Gearbox Snags Homeworld Rights

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Tireseas_v1legacy

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Sep 28, 2009
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Whatwhat said:
OH THE HUMANITY!!
To add insult to the injury Stardock and Paradox Interactive were second and third in the bidding war.

The Gentleman said:
No love for Stardock?
"Starts leaping up and down, screaming something about the awesomeness of Galatic Civilizations and Stardock in general"

Oh well I guess I will have to be happy with more Crusader Kings II dlc and Sins of a Solar Empire expansions if I want to play any real new strategy games that I haven't mastered yet. (maybe Europa Universalis IV shall quench my thirst for world domination for a while when it finally comes out)
I'm actually quite torn on whether or not I would have wanted Stardock to get the rights. Sure, they can make a great game, and I've yet to see a game of theirs without a deep lore behind it, but none of them had a campaign.

Homeworld, while excellent games mechanically (and after viewing a few videos of HW2 after reading this, still holds up visually by today's standards), was really about the story. The themes are somber, and distinctly tribal in nature. The second game felt like it was a great tale straight out of the sands of history, thanks to the narrative combined with a narrator who sounded like an elder speaking to children. The lore behind it is rich, but is revealed only on the most macro level (they found a ship in the sands with a core and a map to their home world). In the second game, there was only two real characters (S'Jet and Makaan), and everything else is about the fleet.

I could get behind Stardock getting the rights, but only if a different creative team, particularly one that aimed to continue the themes of the original two games, were to take the helm.
 

Smolderin

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Feb 5, 2012
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no....No..........NO!....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Why!!!!!??? Oh lord the humanity! My favorite space RTS of all time in the hands of the same people who made Duken Nukem and Aliens Colonial Marines! Do they even know HOW to make an RTS game? Let alone an RTS game on the same caliber as the Homeworld franchise? Gearbox, I swear to god....don't fuck this up.
 

Nouw

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Mar 18, 2009
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Surely after Duke Nukem:Forever and Aliens:Colonial Marines they would have learnt to leave other IPs alone. Is anyone at this point really going to trust them with this?

On the bright side, they seem to have the intention of re-releasing them on GOG.com and Steam. I can at least get behind this.
omicron1 said:
Gearbox is associated with Sega.
How so? As far as I know, SEGA and Gearbox had the relationship of pub->dev for Aliens:Colonial Marines and now that the game is finished they have nothing to do with each other anymore.
DVS BSTrD said:
Gearbox CAN make this work, it's certainly got a better shot by virtue of being acquired title someone there actually WANTs to develop.
I'd agree with you but this is Gearbox. When discussing Aliens:Colonial Marines in the dev diaries, the tweets and the countless interviews they had, it gave me hope because they seemed to genuinely want to make an Aliens game and a good one at that. Of course when the game was released, all of this meant jack. Acta non verba Gearbox.

Man this has made me cynical >.>.
 

Signa

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Jul 16, 2008
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cursedseishi said:
It says right in the game:
Triptych made it, not Gearbox. Content was complete in Nov 2009, meaning that there was only a little over a year that the project was under Gearbox's wing. That's just enough time to get the multiplayer running and then ship it. Gearbox's name might have been on that turd, but they aren't responsible for why it sucked.
 

Vie

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Dear Gearbox.

If you make a shooter, it better be one where your flying a fighter.

Or I'll set the Naggarok on you.

Yours sincerely
Vie.
 

Vigormortis

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SajuukKhar said:
fun fact, DNF wasn't made by Gearbox, it was made by 3D rRealms, and released by Gearbox.
True. They just worked to acquire the rights to it. They saw the unfinished, poorly designed, buggy, shit state the project was in. Then decided to release it anyway, as is, with an insultingly undeserving sixty dollar price tag.

Yeah. We shouldn't be mad at Gearbox for Duke Nukem: Forever at all...
 

