Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy
Homeworld 3
Homeworld 3 System Requirements
Commander, Homeworld 3’s launch is fast approaching. Fleet Intelligence aims to prepare us for the coming conflict with new information, and so we're thrilled to share Homeworld 3's final system requirements today.
Homeworld 3 will support a vast array of system configurations, but in the hopes of making this information a bit more digestible, we’ve aligned system requirements under graphical performance scenarios where we feel the game is best experienced. Please take a moment to consult the grid below:
Homeworld 3 players can enable Ray Tracing for soft shadows with contact hardening, as well as HDR (High-Dynamic Range) for unlocking even higher fidelity. DLSS3 and Frame Generation are featured in Homeworld 3 for compatible NVIDIA graphics card, as well as AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 2. Finally, Homeworld 3 officially supports the Intel ARC series of graphics cards.
Homeworld 3 is a stunning game, best experienced with the latest graphics card and drivers for full immersion; however, as you can see, players with older components can still dive into the next chapter of this GOTY-winning sci-fi strategy series. Whether you’re playing in 1080p or cranking the visuals up to 2160p, it’s our hope that Homeworld 3 can be enjoyed by players across a wide range of hardware configurations.
Roguelike inspiration meets Real-Time Strategy in Homeworld 3’s new co-op mode, War Games.
Commanders will need to manage fleet strength across waves of enemies and claim powerful artifacts that augment ships with each completed objective. Based on the results, players will unlock additional artifacts and starting fleets that keep the challenge fresh.
Kloms under the surface of Hiigara, Imogen S'jet's quarters were bathed in the golden light of the setting sun. The wall was running a complete hologram immersion of the end of a peaceful summer day; an older woman sat on a bench with a young girl. Despite the beauty of the silent Standing Sea below them, the child's rapt attention was on the woman, who bowed her head slightly before offering up one of the two cups she had purchased from the shaved ice vendor. Then, setting her own cup down, the woman reached into her pocket to grasp the leathery S'chto nut hiding within.
“This is the Sachaan communicating on an encrypted tight beam. Come in, HSS Larem Ka. This is the Sachaan on the last leg of the patrol, about to enter Sector 12. Everything remains quiet. Not a bandit to be found.”
Commander Isaac Paktu gave a nod to his Comms officer and his earpiece gave a brief crackle as the connection was made. “Sachaan, this is Larem Actual. Acknowledging update. Keep your eyes open, Jonas…this is where a lot of the civilian losses have occurred. “
Homeworld 3: Story Trailer - Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023
Today, the galaxy is burning.
Join Intel Officer Isaac Paktu and Fleet Command herself, Imogen S’Jet, on a galaxy-spanning mission. Under sudden and brutal attack by a new enemy known only as the Incarnate, the Hiigarans must cross into the Anomaly, the place where the legendary Karan S’Jet disappeared without a trace.
Tactical, beautiful, and wholly unique, the GOTY-winning sci-fi RTS returns with Homeworld.
Ever since we announced Homeworld 3, a persistent question we’ve seen in Steam Discussions and across our social channels has been: Will there be Turkish language support? We’re happy to confirm today that Turkish has been added to the list of official languages supported in Homeworld 3.
To Homeworld fans in Turkey, let us officially say “Teşekkürler” as this wouldn’t have been possible without your dedication. We’re eager to welcome you into the Homeworld community with open arms and thank you for your support as we approach the launch of Homeworld 3 in February 2024.
The Biggest Homeworld 3 Developer Update Yet
It’s surreal to be working again on a game that has been foundational for so many folks at Blackbird — whether they were part of the team that created the original Homeworld two decades ago (and went on to found our studio), or just grew up playing it. Like you, we know that sense of awe as armadas clash amid the glow of a distant nebula. We know the rush of getting a fleet of bombers behind the enemy frigate line. Or the chills of hearing Adagio For Strings in orbit above Kharak for the very first time.
We love Homeworld. It's in our DNA. And it is an enormous privilege to be creating the next installment in this legendary series. A privilege we take seriously. That's why we made the difficult decision to delay Homeworld 3 to February 2024 so we can make a game worthy of that legacy.
But, we get it, being patient sucks. So today, we'd like to give you one of our biggest Development Updates yet. Instead of just honing in on one specific topic, we'll be exploring how Homeworld 3 is raising the bar in terms of visual fidelity and graphics, an immersive audio experience, and giving you a sneak peek at the fully 3D cinematics that'll push the story forward. And stay tuned, as we'll have lots more to share later this summer.
