Remember that episode of Battlestar Galactica where Cylon agents all but destroyed the fleet’s water supply? That’s how fragile your situation is.Īnd like Battlestar Galactica, Homeworld never lets up. Homeworld wants to remind you of your lowly status, so it has you gathering up gas and debris, like some starving puppy hunting for scraps. You don’t have the luxury of mining glowing green minerals or cracking open whole planets. The few seconds it takes to hyperspace in can feel like minutes as you gaze at this massive metal ark, the one thing preventing your species from being a memory. Most missions begin with your mothership hyperspacing into another barren sector. That’s the entirety of the Hiigaran species, and you’re the one tasked with keeping them breathing. Homeworld sees the Hiigarans’ home planet razed, leaving only 600,000 Hiigarans alive. It’s this hopelessness that pervades the Homeworld games and gives them an entirely different energy to most other RTSes. Battlestar Galactica’s fugitives, on the other hand, have nowhere to go, and staying still is a death sentence. Star Wars’ rebels can, at least, lay down their arms and hide amongst the subjugated populace. Sure, both shows have their stars, but there’s no Luke Skywalker, no Force, no Yavin IV, nothing other than the vague scrap of a prophecy. When the Twelve Colonies are annihilated, mankind is forced to take to the stars, with the Cylons nipping at their heels. Instead, it’s the sense of loneliness and desperation that pervades both shows. But the more I played, the more I saw the parallels, and when the 2004 Galactica reboot came along, I started ploughing hour after hour into Homeworld 2.īecause as impressive as they were at the time, it wasn’t the ships or the space battles that made Battlestar Galactica (either the original or the reboot) appeal to me. When I first got into Homeworld, I was blissfully unaware that this space-based RTS had been influenced by the original pre-reboot Battlestar Galactica.
But I’m more than happy for them to recycle chunks of plot as long as Homeworld 3 has the same big Battlestar Galactica energy as its predecessors.
After Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm (re-released as Emergence), and Homeworld 2, they’ve got to come up with a fourth way for the Hiigarans to be exiled to the stars. I don’t envy whoever’s writing the story of Homeworld 3.
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