Lance Mueller has been working on Homeworld 3 for 3.5 years as game director, and he finally gets to talk about it.
Fans have been waiting for Homeworld 3 for two decades, and game director Lance Mueller finally gets to talk about it after 3.5 years as game director.
Blackbird Interactive is making the game, and Gearbox Publishing is publishing it in the first half of 2023. The game is all about staging massive spaceship fleet battles like the kind we saw in Star Wars movies.
But this game, which was unveiled at Opening Night Live at Gamescom in Germany, will feature a lot of storytelling and easier navigation of 3D space.
I saw the announcement, played a live demo, and interviewed Mueller afterward at Gamescom. While it’s still complicated to send your fleet through three-dimensional space, the devs found ways to navigate more easily by allowing you to click on a 3D object — like a big space wreck — and navigate your ships to the target. That could vastly simplify the staging of giant fleet battles in Homeworld 3.
I’m hoping that will make the game a lot more fun than its predecessors. Mueller said the game will also have a strong storytelling element too.
I played a battle that takes place at the site of an ancient hyperspace gate network. A new threat to the galaxy known as The Anomaly has started to spread its darkness and has begun to swallow gates and planets alike. Now Imogen S’Jet, Karan’s successor, is the only one who holds the key to solving the mystery threatening the galaxy’s future.
In addition to the campaign, Homeworld 3 will also have multiplayer and a separate mobile version of the game as well, dubbed Homeworld Mobile.
Blackbird Interactive was founded in 2010 by former members of the Relic Entertainment Homeworld team, including Art Director Rob Cunningham and Lead artist Aaron Kambeitz. After its founding, Blackbird began working on a game the team considered the spiritual successor to Homeworld, and then partnered with Gearbox (the now IP holder and game publisher) to release Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How long have you been at work now? Has it been more than four years?
Lance Mueller: About three and a half years now since we started.
GamesBeat: What was the inspiration or charter when you first got going?
Mueller: Homeworld 3 has been a dream since the beginning of Homeworld 2’s development. A lot of the ideas and vision for Homeworld 2 were massive and expansive. A lot of the things we ended up doing in Homeworld 2 were really good, but we wanted to do more. Now the technology has caught up with the expansive vision of Homeworld 2 and now Homeworld 3. We can do three-dimensional terrain, cover, hiding in tunnels. All of these things were very difficult 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
GamesBeat: How massive is the space now? How many ships are operating in the space?
Mueller: We want to be comparable, as much as possible, to previous titles. We’re still working on performance and things like that to make sure we get to the best numbers we can get. As far as specific numbers we’re not really saying right now, but we hope to have more information in the future.
GamesBeat: Is that just a matter of computing power, or are there other considerations?
Mueller: There are definitely design considerations. More is not always better. We’re trying to make sure we find the right balance to get to an amount of ships that people can understand and work with, compared to creating an epic, cinematic experience for players.
GamesBeat: How do you help gamers play in a way that maybe isn’t how they naturally think, in this 3D space?
Mueller: We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to help bring the controls to a more intuitive format. In the game itself, you saw that if I want to go somewhere, I click on the object I want to go to. It makes it a lot easier to spatially understand something when I can see it. Just going to a point in open space is something nebulous. It’s all about simplifying the cognitive load for the player while we’re improving the intuitive nature of what they want to do, making sure the game always does what they want it to do.
