900 hours after a rude awakening in a rickety cart, a moment to reminisce on all that Life in Skyrim had to throw at you:

* escape imminent death from beheading
* escape imminent death from dragons, spiders, bears, wolves, trolls, vampires, elves, giants, dwarves
* escape imminent death from soldiers, bandits, guards, vendors, bartenders, maids, bards, cooks, mages, farmers
* escape imminent death from rockfalls, sinkholes, spikes, flamethrowers, waterfalls, slicers
* escape imminent death from carrying too much, carrying too little, having everything but That One Thing(tm), having too many of That One Thing(tm), having the correct amount of That One Thing(tm) but at the wrong time, underdressing, overdressing, stepping on something, NOT stepping on something. shouting, not shouting, bribing, not bribing
* escape imminent death from rushing, lingering, picking up books, being illiterate, pulling levers, ignoring levers

All the while your wardrobe is a function of whatever you just looted off that last dead guy (or girl, or creature!) until in the midst of cheating death you discover you can actually learn to make your own stuff, if you manage to escape imminent death while hunting, gathering or mining.

You start getting more confident as your wardrobe and your sharp or blunt implements grow in sophistication, only to discover there is also magic in this world, and imminent death can come out of shadows, or darkness, or distance, or other dimensions, in any combination of freezing, burning, electrifying, infecting, poisoning, or afflicting ways.

So you learn to savour the sparse moments you can stop to replenish your strength, and experience the joys of numerous things to eat and drink that turn out to be imminent death in bite-sized portions. You discover that sleep, besides imminent death, also brings inter-dimensional travel.

You stop and pick the flowers (mind the bees and firebugs), you take in the panoramic views from atop majestic mountains (mind your step), you woo the fair damsels (mind their temper and/or concealed dagger), you sing and drink and brawl (mind whose toes you step on). You travel and fight, talk and laugh with varying companions, sometimes human, sometimes not, sometimes they save you, sometimes you save them, sometimes they betray you, sometimes you betray them.

You shout at people. You blow off steam with automatons. You talk with dogs. You dance with wolves. You trot with horses. You chat with bats. You roll with trolls. You parlor with dragons.

You buy, and sell, but mostly you 'borrow'. You rent, or acquire, or build. You marry the wench of your dreams, and a dragon drops in, causing her to leave you at the altar. You adopt cute little orphans, to watch them spend hours every day honing their dagger skills while you desperately try not to fall asleep.

Eventually, you realize you worked your way through many a death-defying career:
* you were an adventurer (like me), and saved the world from a dragon.
* you joined a group of liberal hippies that spend their life shouting at the skies
* you negotiated a truce in a civil war
* you took sides and massacred the others
* you joined a group of assassins
* you joined a group of thieves
* you joined a group of mages
* you joined a pack of werewolves
* you joined a flock of vampires
* you collected other-dimensional trophies
* you did every quest
* you killed every boss (some of them twice)
* you visited every dungeon
* you explored the length and breadth of the lands, the darkest reaches of the earth, the highest peaks, the deepest seas, the strangest planes of existence, and every single inn (because, we need to test the mead).

In this one moment of self-congratulatory awe at the completeness of your own achievements, you hear a displaced voice whisper.... "Dude, you didn't even mod yet?".

It is then you realize that these past 900 hours were really just the tutorial, the intro, the prelude, the awakening. You're never leaving this place. Ever. So speaketh The Voice.

Unless of course, imminent death. (*)

(*: Actually, death turns out to lead to singing and drinking mead and slaying dragons and then being sent back to keep doing some more imminent dying. Sorry. On the bright side, jiggling: it's real.)

Can some people have fun with this game? Yes. Can I, personally, recommend this? No, sorry. You licked my lollipop, rewrapped it, and then sold it back to me; what did you expect.

Full disclosure: I own the original disc versions of HW1, HWC, and HW2, and have been a big fan of at least the first two.

I played the crap out of Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm for years, both the campaigns and multiplayer. I rediscovered them all over again several times, when unpacking boxes or reinstalling a new PC. They are at the top of my all-time favourite games.

HW2: I think I finished the campaign once, and not in one go. It just felt like a step back from the previous ones, for several reasons. Still, it entertained me for a good while and in some way stilled my hunger for a continuation of the HW1/HWC line.

Was I excited about a remaster? Absolutely; I like shiny new graphics and better sounds, and I looked forward to having the games install and work 'out of the box' on current day OS. But for me, that was literally all they needed to do. Because functionally, HW1/HWC already worked exactly as they were.

For me, they could not have done this remaster any more wrong if they'd tried:

* They picked the wrong engine. If it was at all true that they could not do a remaster of both with each their own engine, I would've picked HW1 over HW2 every day and twice on sunday, From my perspective, it would've made their job easier: just dumb down the HW2 races/campaign to ignore the superior HW1 formations and strafing and ballistics, et voilá, HW2 on HW1 engine. Besides, this argument reeks: they went to the trouble of completely redoing/reinventing the HW1 campaign and ships and balance on a HW2 engine... and that was somehow less effort than simply keeping those parts of the existing source code unchanged? Hogwash.