A new frontier of storytelling
When you go back to play the original Homeworld games, it's kind of amazing that so much evocative worldbuilding and storytelling could come from such simple cutscenes and animatics. Extraordinary music and voice acting carried scenes that were often just ships staring each other down in empty space.
In Deserts of Kharak, we broke new ground with lusciously detailed animatics that heavily focused on the characters at the heart of the conflict, like Rachel S’Jet. But, with Homeworld 3, we knew we could go even further.
In the video above, you will see a very tiny sneak peek of the cinematics that'll thread together Homeworld 3's story, along with non-interactive in-game cutscenes. We can't stress enough that this is still very early work-in-progress footage that will look even better for release. But we were just too excited to not show you. And, don't worry, there's no spoilers here.
Cutscenes are now fully pre-rendered and — for the very first time — will feature fully 3D modeled characters complete with English language lipsyncing. What's so exciting about this level of cinematic fidelity is how it'll bring the Homeworld universe to life like never before. You're going to get closely acquainted with key characters, like Imogen, but also get a much better sense of people aboard the Khar-Kushan and the enemies threatening your very existence. This, in turn, will add a new dimension of humanity to the battles that unfold between each cinematic.
One of Blackbird Interactive's unique strengths is boasting an in-house cinematics team filled with some of the brightest, most visionary artists from film, television, and games. And from the outset we wanted to leverage their talent to tell a Homeworld story with a human intimacy never seen in the series before. We can't wait for you to experience the full story next year.
No one can hear you scream
Audio design has always been a vital part of what makes the Homeworld franchise special, and for Homeworld 3 we are honoring the past while going deeper than ever before. One way we're doing that is using our innovative speech systems to create unique and unparalleled audio experiences in Homeworld 3.
Of the four audio design pillars we have for Homeworld 3, the one that has driven ship pilot speech the most is: "Humanize the fleet." If you've played a lot of real-time strategy games, then you're all-too-familiar with the 'barks' that units give as you order them around. Y'know, "Zug, zug" and all that.
A lot has changed since that golden era of real-time strategy, though. While we could've stuck to tradition, we chose to innovate and create a speech system that'll bring your fleets to life and immerse you in their moment-to-moment interactives and battles.
Speech from your units serves two distinct purposes: information and flavor. The first gives you vital strategic information ("I'm taking damage!"), while the other is an invaluable way to reinforce narrative or worldbuilding concepts. In the traditional way of doing things, each ship has a single voice that must reflect both of these two conflicting categories, with information being naturally prioritized over flavor. But what do you do when worldbuilding is a priority — and the scale of chatter design surpasses anything done before in the franchise?
Throw the traditional way out the window, obviously!
In Homeworld 3 each ship has two voices: The primary voice is that of the ship commander, and is focused on direct responses to player commands, notifications for important events such as coming into contact with enemy ships, and a select few flavor events. This informational layer is clear and (mostly) concise, clearly audible from all distance ranges, and designed to keep the player informed and situationally aware.
The second voice is that of a tactical officer on the ship, and this role is focused on contextual conversational chatter. This contextual flavor layer is full of character, only audible within a certain range from the ship, and designed to breathe life into the vacuum of space.
In both the writing and the design of speech events, an important guiding principle is that ships are not responding to the player. They are responding to each other. From this perspective, certain things become obvious:
Chatter should happen regardless of whether the player is close enough to hear it.
You should be able to stumble into the middle of a conversation between units.
If units are talking to each other, then both sides should be participating.
For example, when ordering a ship to dock with a carrier the conventional approach would be to write a single acknowledgement of the order.
Notice how the unit is talking to you directly? Now here's how this plays out in Homeworld 3:
Interceptor Pilot: “DC this is flight lead looking to put down, echo back.” Carrier Docking Control: “This is Khar-Kushan DC approach vector and bay sent, you are one in line.” Interceptor Pilot: “Copy that DC, we’re inbound.”
In this example, the first line of the exchange is audible from any range (information layer). The second and third response, however, are triggered only if you're near the Interceptor (flavor layer). In this way we ensure that the acknowledgment to the player command is always heard, and that the additional flavor lines don’t clutter the soundfield or confuse things.
Similar exchanges play out even with even simple commands such as Move and Attack, with the commander delivering the informational response, while the tactical officer follows up with additional contextual flavor. For example, an Attack order:
Bomber Pilot: “Target received and locked.” Bomber Tactical: “Passives on approach, light 'em up at range plus 5.”
We’ve gone to great lengths to design a call/response chatter system to humanize the fleet. Outside of player commands, there is a rich world of context-specific chatter that ships will engage in, whether the player is around to hear it or not. For each of several situational states that a ship can find itself in, the tactical officer has a selection of 5 to 15 contextual call-outs and 5 to 15 contextual responses.
