Homeworld: Emergence - The Lost Game About A Lost Homeworld

hello it scott manley here and today you could all games surprised everyone by releasing home world emergence now you probably never heard of full world emergence because it was originally homeworld Cataclysm the lost game of the series which never appeared in the remasters because the source code was lost the war for hiigara has left the galaxy in turmoil the past 15 years have seen the birth of new possibilities and the festering of old grudges but once dominance tied an empire has fractured under the strain of civil war the new ty Danny Republic tries to hold the old territories together while forces loyal to the old Emperor lurk in the new bandit kingdoms waiting for their chance to strike back the Cataclysm set 15 years after the original homeworld wild a titanic struggle between past and future the Kushan people have established themselves on Tiger ax building new cities preparing the damage done by the fine homeworld these are graphical glitches on the videos incidentally they're not in the rest of the game just the videos even a fragile piece as it's politics but it's council has been re-established and the future of the gara is now debated amongst the gathered it's hot even amongst equal there are power struggles the mothership still orbits high above you gotta press into the role of shipyard she now builds new carriers to the specifications of each individual kit the need for new ships and the crews demand is a desperate one military and economic pressure on the new Hague errands is intense resources and technology are at the command of the council if with little or no political power have been forced to purchase technology from the bentusi and other races a garand ships of exotic design now seek their fortune amongst the Stars the war for homeworld is over now but the galaxy remains a dangerous place so yeah homeworld Cataclysm was originally going to be an expansion disk for home worlds rather than a standalone game coming in on vector 247 the original homeworld was of course developed by relic but for this expansion Ciera contracted it to a barking dog who you probably don't know very much about that they did this they also did at least one iteration of counter-strike and then they were acquired by Rockstar Games they became Rockstar Vancouver and somewhere during that purchase apparently the original source code for Cataclysm was mislaid it was lost was weighted we don't really know and this meant that when gearbox acquired the rights to homeworld and remastered it into homeworld 1 & 2 they were unable to do that with world Cataclysm Elfi amerikanische my emotions are attack entitled remember waiting on the way to play it was using the original disks released back in 2000 and not so compatible these days this is Santa Fleet command to all ships prepare for emergency hyperspace set course for the homeworld of course getting old games running that's what gog.com can cut its teeth on that's how it got started it used to be known as good old game night can I still call it that because of God sounds a bit silly so yeah they have apparently apparently the decision has been made that there is no chance of tracking down the parts and developing the missing part of homeworld so they've put together this package and they literally surprised everyone by releasing it this morning I'd never heard that this project was happening we can assume that if it was going to be released it would be through gog comm but we held on to the hope there might be a remaster there was always the possibility that the asset could be stripped out of the game and the level basically recreated right without the source code but I guess they decided to go with the re-release fruit or the repackaging route and that's what you're looking at here this is a very old binary and you can get it to work that this is running using OpenGL version rather than the 3d FX OpenGL it apparently supports an incredibly old version of direct3d which doesn't seem to work correctly and there's even a software renderer option which works pretty well however it does seem that performance is not as great as I would like given that I've got a pretty high-end Nvidia graphics card and here you're back when this was released most computers were still below 1 gigahertz CPU clock of course you could still make some pretty good-looking spaceship these designers still look great today they really Alan have that 70s sci-fi book cover click at Peter Elton is of course the name that was credited by the artists originally he was going to create art for the game the publisher changed their mind and he merely got some thanks and the character named in his honor in the original homeworld I actually think the look of the spaceship really stands up pretty well they they would look good any more Polly game these days okay maybe the textures can be upgraded a bit but I think it I think it looks totally acceptable considering as a $10 game now in the original homeworld you had the mothership and in this one you have a much smaller mining ship on our launch that in fact I think the scale of the game is a whole lot smaller tactical officer online for power to sensors analyzing combat data now command we need to find out where we can do the most good well at least the size of the fleet you're reading our small article attention carrier ver act this is it's on Tom mining vessel kun LUN we have arrived in Sector one one request targeting Gatto good dad you could long we've got a strike fleet needing cover in Sector one oh nine assists they'll send everything we've got but be advised we are a mining vessel it would be best we can like weighing up Ireland's frigates are under attack from toy daddy bombers as dispositions without cider support the brigade's will be destroyed and that flank will collapse send out a squad of acolyte fighters ASAP to assist the frigate and finally I'm actually playing the game so it is of course playing exactly the same way as the original book world you'll notice instantly that we're running a 4:3 aspect ratio because that's what the original game sports I haven't tried to get it set up for 16 to 9 but that may be possible not really clear that every game engine where that era is it support modern widescreen aspect ratios yeah I've got the mothership I've got some workers are going to go and start mining asteroids we could recon spacecraft that are going to start on in looking for bad guys and I've been told we need some fighter support so I built starting to build this day now right these are acolyte fighters we're actually told that there are bombers attacking our our frigates or whatever and we should go and help them but we need to build some of these fighters first we get signal we've picked up a flight of tie-down fighters incoming from the main battle they're probably investigating our hyperspace signature little do they know we have a fully armed and operational mining vessel here I mean okay so the game you do start out with a mining vessel but one of the changes from the original homeworld is that the large ships have modules which through the game you can build enhance you can modify your ship you start out of this mining vessel you turn into something completely different by the end of the story and yeah the story as I said starts 15 years after the original homeworld it is not generally considered to be part of the homeworld for the simple reason the whole world - doesn't make reference to any of the events that happen in this and there's some serious stuff that goes down it is however an excellent story and there are many home world fans who will tell you that their favorite is Cataclysm of course I'm interpreting that as a you know genuine love maybe it's just the gamer equivalent of a indie band hipsters who want to have unpopular opinions to set themselves aside from the crowd as for unpopular opinions I'm pretty sure that I'm unpopular with with high down fighters that my acolytes are know tearing to shreds way to high alert now yeah I'm having to defend my workers from the astro sorry my