Homeworld 3 Review (Rithrin)
Full Disclosure: I was part of the Community Playtest group for patch 1.3, and I put probably over half my playtime into that program alone.
Homeworld 3 has a had a very troubled launch, with quite poor reception. With a 20 year hype build up, it really needed to be 11/10 right out of the gates. Unfortunately, it was a 6/10. Understandably, those who had been counting the days since the launch of Homeworld 2 for a worthy successor blasted the game's reputation to bits over it. And while I do feel the initial reviews have been overly harsh and aggressive, I can't blame them for being disappointed in the release state.
Without rehashing too much about the campaign's narrative and cutscenes, it'll suffice to say that it relies too heavily on some typical and overused genre tropes that focus on characters and internal drama, whereas the players care more about Homeworld's galaxy, the factions therein, and more broad-strokes political events. However, if you focus on the actual gameplay and experiencing the mission design, it does have a good amount of enjoyment to pull from it. It's sort of an anti-Homeworld:DoK - where DoK has a fantastic narrative and poor mission structure, Homeworld 3 has poor narrative and great mission structure.
What saves HW3 is the underlying gameplay. HW1, 2 and DOK are still played by a dedicated fanbase to this day due to compelling RTS gameplay. At launch, HW3 had some huge flaws, poor unit balancing, control issues, all sorts of problems leading to poor Skirmish and War Games experience, their other two game modes beyond the Campaign.
However, Patch 1.3 contains the results of a Herculean effort by the devs to address the major underlying mechanical problems. They pulled in members of the community, including many vets of the HW1 and HW2 competitive scenes and some top modders.
As a result, every unit in the game has a niche to fill in gameplay, with little redundancy. Changes to the resource system mean players no longer have the ability to completely saturate their build queues at all times. Skirmish tech trees and researching changes force players to make real decisions about build order and timings. Additional mechanics were added at player behest: Hyperspace Jump ability for all ships of Frigate-class and higher, Hyperspace Inhibitors for trapping and ambushing, Mothership-borne superweapons for late game, etc.
On top of this, unit controls were examined and common issues smoothed out: Units capable of executing discrete move commands while still maintaining a target lock (the infamous "Move while Engaging") now do so reliably, and a specific UI indicator was added to let the player know when this is happening. Almost all cases, including very edge-cases, where units would fail to execute move commands in combat, for instance being told to disengage, were fixed. Engagement ranges were fixed to eliminate cases where units weren't properly returning fire on attackers when they should. New targeting logic was implemented for bandbox attack commands, ensuring that ships weren't wasting their time attacking targets they are ineffective against, and some other tweaks.
A cynical person might say that these are all features which should have been in at launch, and that this is too little, too late. And truthfully, they are half right. This all should have been in at launch, and they certainly should have ran the community playtest program before then. However, it's not too little, and it's not too late - HW3 is out and it'll be here to stay. The difference is that now it has an enjoyable Skirmish mode, an interesting and challenging War Games mode to play with friends, and a robust suite of mod tools.
tl;dr: Patch 1.3 brings the game mechanics up to where it should have been at launch, and you can safely invite some friends to play Skirmish or War Games matches with you and know you'll be in for an enjoyable experience. Try it with an open mind and you'll be very surprised at the results compared to the 1.0 launch experience.