When a ship triggers a call-out chatter line for a situation, a nearby ship will trigger a response for that same situation. A different call/response pairing will be triggered each time between those two ships for that situation, which adds up to a lot of possible combinations. In fact, given the number of ships available to the player by the end of the game, each designed chatter situation (of which there are several) has the potential for nearly 245,000 unique call/response pairings.
The chatter situations that have been designed largely reflect the amazing work done by our art and design teams. The scale of terrain and gameplay elements in Homeworld 3 are truly awe inspiring, and must be so to the crews of the ships we send into harm's way. When flying in formation near massive Progenitor structures they might comment on terrain proximity warnings, or even the strange signals coming from these structures. When flying through dense nebulae they might comment on sensor and comms interference, or the fact that if they can hide in the particulate soup so can their enemies…
This speech system is just one element we are employing to achieve an informationally-rich and cinematically engrossing audio experience in Homeworld 3. We can’t wait for you to immerse yourself in the world we are crafting for you.
The beauty of the cosmos
If you've been following development so far, you're already aware of what a massive jump forward we've made from previous games in terms of visual fidelity, thanks to what our incredibly talented artists have been able to achieve in the Unreal Engine 4. But today I wanted to spotlight two aspects of Homeworld 3's visuals that have had a huge impact on how the game looks and, in some missions, plays.
One of the biggest benefits of Unreal Engine is using its Physically Based Rendering (PBR) System, which unlike older rendering methods realistically simulates how light interacts with different materials. This is a huge step up from previous Homeworld games, where artists would need to manually tune materials or have global lighting hacks to work with differently lit environments. Fortunately, earlier Homeworld games mostly stuck to levels set in the harsh blackness of space with a planet or nebula in the distance for some visual interest. But it also meant the surface of your ships didn't actually respond to any kind of light source. They were just flatly lit from all angles, making them feel a bit disconnected from the scene around them.
PBR, however, gives us access to tools like dynamic lighting with realtime surface reflections, shadows, and global illumination to bring our environments to life. It also means we can build ships with hulls that react realistically to an enormous variety of lighting scenarios. The results speak for themselves…
In Homeworld 3, you'll fight your fair share of battles in cold, dark space. But PBR allows us to create levels each with their own unique visual identity and near-photo realism. You'll command fleets in low orbit above planets, or explore ancient relics floating just above a churning sea of clouds. And in each of these environments, the materials of your ships will react with the light with a level of realism that, frankly, feels a bit awe-inspiring (yes, I'm a tad biased here).
One area I particularly love to geek out about is how all these different lighting environments react with the hulls of your ship. We spent a long time studying how visual effects are done for Hollywood blockbusters with big ships — like the latest Star Trek movies. It was a big inspiration for how we have paneling look on the units.
We're obsessed with the small details that make Homeworld 3 come to life. With maps generally spanning 100km in every direction — and filled with megalithic structures you can fly in and around — the sense of scale is immense. But equally important to us is the ability to zoom in on the action and hear the back-and-forth radio chatter or, when talking about PBR, the micro-level of detail in ship materials. The scuffs and impact zones of enemy fire, or the scratches on the surface of a structure.
Before I go, I wanted to also walk through one other element of Homeworld 3's visual fidelity that we're very excited about: nebulae. We've talked a lot about bringing "terrain" to space combat with megalith structures, but nebulae bring even more strategic opportunities for players who are clever enough to exploit them to their advantage.
These dynamically-generated gas clouds are a key aspect of a few maps because they not only obscure your vision, but also mask sensor data from ships that are traveling within them. We were initially inspired to include them after toying around with Unreal Engine's ray-marched clouds system, which can create realistic (and gorgeous) fluffy clouds. As pretty as those clouds can be, however, we needed more control to create nebulae that more closely mirrored what you see in those gorgeous NASA photos. So we said what the hell, let's build our own system!
Above: Our nebula generation system lets us adjust properties like density, movement, color, and much more!
Ray marching is a powerful, resource-intensive way of simulating objects with varying levels of density, like clouds. A lot of tasks in game development — especially lighting — are accomplished by firing invisible rays and then getting data from the point where it collides with an object. But imagine you're trying to measure a jar filled with smoke. If you shoot a beam at it and only measure the smoke's density from the surface of the jar, your results are practically useless. With ray marching, you fire that beam and measure the data at different depths of the gas volume extents. This is done by "marching" that beam forward by a set interval and for each step or march you combine that result with the previous measurement, the accumulation of these measurements gives us the final result for density. Do that enough times, and you start to get an accurate idea of how much smoke is in that jar from a specific view angle and then use this to derive lighting and color based on this result. We then take this result and use it to map different volume density effects, as an example where the density is low, we will blend in more wisp-like shapes with more movement, versus where it is more dense (towards the core) we may use a fractal volume density effect to create interest and shape. And all of this is done for every pixel of nebula visible on your screen at each frame!
