As a lot of people have already mentioned, I'd absolutely love to see a Homeworld reboot. I've not really seen anything quite like it in terms of gameplay yet. I'd have thought space would be a very common battleground in RTS games, but we've only had a handful of space based strategy games, and few good ones even among those, and none anything like Homeworld or HW2. Here's the thing: it's not hard to pull off technology-wise. It'd be relatively cheap to develop the engine. The difficulty would be - and has always been - in the UI. Giving orders quickly and efficiently in three dimensions is difficult to pull off with mouse and keyboard.
That's no reason for a reboot though. It'd be cheap to do, a good challenge, and there's a market for it, but those aren't reasons in and of themselves. If you need a solid reason, here's one: graphics. HW2 is still stunning after all this time, think of how much awesomeness a modern reboot would entail.
One thing they'd have to do is bring back the same team of concept artists. Homeworld and HW2, besides being fun, were beautiful games.
But here's one nobody has mentioned yet: Sky Odyssey.
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Never heard of it? It was one of the PS2's launch titles. It wasn't very pretty (downright N64 like), but it was one of the few examples of a non-combat flight game that was actually fun to play. You assumed the role of an explorer, looking for fragments of a lost map to find the ruined tower of a forgotten civilization, venturing remote and hostile lands inaccessible by any route except air. You had to go through storms, rocky crevices, old ruins, find a refueling plane in the fog, and other adventures and misadventures. It all maintained a very tense but adventurous atmosphere, despite suffering from repetitive mission designs at some points.
Here's why it deserves a reboot:
- It had a lot of potential, but was plagued by some easily fixed issues:
-->Repetitive mission design. Less canyon missions please.
-->Poor story exposition. I'm not asking for cinematics or a main character - there are other, better ways to tell a story in a game - but I am asking for something more than a bored sounding mission briefing.
-->Poor GUI.
- A reboot could be absolutely stunning graphically. A game like Sky Odyssey is ripe ground for scenery porn, something that was never -and could never be - done in the original.
- Marketing. Games where you kill stuff to death will never go out of vogue, but the market is probably up for something different. Handled with the same attention to detail as a game like Portal, even non-combat or racing games can be successful on a large scale these days.
But here's some things a reboot could also do.
- An open world approach might be interesting.
- A restructuring so that the focus is on gathering resources for mounting the next big mission.
Otherwise I'd play it, the things I remember kicked ass.