Vigormortis

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Darth Sea Bass said:
People, people chill it could have been worse... EA could have bought the rights! I'll leave you with that nightmarish thought.
Meh. Wouldn't have happened.

Homeworld, as a franchise, isn't "hardcore" enough for them. It isn't a Call of Duty wannabe. It isn't a sports title. It's too complex with it's more than two action keys. And, it's in a genre that's too "strange" to homogenize without directly competing with their own Sims franchise.

Now, Activision on the other hand....
 

Spitfire

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Dec 27, 2008
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Well, this was bound to end badly.

If Relic had bought the rights, I would've been pissed, because Relic are so far removed from anything Homeworld-related nowadays, that I couldn't trust them to do anything interesting with the series.

If TeamPixel had bought the rights, I would've been pissed, because they don't have the resources to make another game in the series.

BlackBird Interactive (the studio where some former Homeworld dev's now work at) would've been fantastic, but they're a young studio still trying to establish themselves, and resurrecting a franchise that has been dead for a decade is probably not a priority for them at this point.

But Gearbox? Not only do they have no experience with the RTS genre, but their track-record when working with licenses that don't belong to them is not exactly stellar either.


Therumancer said:
mirage202 said:
Well, that killed my hopes for Homeworld 3.

RTS really is a dying genre isn't it?
Well, I think the issue is that Blizzard set the mark so high, and has dominated the scene so intensely with Starcraft that most companies are afraid to even try, the last real attempt was from the "Command And Conquer" franchise and it didn't go all that well.
When did Command & Conquer ever try to compete with Starcraft?

Yoshisummons said:
Good bye Homeworld franchise.

Wait! on the maintenance frequency... I'm receiving a signal from the cryo trays in orbit, one of them is suffering a massive malfunction.
I see what you did there.

Can't say I share your optimism though.
 

Abomination

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Bill Nye the Zombie said:
omicron1 said:
Gearbox is associated with Sega. Sega owns Relic. Gearbox have a history of studio collaboration.
I say they're working together.
Sega also owns Creative Assembly. I feel like Sega is going to "suggest" that both Relic and Creative Assembly "help" Gearbox with this one, just so Gearbox gets some good press for something other than Borderlands. Or cause Sega wants to put out good game. Either works.
Just looking at it you can see something amazing potentially happening.

A Homeworld real time tactical game with its own Total War turn based strategic empire management.

One can dream, I guess.
 

Mr C

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May 8, 2008
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I recall these wankers stating Gearbox Software has great love and respect for the Aliens franchise.

I loved Homeworld, may you rest in peace.
 

Ishigami

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Well that is rather unexpected.
If Gearbox wants to break out of their shooter typecasting then I welcome that. Go ahead Gearbox.
As for their new game or what ever they do with Homeworld I wait and see...
A re-release on Steam of the series would certainly not be a misstep.
 

Carnagath

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Homeworld is one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, and I don't really know what to think of those news. I lean towards the fact that, since Homeworld is a niche IP that can't really be cashed-in with a shitty title, they will HAVE to do their absolute best to actually make it good. Are they capable of it? We'll have to wait and see. Relic weren't doing anything with the franchise anyway, either because they have more easily marketable RTS ip's or because they were too scared to touch it again.

Also, I thought devs would have learned by now that using the word "accessible" when you are trying to hype up a game is one huge red flag. Stop using it. Context doesn't matter. Just never use that word ever again for any reason. Seriously.
 

shintakie10

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Sep 3, 2008
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The only good that can come out of this is Homeworld 1 and 2 bein rereleased on GoG and Amazon.

The terrible part of that only good part is it'll probably be released with a bullshit price tag.
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

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Sep 10, 2008
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fix-the-spade said:
Maybe they're sick of making shooters over and over?

If they make a decent job of this then great. If they Borderlands PC port this I'll personally mail a head crab (live) to Randy Pitchford.
Port of 1 or 2?

Because Borderlands 2 is surprisingly good on PC, leagues beyond the crapbucket that was 1.

