was some ok innovation, but there were so many missteps in terms of level design, autoscaling, lack of breaks in between missions, completely boneheaded story setting, that the positive changes are overshadowed by the negative changes.

[Gotcha!]

Can't agree more. I never liked HW2's single player.

Players should have been allowed to harvest resources and rebuild their fleet after each mission, just like in the first one. It was also very nice to catch a breather.
Autobalancing was also present in HW1 though, something most people either forgot or never noticed. But yeah, it's a lot more unforgiving in HW2.

I won't get started on the half-baked story. :)

Multiplayer/skirmishes are fun though. At least there's that. :)

[Link Kadeshi]

The Kushan came from Kharak, the people are called Kushan. And the ships they trudged off in were called Prison Ships.

Sorry, I had to say that first....

However, I totally agree. HW1, while it did have a balance feature, I could build and salvage everything that wasn't bolted down (And half the stuff that was) and beat the game. In HW2, I once did TOO well. I took too few losses, and face off against such overwhelming force, it's not funny. Balcora's Gate was a tuff one as I recall. Not sure if I had a mod that changed the unit cap or not, honestly. Regardeless, some issue.

[SPOILERS FROM HERE ON]

The story is a resault of idiotic publisher involvement. How are they the last of the Bentusi? What? Where the heck did that come from? Not only did the Loyalist Taiidan join the Vaygr, but the Republican Taiidan seemed to as well, I guess. Even so, why are there no Taiidani ships? Did they seriously scrap EVRY SINGLE Taiidan ship?

The ships, too, show the publisher BS. 100 years is not enough to completly forego your cultural ship design evolution. Of the Hiigaran ships, only the Ion Cannon Frigate retains any resemblance to the HW1 era ship. I guess they outsourced their ship R&D to another race. The tech doesn't seem to make sense either. Where is my freakin' Assault Frig? The Flak Frigate is not good enough, sorry. No cloaking generator, no grav well, for some reason. But they did steal the Taiidani Defense Field Frigate, and made it stupidly worse. What? You wanted to build a scout AND order a shipyard hyperspaced in? HAH! Too bad that wont happen, because there is only one guy that handles the construction/shipyard ordering. I'd get not being allowed to build two fighters, or two frigates, but I have to build seperate construction facilities, why can't they all work at the same time? I really can't build a probe and an interceptor wing? Really?

Sigh.

[dbrower]

A little while after a war, people stop liking to pay for a fleet they don't need, and it shrinks if there is no Big Baddie threatening to attack at any moment.

HW2 was a more difficult game than HW1; now they are about equal (I'm through M11 on 2).
Two is always easier if you just remember to never to what Fleet Stupidity suggests, and do something different, like delay the last kill until you have harvested and reconfigured your fleet. In One, "intellegence" made fewer asinine suggestions.

I like 'em all just fine.

[Temp.sgk]

Umm you do know you can pause the game and issue orders? That would solve your problem with the nonstop enemy attacks.

[BlaezeL]

So much this, all of the above. Plus some more from me:

Gameplay... I stopped enjoying HW2R at M3. You are not allowed one single mistake, no way to recover; you have to do everything as it was scripted and envisioned by the designers, the game just punishes for anything else.
So, just to spite it, I started to ignore mission objectives (given by the wonderful "Fleet Stupidity" :D) and go off in random directions, finding a shipyard undefended here (taking it out because of course you are not allowed to board and take it, even if you successfully board it it remains in enemy hands.... pff), stealing stray frigates and destroyers there. And then sometimes, the game hates me back and throws a huge, undefeatable fleet at my mothership out of the blue. Gee thanks, there comes some save scumming from my part then, and I steal that fleet as well. But of course, I have to remember to scrap the majority of this stolen super fleet before mission end, otherwise, there will be some unbeleiveable opposition on the next one.

Visual design... In HW1, every ship looked different, just by their vague shape, you could recognize them instantly. In HW2, every ship looks the same. Vaygr ships are vertical, Hiigaran ships are horizontal slabs, that's it. There goes readablility. Amazing how they did so much less by using much more poligons. But the minimalist style is still amazing, mind.

