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Homeworld 3 dev confirms key changes based on community feedback

by Adam Cook on March 27, 2024

Gearbox Publishing and developer Blackbird Interactive has released new info on changes coming to Homeworld 3, based on community feedback. The ideas that fans have come up with are based on time spent with the Steam Next Fest demo, and are fairly significant, ranging from update to the controls, to quality of life improvements.

Here’s the full message from the team to the community:

Just over a month ago we released Homeworld 3’s War Games demo. It’s hard to express how awesome it felt seeing waves of players jump in and get their first taste of what we’ve been working on for so long. What’s really staggering, though, is that over 100,000 of you played that demo during the week of Steam Next Fest. Think about this for a second: Homeworld 3 is a sequel to a game so old that, if it were born in the US, it’d soon be able to legally drink beer. It’s rare for a series to stand the test of time like Homeworld has, and seeing so many of you waiting patiently all these years is an incredible honor — and a responsibility we take seriously.

We’re incredibly grateful to have seen so much engagement from the community during the War Games demo. We couldn’t have predicted how many of you would speak up to make your feedback known, get involved with the conversation, and offer your perspectives. This past month, everyone was heads down discussing every post we saw from Steam, social, Reddit, Discord and beyond. We did this in service of putting together a plan worthy of this community’s dedication and passion for Homeworld.

There are five main areas of change: Controls, Combat, Attack Move, HUD, War Games.

Updates to controls

All keybinds are now re-bindable
Increased movement and rotation speed of the default camera settings for a smoother experience
Updated the legacy control scheme to replicate Homeworld 2 Remastered’s controls and feedback

More exciting combat

Increased ship hitpoints by 30%
Made improvements to formations so they are more beneficial/strategically valuable
Support Frigate pilots now heal friendly ships without being directly instructed for increased autonomy

Classic Attack has returned

As with older Homeworld titles, ships can now attack in one direction while moving in another for increased combat depth

Homeworld 3 UI changes

HUD and quality of life adjustments

Players can now use a slider to adjust the scale of the HUD in the settings menu
NLIPS (Non-Linear Inverse Perspective Scrolling) has been fixed to ensure players can still see and easily select smaller ships like Fighters even when zoomed very far out