[fear.gets.you.killed. anger.keeps.you.alive]
March 19th, 2008 - Stuart Parry
A famous poet once said, "when Alexander looked over the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer"
That’s how I felt when I completed Homeworld. It really was the end of an era, for years I’d been stuck at the same point in space, forever throwing wave after wave of fighters, frigates and destroyers against the seemingly impenetrable wall of the Taiidan fleet. Nothing seemed to work, every tactic, every diversion lead to my eventual destruction. I even spent time away from the game thinking of new ways to win, this wasn’t going to be my Kobayashi Maru. From then on I micromanaged my fleet, I collected as many resources as humanly possible, tried to raise combat efficiency in dealing with enemy forces so that I could at least put up a fight in this, the final level of Homeworld.
Then one day I did it. I felt that overwhelming joy, relief and of course loss. I’d made the seemingly impossible possible, and now I had nothing left to focus my time on. I had no more worlds to conquer, I had no more enemies. I’d led my people home and that was it. Whenever I played it again it just wasn’t the same, there was no challenge because I’d already achieved victory.
The game is still as amazing as when I first played it almost ten years ago, it released my inner geek. The story was linear, but the way you achieved it wasn’t, you had the whole galaxy to play with. Your imagination was the only thing stopping you as you came up with the battle plans necessary to achieve total victory over the Taiidan, who were hell-bent on ending your existence. That is if you carried out your plans well enough, it was all too easy to make a mistake and suffer defeat at the hands of an unforgiving enemy.
It was a game that went after your heart as well as your mind. From the first mission where you see the successful launch of the Mothership containing your people, and these really were your people, you had direct influence over their fate, which ultimately was your own fate. You complete all the training missions, learn the basics of three-dimensional space combat and movement, so you bravely set off into the black depths of space.
On your journey you test out your hyperdrive engines, basically Faster Than Light travel. So you boot up your FTL and jump to a point in space where another vessel had taken ten years to get there using conventional drives – you arrive only to find the drifting wreckage of the support vessel, and that while trying to figure out what happened, you have unknown ships on an intercept course. You return home to find Kharak’s atmosphere burning, 250 million people dead, only leaving 600,000 in cryogenic storage alive. You’re on the brink of extinction.
Many of those woken up from their sleep go insane, or commit suicide, the horrors that have occurred drive them beyond breaking point. You’ve got to deal with so much suffering and loss, that it’s difficult to comprehend the scale of it all, but you’ve got to.
Homeworld is as good, if not better, than a lot of films for emotional attachment, while you don’t directly meet the people under your command, you empathise with them – their journey is in reality your own and that’s far more powerful than any film, because with films you’re always an observer, you’re just watching events unfold on a screen that have already been told, but with this, you have direct control. They die, you die. Maybe not in a literal sense but after investing so much time into something, to see it fail can be sickening.
Homeworld truly is one of the masterpieces of modern videogames. It has everything, and it will stand the test of time.