* They picked the wrong UI. Yes, it took a few moments and maybe a peek at the manual to figure out how to call up the HW1 UI, but the almost entire absence of it made Space(tm) feel Real(tm). I agree that the research/build/launch dialogs would have benefited from an overlay implementation, but functionally they worked much better than HW2.

* They picked the wrong camera movement. In HW1, when rotating the camera with right mouse click, the pivot point is the ship or object you focused on. This feels utterly natural, because that is what focus means: maintain your view on your point of interest while rotating to get an overview of all that surrounds it. In HW2, the camera instead pivots on itself. Aside from breaking immersion (wait a minute, am I part of this story, or am I filming it?), it does not maintain focus on what you told it to. Homeworld is not an FPS!

* They killed the AI in so many ways. Strikegroups break formation the moment they start moving, or never form up the way it was intended in the first place (sphere guard, anyone?), broken pathing makes ships get stuck in places, ships forget halfway what they were ordered to do and need to be reissued so they don't either stop in the middle of nowhere or decide to do some suicide move on their own.

* The remastered graphics and sounds, while pretty and certainly a significant step up from the originals, end up being underwhelming when compared to community mods like Complex which have been available for years.


And as if messing up the Remastered versions wasn't enough:

* They messed with the 'Classics'. Yes, they included a 'Classic' version that supposedly kept the original experience intact for those who may not like all the changes in Remastered. Which I would've been happy with, except... they kept the bugs/shortcomings intact (no widescreen/high resolution support unless hacked through registry), but they messed with things that should and could have been left alone (load/save no longer compatible with original savegames; LAN multiplayer removed; D3D/sw rendering removed).

Why? Especially that last one: it was already becoming difficult to make the originals work on current hardware and OS... and they go and remove compatibility options that existed in the originals! What exactly is the point of including HW2C then? It's not as pretty as HW2R, *and* it's now almost as bad about backwards compatibility. Pointless. If you need a lighter version to run on somewhat lesser hardware, just run HW2R with all graphics options turned to minimum. (except now, since they removed the other pre-existing rendering options, it's OpenGL 3.3 or nothing. Sucks to be you if you don't have updated compatible drivers).


I played a few missions into HW1R before I got too irritated and went back to HW1C. Two missions short of the end of that campaign, they then published a patch for the Remastered version that somehow managed to break load/save in HW1C, making it freeze and crash on loading savegames created just days/hours before. So I ended up playing halfway through the campaign on my original disc versions before even feeling like trying again.

Did I miss the remastered resources while playing HW1C / HW1 original? Quite honestly, not in the least. They are a shiny bonus, indisputably, but simply have no bearing on the masterpiece that was and still is HW1.

In the end, I just feel duped for letting my nostalgia win and buying into the pre-order. This collection does not deliver: it removed what was good and added new gripes, in exchange of some shiny graphics and rerecorded sounds. On top of things, where my original dics versions came with the soundtracks included, now they want additional cash just for the soundtracks (which are not even complete btw, something about licensing quarrels).


I noticed some people keep arguing that it's 'only' been days/weeks since release, that we cannot expect everything to work right yet, that we should allow them to get feedback and patch things. I regard this a non-argument.

Under normal circumstances, with a production from scratch, that argument already makes me grit my teeth. Software/gaming has to be the only industry where consumers not just accept, but even *defend* incomplete and bugged-to-hell product releases. This should not be acceptable, and if consumer rights were anywhere near any other industry, we'd all be eligible for a refund.

BUT THIS IS NOT A NEW RELEASE!! They had full access to the original sources. Again: they started with full access to the original source code. They even had the original developers assist them! And even with all that, their release is broken through bugs or intention. They do not get to claim 'needing time to fix inevitable issues' when those issues are in most cases clearly caused by meddling with code that did not need to be touched to begin with.

Whether some people may like HW1/HW2 Remastered the way they are is frankly irrelevant to me. I'm sure there's plenty of people that feel Mona Lisa's smile could use a little retouching. It still does not make it right to put a marker to the master piece. If the original developers felt like they didn't get to make their 'definitive' version of Homeworld before, they could've saved that for Homeworld 3, or more likely, a future DLC for Homeworld Remastered.

End verdict: A lot of money for shiny graphics and rerecorded sounds packaged with broken functionality, which makes at least this vet go back to the originals.

P.S.: for the ones asking about Steam showing my play time increasing - that is me trying out the dozens of mods already coming out trying to restore what Classic/Remastered changed from the originals. Just let that sink in: the community, with limited tools and gimped access to game data, making right what the developers couldn't do with full access to everything.