Story... This whole legendary hyperspace core of forgotten space-techno-gods mumbo jumbo is just ridiculous. (And to nitpick, in the HW1 manual, they specifically stated the hyperspace core of the mothership was a reverse engineered replica of the one found in Khar'toba - the wreck in the desert. So even if that core was by some unimaginable chance this legendary stuff, how comes it can be replicated so easily, by a culture that completely forgot hyperspace tech for centuries! Why is it such a big deal now?)
The Hiigarans. Did they completely lose it after landfall? I can understand shrinking the fleet in peace time, but there is this invasion thing going on in the galaxy and they only start to prepare shortly before it hits them? And they prepare by building a second mothership? For a couple of months they are building that mothership and nothing else? When an invasion is coming your way, you build a huge military fleet to defend, not a replica of a colony ship that was originally planned to serve as a swiss knife for an expeditionary mission. How comes I can build a defense fleet in 3 hours, but they failed to do so in months? I had my doubts if the homeworld formula (mission based game centered around the mothership) can be used for an invasion story, sadly, this does not convince me that it can be done successfully.

But somehow, it is still an awsome game. I really like playing it when i am not hating it intensely. My love-hate curve fluctuates on the frequency of new ridiculous enemy fleet appearances, so it does a full swing in roughly every 20 minutes :)

[Adino]

Originally posted by Link Kadeshi:

The ships, too, show the publisher BS. 100 years is not enough to completly forego your cultural ship design evolution.

Maybe not, but it IS long enough to make changes. Look at our history. WW1 - WW2 - Modern age. We are only just entering 100 years since the invention of the first tank and they are vastly different. Little Willie vs Leopard II.

Originally posted by Link Kadeshi:

Of the Hiigaran ships, only the Ion Cannon Frigate retains any resemblance to the HW1 era ship. Sigh.

The ships in HW1 weren't Hiigaran they were Kushan. The Kushan were exiled from their homeworld and therefore had to redesign and build from scratch all their own ships. When they go to their homeworld Hiigara they obviously took on the Hiigarian culture, weaponary etc instead of keeping their own. Secondly 100 years is a long time and we don't know what battles they ships fought in that forced the changes to be made.

[Spacemonkey]

I disagree. I really liked HW2. The auto balancing made the game a challenge, unlike in HW1 where once to got a big fleet, the rest of the missions were easy.

However I agree the story in HW1 is much more plausible then HW2.

[Spacemonkey]

Originally posted by Link Kadeshi:

The ships, too, show the publisher BS. 100 years is not enough to completly forego your cultural ship design evolution.

Of course it is.

Compare modern fighters jets to the planes we had 100 years ago. Completely different.

[Jeckenn]

Yes, I have to agree with this post. The action never stops unless you press pause and that is not how I like to play an RTS game.

However there is not much use in telling Gear Box this because all they did was remaster the games they did not try to make new games or make changes to them they just redid the graphics to represent todays standards.

[Gaz]

BIG LOL.. dude's! seriously? 100 years ago we were just getting to grips with flight!.. And today we have Eurofighter Typhoons, F22 Raptors, Type 45 Destroyers and Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers.

[sieur_metz]

My post will contain spoilers.

A lot of love went into the story of HW1. The game was anything but hollow. The amount of lore created and slipped into the manual made gave this people a complex and thorough backstory. It made me care about the Kushan.

The HW2 storyline is godawful terrible in the context of what we know from HW1, and even on its own is very lacking.

The original homeworld fleet should not have been scrapped, if anything it should have been as rapidly expanded as possible because the war to take Hiigara may be over but that hardly means Hiigara is safe. A 4000 year old empire with vast military armaments converts to a republic within the span of a few months. The Taiidan people had no cultural basis for democracy - it would be incredibly unstable. How many military leaders with independent support would be seeking to carve out their own empires? And if that instability isn't enough, factor in the literally billions of Taiidan refugees who had nothing to do with the bombing of Kharak who are forcibly removed from the only homeworld they ever knew and sent into an exile of their own. How many of them do you think would be willing to join with an imperialist armada to reclaim Hiigara - after all, they were actually born there, its more their homeworld than it is the Kushan's. The Kushan out of necessity would have spent the next hundred years honing their defenses and expanding their fleet to have any chance at surviving. Its an incredible set up for intricate story telling. Unfortunately it is entirely disregarded.

