Gearbox Software acquired the Homeworld franchise on April of this year during THQ’s bankruptcy auction process. At the time Gearbox stated its intention to “preserve and assemble the purest form of the original acclaimed and beloved games, Homeworld and Homeworld2, with the intent of making them accessible on today’s leading digital platforms”, which indicated a clear intention by the game developer to re-release the original Homeworld games at some point in the future.
Well, Gearbox has confirmed this intention in PAX Australia by announcing that they will indeed be releasing the original sci-fi real-time strategy games Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the unaltered versions developed by Relic, to be available digitally for Windows PC, reports Polygon.
In addition to the original two titles re-release, Gearbox also announced that they will be releasing high-definition remakes for both Homeworld and Homeworld 2. No details regarding pricing or release dates for either the original unaltered versions or the HD remakes were announced.
We’ll keep a close eye on this and let you know as soon as there are new developments, particularly when there’s more to tell on the “when” and “how much”.
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YES YES YES! But only if they modify it to take advantage of multi-core processors. I have my discs from both HW & HW2 but cringe every time I get the urge to play, just because I know large scale battles slow to a crawl even on a dual quad system.
I too love parallel processing, but as I understand it, coding for multicore systems requires a different design philosophy from the project outset. Shoehorning multicore processing into software built for a single core is non trivial, or else everyone who ever wanted to spruce up old software would have done it by now. Speaking to some locals in the software development biz, they also noted that old people don’t like multicore and tend to wave their cane at the young whippersnappers with their quad cores and their hyperthreading and their gosh durned virtual cores.
I ran Homeworld I without issue on my 300MHZ Pentium II. Modern Core architectures run on a single core at ~3.6GHZ, so one core of a modern CPU is 12x faster. Now if you also throw into account that modern proc’s do about 2x as much work per cycle you’re up to a factor of 24x as much CPU power on a single thread. Not to mention your other CPU threads will handle stuff like OS and other interrupts that must be dealt with, leaving more time for the core dedicated to gaming to actually game. So I don’t think you’ve really got a problem here…
Also introducing parallelism to a software architecture that’s not built with parallelsim in mind is probably asking for a LOT of bugs
Ooooh. This is gonna be nice.
I hope gearbox help the amateurs who work on these (fans already done these):
Better graphic mod
http://www.moddb.com/mods/homeworld-2-ultra-high-graphics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIF54pndlpo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-EQmybAaqo
Homeworld 1 campaign for Homeworld2 engine
http://www.moddb.com/mods/homeworld-remastered
Homeworld touch:
http://teampixel.com/save-homeworld
It would be a good start to me if they work togather the modders, whom also bring other universes ships (New battlestar Galactice, Stargate, Star Wars, Star Trek etc.) and with the ones who create Complex and graphic updates. They could spear lots of times for Homeworld 3.
I wish other license holders would follow Gearbox’s lead: spiff up the old classics to current graphics standards and re-release. Most of the time re-programming a classic simply results in an inferior remake that stains the memory (and reputation) of the original.
Well I personally think that better graphics will bring no change to the games. This has been more of a modding domain in most games. Paying extra money for no new gameplay seems like throwing it away. I’m sure people like things looking good though.
If nothing else, this may lead on to HW3.
I would gladly pay for Master of Orion 2 that works 100% on Windows 7+ and has multiplayer over TCP. Graphics may stay the same just upscaled for resolutions bigger then 640×480. I’m sure there are people that would do same for Homeworld 1&2 remake. Also that could potentially bring the game to “new kids”.
Doesn’t the MOO2 from GOG work good?
All true Ivan, I agree.
@Smitty Windows version has weird bug with pallete on my Windows 7 when explorer.exe is running. Black becomes pink and since there is a lot of black, whole game turns pink. Alt tabbing out and back resets the pallete but it corrupts after a few seconds. And there is a mouse movement bug when picking a ship to refit.
DOS version works within DOSBox but it’s still 640×480 resolution. Also windowed mode has bug where alt tabbing out and back prevents mouse clicking in game but a few more alt tabs eventually fix the problem. Multplayer is a hack of it’s own and crushes a lot.
Yes it works, no it doesn’t work good. It’s passable though.
That is so cool. Glad to hear it. Definitely would relish any excuse to revisit the original Homeworld. For me it was a watershed/groundbreaking game experience. As PC Gamer magazine so succinctly noted in their review all those years ago, “Homeworld is a great example of synergies, that is, the game as a whole is better than the sum of its parts (gameplay, story, visuals, music).” How true.
BTW, I know some of you might disagree with me on this, but although I loved Homeworld: Cataclysm with its creepy and sinister alien nemesis, Homeworld 2 didn’t work for me at all. The story seemed lame compared to the first two games, and to be honest I hardly remember the game, whereas I remember the first two as if I played them yesterday.
Hardware: Shipbreakers now seems to be an official Homeworld project:
http://www.polygon.com/2013/9/1/4684456/gearbox-homeworld-ip-hardware-shipbreakers
This is great news! Loved the Homeworld games, even the music was awesome. I believe ‘Yes’, the legendary Prog Rock band where involved in that but could be wrong :)
You would be Correct Yes was in the first game! :)
Would be nice if they released it on Steam. I never played either of them and would love to give it a try