workers who are harvesting the asteroids from the tide and fleet that mostly don't know where I am meanwhile I'm trying to get some ships put together to go and help my friends by in a way that gavel raid comes along with a bunch of acolyte there's my tactical overlay on no giving me you little circles and squares and triangles stuffer in my target I should there's no circles there what am I talking about what I am seeing is nice exclusions all these things up rajat so each step in the mission has very well set objectives they appear in the bottom left corner that's not necessarily that's not so much the case in the original homeworld there's a lot of things that happen and you're pretty much just playing through the battle without these object and showing up having said that it's a very small part of a very old UI the homeworld remastered collection has vastly improved you I had decades couple of decades to improve on the original design and it benefits immensely we've done it by taking pressure off kissing above flank force we've helped hold the line llegué us our kid is awesome tension kun LUN first imperialist attack wiped out our sensor grid we need you to scope enemy positions with your recon ships we are planning a counter-attack I get to say them every time I say kiss it feels like everything kiss was on all this which just doesn't scan very well for me but you know the game does come with the standard homeworld manual which is like 150 pages of lore with tons of controls all over the place there's a lot to learn and it does stand up really well on the downside if you try to get this running there's a good chance we wouldn't run perfectly after the first install you're going to be spending a bit of time on the forums trying to figure out how to set it up I in the end had to go into the shortcut that they created and modify the command line options to actually make the thing render properly it would render properly but it would render my most pointer and it wouldn't render a resolution that was useful so so that might turn many potential buyers off but at least homeworld remastered doesn't have any of these issues I have picked up a convoy of enemy resources with escorts in this area they must be resupplying the imperialist attack seek engage and destroy them I'm only playing the first mission incidentally there the whole story is quite expansive I don't want to drop too many spoilers but it does deal in nano bot infections an infection a disease the pathogen that literally takes over other spacecraft and enslaves them that's what you're fighting against for much of the game our engineers think there is a way to link our acolytes together to form a Corvette class vessel they are ready to begin research on the project if you remember the original homeworld the science vessels would come in segments and they joined together to meet make a better and better sign ship in Cataclysm your fighter ships can actually be a rolly they can join to create a more powerful spacecraft incidentally yeah you got again lots of lore inside the game itself to read if you're into that kind of thing but of course you're doing that in real time so while you're reading there's bad guys flying around and potentially shooting and everything Roger manual you can of course enjoy when you're offline the game does provide different difficulty setting or so and very easy setting if you want to use that and just breeze your way through the game and enjoy your story because that is one of the strengths of the the homeworld franchise in general it is also a real-time game and I actually have very hard playing people make forces organized selecting them and trying to assign them to groups can you say in the matter I'm not the pair of that so I tend to just play the games through on the easier levels mostly because I don't have time I'm not the best real time strategy clear quite a veteran things like Crusader Kings like where I can really think about what I'm doing taking down the last of the resource harvesters receiving attention get them off this is the thumb time lining us all what in LA the enemy resources have been destroyed ready during the mission you can of course send your spacecraft back to base to get repaired they can get upgraded they can be scuttled rebuilt and warning the proximity sensor net is under attack in Sector 110 if the net fails the tide and force can run their entire fleet through the whole we must defend the net immediately ok let's send another sent whatever we can find out that we as always the hard for us fight fighters all over the playground I've get acolyte politely playing good now so here we go water well I don't know how many if we get a whole bunch of them coming in here now you'll notice these are using the square icons that's because these are my hair dumb ships is actually then by wealthier but they are acting at and by ground you've cleared up ships I'm not really clear on the exact bonuses but let's I actually tell Mike I think to split up just so I can show you special action on link ha I mean you thought you only had six enemy ships no you have to well can your guns track at all I don't think so you better deal with these lighter fighters first and then we'll go up to the editorial hell oh yes beautiful thing we're not loading all over the place do I think some of those might be my people exporting now we can build more it'd be nice if these things would actually publish a like average pilot life expectancy be an interesting statistic in these real-time strategy games right because I don't think it would be very long you're the most badass pilots in the universe your life expectancy is humans have taken the upper hand Imperial are falling back one of their damaged cruisers within this area I think we should make sure it's not in that area track it down and make sure it's never threatened Sagara again now at this stage of the game I don't have the ability to salvage a hostile ships I believe that that comes later and that's going to major mechanic in the whole world series of course my ships joining together they're going off to on Ultron and this is finally clearing out the last defenders here obviously I've heavily edited this mission puppets charted maybe took about half hour to play through you can probably do it a lot faster but I like to harvest all the asteroids normally you would have a very hard time taking down a ship that size behind little spacecraft but it is a way they've been heavily damaged by the other spacecraft on your board about knowledge as to the case of you publish it until it goes turn then victory will be yours can actually zoom right in and watch the big neo voice of spacecraft from their point of view there is actually like a cockpit view option but it literally just shows you caught your spacecraft and see you you're not flying this you're just watching the EEI zip around murder eyes all the hostile forces when's it gonna die looks like it leaking space stuff everywhere how much spaceship blood can it week before it goes died surely it is not long for the world finally and with that that is essentially the last objective in this mission and after the end of the mission we get to select all your spacecraft and add on to the next one you get a bit more story I'm certainly not going to play through this whole thing as a series I might do a twitch thing I don't know because I just don't have the spare time to play this through high quality just seriously but yet it is available on gog.com my ten dollars right now there are actually having a sale on all the homeworld stuff seeking a homeworld remastered which can world one and two you can also get deserts of Kharak all the summer sales are on right now all of these games are greatly reclaimed strategy games after the whole world definitely is little dated but the story is great and has fans all over the plate can they be picked up it's something you have to play if you're a fan of spaceships and strategy so I made me do a bit more on this but until then I'm Scott Manley fly see [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 145,290