The result is clouds of realistically simulated gas that reacts to different light sources and can hide ships based on its density and the depth of the ship within the cloud.
And that's everything we wanted to share today. Thanks for taking the time to read this monster of a developer update. We're so appreciative of the response of players like you with the news that Homeworld 3 was going to launch next year and wanted to take the time to give you one of the biggest development updates yet. We'll have lots more to share later this summer, so please look forward to that.
Until next time.
Demetrius Apostolopoulos, Technical Art Director Dave Renn, Audio Director Karl Gryc, Art Director
Homeworld 3 Fig Website Shutdown & Backer FAQ
Hi Everyone,
As you may have been aware, Republic, Fig’s parent company, announced in 2020 following their acquisition that they would eventually be closing down the legacy Fig.co site. We recently received the official date of that shutdown, which will take place on May 29.
After May 29, the Homeworld team and backers of the project will no longer to be able to access the Homeworld 3 Fig site. Although we won’t be able to share updates on that platform, we are committed to continuing to provide you with consistent updates and visibility into Homeworld 3 through alternative channels. Key details on how we’ll be communicating with you moving forward are below:
Your Backer Rewards
Fig has provided us with our complete backer list, which includes contact information, selections, and everything we need to deliver your Fig Rewards.
As we move forward to fulfilling your rewards from the project, we will be shifting our direct communications to email. We will be using the emails associated with your Fig account to distribute relevant information regarding delivery of your selections. Make sure to whitelist and approve communications from email@newsletters.gearbox.com to make sure you’re not missing any important updates.
If you need to change your contact preferences or Fig information, please submit a ticket to support.gearboxsoftware.com/Homeworld3 and choose the “Fig Backer” option from the drop-down. Fig support will no longer be able to help you with this.
Homeworld 3 Development Updates
We love sharing updates and giving you a look at how the game is progressing.
With this in mind, we will be adding sections to Homeworld Universe, including sections that will be the future home to the content we’ve shared in Fig updates up to this point!
We expect more questions from this news and have created a Q&A addressing some potential concerns. We are committed to answering your questions to the best of our ability and if you have any that expand beyond the scope of the Q&A, please submit a ticket to support.gearboxsoftware.com and select the “Fig Backer” from the Homeworld 3 dropdown.
We recognize that this news is sudden, and we want to ensure that everyone who has supported the development feels informed and valued. We are eternally grateful for the fandom demonstrated by the community, day in and day out. If you haven’t already, make sure to follow Homeworld 3 on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, as well as join the Discord, to stay informed on the latest news.
Thank you as always for the support, we look forward to sharing more with you soon.
We are moving the launch of Homeworld 3 to February 2024.
Our primary goal is to deliver a Homeworld experience that lives up to the standards set by its predecessors and is worthy of this series' incredible legacy. Homeworld 3 is shaping up to be exactly that, but in order to fully realize that vision we need more time to refine and polish the game.
We deeply appreciate your passion and dedication to this game, and we are working hard to get Homeworld 3 to you as soon as we can.
We've spent years developing Homeworld 3's gorgeous ships, so it's only appropriate that they explode in equally spectacular fashion. Hi, I'm Tim O'Connell, Senior FX Artist here at Blackbird Interactive. In our latest Fig Update, I'm going to go over some of the work we've been doing to make sure your battles in Homeworld 3 look and feel as climactic as possible.
From the very start of development on Homeworld 3, we knew we needed to use the latest tech, better looking FX, and dynamic damage to make the results of hostile engagements as thrilling as possible. Looking at the health bars of your ships is one thing, but we want you to see the scars of your hard-won battles. Broadly speaking, this can be broken down into three stages: weapon damage, ship damage and wreckage.
Brace for Impact
Let's start with weapons. The Homeworld 3 Design Team needed us to produce four distinct damage types (Kinetic, High Explosive, Energy, and Ion) — each with their own visual treatment and effects on units. I'm sure you can already imagine how each damage type would affect a ship hull, but we wanted to go further and add to the realism with realistic lighting and fluid-based simulations.
(Here we see how different weapon types can create unique impact craters on ship hulls.)