So lets consider HW2 as though none of the events of HW1 ever happened. We start HW2 with Hiigara under military assault and the plan is to sneak a brand new mothership class vessel through enemy lines and....? Actually I have no idea what the plan was because it must not have been too important since when the severlely depopulated Bentusi drop by to deliver a swift and cryptic message about a superweapon from ancient technology all other plans are put on hold. Instead of telling those evident losers to buzz off and waging a massive counterattack you go on a safari hunt which tragically your enemy has already started and no matter how many times you think you will finally have the advantage, they will always be a few steps ahead because they're immune to everything you aren't.

Naturally the object of the safari hunt must have some kind of history behind it. Sadly, its not very compelling. The "Progenitors" build themselves a big fancy super-deathray-ship that can jump around space really really quick. Okay, so they are exceptionally smart and exceptionally violent. That's believable. Unfortunately that is about where believability ends. They jump their super-death-ray ship to the center of the galaxy, accessible only through special gates that can only be unlocked with keys in the shape of smaller not-as-super-death-ray ships. Then they take the hyperspace core of their big super-death-ray ship, break it into three pieces, and scatter them about the galaxy. The lesser death ray ships are carted away for safe keeping, but get lost anyway. None of this makes sense, and the progenitors rightfully no longer exist.

So you and generic baddie fight it out to get to the super-death-ray ship first, you succeed and in a witless moment of an otherwise ridiculously successful military campaign, the generic evil mastermind commits evil baddie sin #1 and gives away the final details of his evil plans in time for you to hop back to the homeworld and save the day from his planet killers. Aftermath - being the only known race remaining in the galaxy, the Hiigarans win, because super-death-ray ship can defeat all the rest of the vaygr, everywhere, all by itself. Sadly, we only get to play with it for one mission.

TLDR: Bang your head against your keyboard. The resulting text is as coherent as the HW2 story and probably more true to the pre-existing lore.

[Gaz]

does it matter? I loved HW2..

but c'mon.. its just a game. Just be grateful that the remake is here, and finally something homeworld related is again happening :)

And if we are all really , eally nice to gearbox and give them all our money, maybe they will be nice enough to give us HomeWorld 3 & 4 :) ????? Perhaps even a couple of standalone campains from other factions and story arks like Cataclysm .. :)

[sieur_metz]

Originally posted by Gaz:

does it matter? I loved HW2..

but c'mon.. its just a game. Just be grateful that the remake is here, and finally something homeworld related is again happening :)

And if we are all really , eally nice to gearbox and give them all our money, maybe they will be nice enough to give us HomeWorld 3 & 4 :) ????? Perhaps even a couple of standalone campains from other factions and story arks like Cataclysm .. :)

Yup, thats why I bought the remaster in advance... I'm really looking forward to new stories in the homeworld universe, hopefully more like cataclysm :)

[Spacemonkey]

I don't see any point in nit-picking of the details of the HW2 story.

HW2 doesn't detracted from HW1 in any way. And if it wasn't for HW2, we would have never had such a large activity community, awesome mods, and a re-master.


So come one, give HW2 a break. I enjoyed it.

[sieur_metz]

Originally posted by Spacemonkey:

I don't see any point in nit-picking of the details of the HW2 story.

HW2 doesn't detracted from HW1 in any way. And if it wasn't for HW2, we would have never had such a large activity community, awesome mods, and a re-master.


So come one, give HW2 a break. I enjoyed it.

Lol... to be fair, the HW2 engine was very impressive. The complex mod really unleashed the potential and gave me far more hours of playtime than skirmish in either cataclysm or hw1.