Rating: 4.9101124 out of 5

Keywords: homeworld, cataclysm, emergence, gog, rts, peter elson

Id: b7N9fKGGmXs

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/unemployed_employee]

Homeworld: Cataclysm Emergence had once of the best single player campaigns back when it came out. It carries the journey type narrative from the first Homeworld but with a sick twist, literally. It follows the story of a small time tribe (kiith) within the Hiigarian society, and their struggles against not only trying to defeat their eventual nemesis, but also their ascension in the Hiigarian hierarchy.

Cataclysm Emergence improved on original Homeworld's overall combat and resource management, getting rid of fighters' fuel reserve while adding plenty of one-time special attacks (ie. acolyte missiles) that incentivizes the player to manage their attacking resources carefully.

The mothership still serves as the central hub, but she now feels more integrated into the fleet as it can move (albeit slowly) and have enough weapons to defend itself against small fleets. The player will find themselves maneuvering the mothership against the enemies often throughout the campaign, and she actually becomes a formidable weapon towards the end.

The voice acting in this game is on point. Since the protagonist is not a demi-quantum-computer-god, the speech is not restricted to a human monotone; he could actually breathe life into his words. Many players will point to both the Bentusi speech and the warship speech for his on-point voice acting, and I agree, they are brilliant and they convey his emotions across.

I have no idea what happened during this game's launch, but it was vastly overlooked and underrated by many. The game is quite the journey, and it definitely gave the teenage me lots of sweaty moments during my game play (fuck the infection beam). It was the first space horror game I have ever played and the screams of the spoiler still echo till this day. It's no Starcraft, but it's definitely one for the classics.

Edit: words

[u/trooperdx3117]

The crazy thing about Cataclysm is that it's a survival horror RTS which should be an absolute recipe for disaster but instead works incredibly well.

The beast is probably one of the creepiest downright unsettling antagonists ever in a video game which is a remarkable achievement when the game is ultimately about watching a bunch of metal boxes flying about in space.

[u/teious]

My absolute favorite game, followed by the first instance of Homeworld (maybe because I played Cataclysm first).

I'm so happy to see this game still getting love after 17 years. Hope gearbox finds it in their heart to remaster it and keep investing in the series. It's been bumpy due to some of their decisions and fan response, but I have nothing but respect for the love they showed the series, bringing it from the "dead".

Instant buy for me and probably will get back to the yearly replay list.

[u/handsomeness]

I actually downloaded and cracked this game to play it in order when the HW remaster came out. I am so happy it runs in Win 10 flawlessly and I can buy it now. The cruise missile mission or the giant canon at the end are alone worth the price of admission.