In the above example, you can see how each weapon leaves a unique impact "decal". You can think of them like a sticker you slap onto the surface of an object. It's a simple effect, but it gives you a basic idea of who shot your ship and with what type of weapon. Decals were used in the previous installments of Homeworld and always did a darn good job of showing damage. But we saw an opportunity to do so much more.
Thanks to the efforts of our Tech Artist, Francisco Múrias, and Engineer Viktor Solbay (not to mention plenty of other team members), we have developed a whole new solution for displaying damage on ships. We call it "Splat Damage". With Splat Damage, we're not slapping impact stickers on your ship but creating dynamic impact points that directly alter the surface geometry and properties of the hull in the exact area hit by a specific weapon type. A decal gives you the mere impression of damage, but with Splat Damage you seehow an incoming salvo rips through the armor of your precious Destroyer.
(This early prototype of Splat Damage warps the hull with dynamically-generated impact points.)
We did this because we wanted the wounds sustained by your fleet to persist from mission to mission, and to give you "at a glance" information if a specific ship has been through combat before. Each combat encounter will leave scars that, over time, tell the story of that particular ship.
The advantages of this Splat Damage model don't stop there. Now, each ship has its own dynamic damage texture, which will procedurally add damage to the surface of the ship. What's even cooler is that we can gradually transition damage as it increases in severity, going from surface scars to devastating hull breaches — all while showcasing secondary hot spots and burn marks. As you can imagine, this system can be resource intensive so we prioritize it on larger units and Capital ships, where the effects are most noticeable and striking.
Battle Scars
Let's switch gears and talk about ship damage. This is a little more unit-specific, so I'll break it down into Fighters/Corvettes, Frigates and Capital Ships.
Because Fighters are so small, they don't require such nuanced damage modeling, but we wanted to make sure that a player can see what condition they are in regardless of distance. In the Homeworld 3 Official Gameplay Trailer, you can see a distinct camera-facing smoke sprite when Fighters take damage. This was a good solution, but it did have issues like resource cost and, if a unit was too fast, you would have this “popcorn” effect where the smoke from a damaged ship looked like individual puffs rather than a consistent stream. Needless to say, we felt it was a little ugly and dated.
We knew we could do better, so we moved onto using a Ribbon/Sprite system. Now, at low speeds we use sprites to simulate the smoke, but at higher speeds we swap to this inky trail that streams out of the back of a damaged Fighter. Stylistically it looks much better and, overall, the system is more adaptable to how Fighters behave in combat.
For larger ships, we use a series of “damage sockets” placed around the hull where we can spawn required FX to help simulate damage. We also have a range of damage stages we call light, heavy, critical, and "it was a pleasure serving with you, Captain".
Light damage is what you might imagine: Smoke, which consequently gets thicker and darker the more damage a unit sustains. We then add additional fire, hull breach FX and sparks to show the severity of the damage as we progress through different damage stages.
(Here we see all the Damage sockets we add to the Raiders Carrier.)
(Using this system we are able to have a random damage location every time.)
Wrecking Crew
Finally, let's blow something up!
Back in our Fig update detailing the new Railgun Frigate, we revealed an older version of our wreckage and debris system that litters the battlefield with persistent wrecks. This old system relied on artists hand modeling the debris meshes using a 3D app like Maya or Blender. For a game with many different ships of all shapes and sizes, you can imagine how time consuming that was. We needed a better system. One that allowed us to dynamically generate the debris meshes on the fly.
Thanks to the hard work of Adrian "Ed" Lee, Francisco Múrias, Liam Smyth, and many others, we developed a procedural "Ship Breaking" tool leveraging the power of a great piece of software called Houdini. This tool realistically simulates the different ways a ship hull will collapse under the immense pressure of an explosion. But that's just the beginning. This tool also models the internal rooms and mechanisms of a given ship, and then warps and crinkles them so they bulge realistically — just like what would happen if an explosion from within a ship forced all its guts out into space.
Thanks to these new innovations in Homeworld 3, we not only have a more realistic portrayal of ship destruction, but a much more visceral one too. It lets you witness the destructive fallout of our dynamic battles at a level of detail that wasn't possible before. And once the dust settles, the battlefield will be littered with accurately-modeled wrecks waiting to be scooped up by your Salvagers.
This huge feat took many months to develop, but I believe it is all worth it. The RTS genre is packed with legendary games, and we aspire to make Homeworld 3 one of them. Working on Homeworld 3 is something I am so proud of, and making something for the fans — both old and new — is something I will treasure for the rest of my life.
Thanks for following along as I nerd out about spaceships for a bit. I love what I do as an FX artist, and if you want to ask any questions in relation to FX in Homeworld or in general, please reach out here or on Twitter.
