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The next mission is where I dropped the whole thing while playing HW2 Remastered. I don't know what, precisely, pushed me over the threshold of absolutely not caring anymore, but I had just had a hell of a fun time playing HW Remastered and HW2 just felt like a total slog in comparison.
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May 5, 2015 02:25
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sigh. It hurts to think how awesome Homeworld 1 is by Mission 4, and how...sigh. I still have the Homeworld t-shirt from E3 2003. I was so, so excited for this game.
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May 12, 2015 04:47
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Illuyankas posted:My problem so far is that the missions themselves are pretty boring, and there appear to be no actual stakes or sense of danger. It feels like going through the motions. I think this, more than anything, about the actual gameplay. Homeworld's missions were fun. These aren't. I think part of that is that...there's a weird knife-edge of difficulty they rest on. The story dictates that that Vagyr is this unstoppable horde you're fighting a desperate escape through, and so you end up with these waves of crap to deal with. But...you don't have anything effective to deal with them for no reason that's explained in any way (made so much more inexplicable by that mission with Ion Cannon Frigates and then...you don't get to build them for yourself why?), and you're hamstrung by the unit cap, which you can very easily hit. So the missions get passable by the Vagyr unit composition being totally ludicrous and ineffectual...just lots of them. ...which makes it tedious. And, when I most recently played it, just plain frustrating, because my THIS ALL THE FIGHTERS/BOMBERS THE GAME WILL LET ME BUILD wing of stuff would get torn apart engaging an enemy force, and then it's like...guess I'll build more fighters and bombers, because the frigates aren't going to do me any good. As for the story...I think you have to get all the way through it to really appreciate the let-down.
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May 14, 2015 07:00
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Koorisch posted:It kind of makes sense when you think of it, they didn't want to get singled out as the ones who released a horror from the past that converted a lot of people into goop to make more goop. Hire a PR kiith to spin it as a long con to dupe the Bentusi into releasing completely ridiculous weapons tech to the Hiigarans.
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May 15, 2015 23:49
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Karan S'Jet has been troubled ever since The Pride of Hiigara made for open space. She's forgotten something. But what? The keys are right here. The spaceship is on. It can't be her keys. The hyperspace core is installed and operational. They've jumped several times. It works great. The engines work this time. That's really cool. She makes vroom vroom noises, alone in her tank, where Fleet Intelligence can't hear. But what has she--oh. OH gently caress. Her face flushes crimson. "Ion cannon frigates are available for construction" she blurts onto the fleet comm line.
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May 19, 2015 01:39
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Something so eminently Oracular that a team of Hiigaran marines can kick down the door on an asteroid archaeological dig and abscond with it in the space of a cutscene, but so mundane that teams of space archaeologists searching for it on the orders of a space tyrant didn't know they'd already found it. The abrupt mission endings are another thing that frustrates me about the game. The post-mission HYPERSPACE button is a little thing, but it's agency for the player. Taking that away makes the whole thing feel so much more obviously railroaded, even if that hasn't changed that much--it's not like Homeworld had branching missions like Wing Commander.
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May 19, 2015 03:10
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Night10194 posted:This is also a setting that has proven, over and over again, that you need to be really loving careful with picking up random space things because they are super dangerous. But the Bentusi said it was legit. ...what happened to all the Bentusi again?
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May 20, 2015 00:01
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berryjon posted:To make up for missing Monday, I'll have two videos for you guys next Monday! Missions 6 and 7 represent the first two-thirds of a mini-arc which shows off one of the ways in which the game fell short its design goals. Based on some of the Cataclysm video, I sort of wish you'd time-lapse over boring parts instead of jump cuts. The cuts can be so jarring. But I don't do video of any sort at all, so I dunno.
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May 30, 2015 00:52
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Mission 6 feels like the first asteroid field mission from Homeworld to me. It's a neat idea that ends up being kind of too long. But oh well. Mission 7 misses so many Homeworld beats though. The no-fanfare Destroyer introduction (new research options unlocked! You're playing an RTS, haha!) is par for this game, I guess, but the radiation stuff is just...why? Sure the Hiigarans would reverse-engineer and reproduce the Mover, but they'd also say "oh look, dangerous radiation. Research thinks they can adapt our ships to it!" ESPECIALLY once the Vagyr show up in radiation-proofed vessels. I think I'd have been happier if they'd jumped in, been radded to death, and then had to jump in elsewhere. Makaan and the Vagyr are just such uninspired foes. They menace, vaguely, in the most annoying ways possible: by being basically everywhere, by getting random immunity, by having scouts show up without it really seeming to matter what you do to them. Man, maybe the general lack of apparent motivation/agency is part of the problem I have with the mystireligious plot, too. Everything just seems inexorable. Your destiny will be fulfilled, and all you can do is try to leave the smallest number of friendly frigate bits littered behind you and try to rebuild before the next wave spawns. The other two Homeworlds feel uncertain. Desperate. Top-notch art, though. And thanks for trying the speedup! I hadn't thought about how popping through interfaces and going to various battles during that would look--I'd imagined it while remaining focused on a single ship for a long battle or somesuch. I still liked it though.
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Jun 2, 2015 06:36
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berryjon posted:While paying ahead... Honestly, I think I've recognized two missions so far, and one of those is the first mission. I had completely forgotten that this bit was stretched out over so many missions.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:50
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Captain Bravo posted:... after all that loving buildup the goddamned thing doesn't even explode! It's like running out of the building with the timer hitting 00:01, and then a jump-cut to everyone sitting at the bar, saying "Whew, we dodged a bullet there!" Yeah, this jump-cut hurt me. Just...have a proper ending! Homeworld 1 really did this well. "There's nothing left for us here." I really tend hard over in the other direction though. I'm the flight sim player who wants to fly half an hour back to base, land it, pull it up to the hangar, park it, and get out. So the abruptness hits me harder.