As for the news:

At least it wasn't EA, but still...

WHY?
 

RicoADF

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Jun 2, 2009
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omicron1 said:
Gearbox is associated with Sega. Sega owns Relic. Gearbox have a history of studio collaboration.
I say they're working together.
They better be, I wont get the game if it's made by gearbox, but if Relic are working on it and their just a logo on the box, well that's a different story. After all Aliens showed they like letting others do the work for them.
 

MysticSlayer

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RIP Homeworld. Sorry, but you just couldn't keep up with your Big Brother, Boarderlands. Here, let me take you to the nice, large graveyard so you can pick your place right next to your other adopted siblings: Duke Nukem and Aliens. Oh, you ask who that is over in the WWII-era games. Well, that's Brothers in Arms. You see, he's been contemplating suicide ever since Gearbox abandoned him a few years ago only to let his mentally unstable twin run around in his name, but he does have hope after his twin was renamed to avoid association, but he's still probably going to kill himself before Gearbox stops doing perverted things with its favorite child, Boarderlands.

On a more serious note: It is sad to see how Gearbox automatically makes us groan in agony, especially since only a few years ago it was a well-respected company. It's going to have to pull something really good to get our trust back, and Boarderlands doesn't count. Still, I'm not holding out that much hope for Homeworld.
 

Spectrum_Prez

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Parsing the language in the quoted press release is a hilarious exercise. I hope any HD version of the Homeworlds is better than the disappointing AOE2 or Baldurs Gate re-dos.

Ed130 said:
Because Borderlands 2 is surprisingly good on PC, leagues beyond the crapbucket that was 1.
fix-the-spade said:
If they Borderlands PC port this I'll personally mail a head crab (live) to Randy Pitchford.
Wait a second, people had problems with the PC version of Borderlands? I hated the game, but it ran smooth as a whistle on my underpowered laptop... it was nowhere close to a memorably bad port (thinking Halo 2 or Saint's Row 2 here).

Whatwhat said:
(maybe Europa Universalis IV shall quench my thirst for world domination for a while when it finally comes out)
Based on what's been shown in the forums, it looks pretty terrible. Way too deterministic. NIs have been *cough* 'streamlined' *uncough*. The interface looks too polished and shiny. ROTW has got absolutely no love so far and the game is supposed to launch in Q3 or so.
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

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Sep 10, 2008
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Spectrum_Prez said:
Parsing the language in the quoted press release is a hilarious exercise. I hope any HD version of the Homeworlds is better than the disappointing AOE2 or Baldurs Gate re-dos.

Ed130 said:
Because Borderlands 2 is surprisingly good on PC, leagues beyond the crapbucket that was 1.
fix-the-spade said:
If they Borderlands PC port this I'll personally mail a head crab (live) to Randy Pitchford.
Wait a second, people had problems with the PC version of Borderlands? I hated the game, but it ran smooth as a whistle on my underpowered laptop... it was nowhere close to a memorably bad port (thinking Halo 2 or Saint's Row 2 here).
It wasn't that bad, but still pretty terrible.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/6725-Stolen-Pixels-139-BorderLAN

It used Gamespy for multiplayer, which was complete sh!t considering the major multiplayer aspect of the game.
 

Beryl77

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Well, I'm glad I'm not a fan of the series but I feel bad for those who are. I suppose it's too early to say things like that but I won't believe anything they say until the game is out. My only hope is that they after what happened with the Aliens game, they'll try and regain our trust by making an actually good game.
It is worrying that they've pretty much only made shooters until now but it doesn't necessarily mean that they will make a bad RTS game. Valve for example has also only made shooters (except Portal I guess but you're still in first person with something that's like a gun) and they then made DOTA 2, which couldn't be farther away from their usual games. Granted, they hired Icefrog but still, sometimes a company wants to expand and do something else. They have to start somewhere if they don't always want to make shooters.