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Jun 9, 2015 23:25
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Tthanks for doing the LP of this. After a friend bought me the Remastered box I definitely felt like it was time to play these, and I was starting a slog into HW2 Remastered when I got here and just decided to watch you do it instead. Especially since you do a good job of laying down that stream of fun facts on top of it. ...also apparently the reply taking me to task for doing nothing but complain about the game in this LP thread was actually just something I dreamed about, because I sure don't see that reply anymore. Weird. Still thanks though.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:25
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That was some fine fast-forward music. Also, do the Vaygr have Grand Admiral Thrawn? Their tactical hyperspacing is not only tedious and annoying mission design, but also Bentusi-level precision compared to the Hiigaran's "hey, why don't you drive that slow-rear end ship a few hundred kilometers?" capabilities.
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Jun 15, 2015 06:26
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berryjon posted:Because Cataclysm wasn't done by Relic, and they mis-read why the audience reception at the time was negative. As time has gone by (and I hope my LP helped!), the appreciation for Cataclysm has improved. But at the time, they didn't understand that Cataclysm was only bad because it stood in Homeworld's shadow. Homeworld's shadow is super important to the reception for both games. As far as I'm aware, HW2 was first shown at E3 2003, and it wasn't a playable demo (or at least if it was, only a select group got to play). Other games being shown at E3 2003: Half Life 2, World of Warcraft (or an expansion to it? Something to do with ice?), Guild Wars, Thief 3...it was a pretty big show. And everybody was ready to love HW2, the proper sequel.
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Jun 16, 2015 20:02
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Calax posted:The only mission that made me "quit" was the second to last one... and that was just to quit and undo some of the .lua cheating I'd put in place because having 44 Battlecurisers causes the adaptive AI to spawn (for that level) about 200-400 squadrons of fighters to 'counter' you at the start. For such an aggressively rock-paper-scissorsed game, they do an awful job of auto-balancing.
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Jun 24, 2015 03:39
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They don't even feel like Hiigarans anymore. When the Kuun Lan broke their giant gun, they got the Bentusi to *show them how to fix it*. Here...well, let's just dock or something. Engineering is out of coffee. Super cloak? ...nah, gently caress it. Unkillable fish frigates? Anything? Maybe try to reverse engineer the blue shooty thing on the dreadnaught since there's not a whole lot else to do this mission? I remember so little of this game. I definitely don't remember this. The only reason I'm sure I beat it is...well, being angry about the last mission. Up until then, I think I thought it was going to get better.
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Jun 30, 2015 07:11
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Torrannor posted:Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm were better games, especially Cataclysm. But I still enjoyed HW2, even though I only replayed it once. The middle section does suck. I really don't want to go into it because of potential spoilers, but it actually took me right to the last mission to really hate HW2. For some reason I'm excited to share why.
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Jun 30, 2015 23:45
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Makaan shot first sorry
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Jul 5, 2015 19:57
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...oh man. The movie makes it look like Bentus blows its fragments into a cloud light-minutes across, destined to become a debris ring. An event that the Vagyr would be able to detect somehow, through some hyperspace mumbo jumbo. So you're going to hyperspace over to where the core is, because you hyperspaced out when Bentus blew. Almost like Karan knew you'd have to chase the core post-detonation. Nope! All of Bentus is sitting within a couple of kilometers of the original detonation site, and the Hiigaran fleet has barely moved. Also, serious question: isn't retrieving things from radiation what the Progenitor Workers are for? propatriamori fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 21:34
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anilEhilated posted:Considering the displayed competence of everyone involved, that mod would consist of one very short mission where you foil a half-assed assault on Hiigara. Bentus rolls up and starts droning on about end times and Makaan and Fleet Command shouts AT LEAST MAKAAN DOESN'T PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS
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Jul 8, 2015 00:57
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Ha, wouldn't that be a trip. Slay Makaan, lose Hiigara. FLEET: "What do we do now?" SJET: "We find another Homeworld." Roll The Ladder.
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Jul 11, 2015 00:13
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an oddly awful oud posted:Did you touch on the fact that mission 13 makes no sense, in that the Vaygr destroying the hyperspace gate before the Pride of Hiigara goes through would leave Makaan trapped in the center of the black hole cluster without all three cores to actually awaken Sajuuk? Reverse psychology to goad the Hiigarans through the gate, in case the Hiigarans realized that all they had to do from that point on was ignore him?
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Jul 31, 2015 00:21
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This mission made me hate the game. Homeworld's last mission does a lot of things right that this one doesn't. There, it's the last hurrah of your fleet management skills, against a huge enemy force. The goal is obvious and it's the one you've been working toward the entire time. The siege of Hiigara is so removed from Homeworld 2 proper--you just kind of pass through it in one mission before you can even build Ion Cannon Frigates--that returning to it and seeing that it's still an ongoing concern always felt kind of weird. In this one, IT'S YOUR FIRST TIME EVER USING SAJUUK. What the gently caress does Sajuuk even do? Sajuuk is the Great Maker, so it should make stuff, right? What does it make? Nothing. It's a slightly bigger version of the dreadnaught, with some secondary weapons. So it's a Battlecruiser on steroids. It's not even a particularly good battlecruiser on steroids, either, because if you throw Sajuuk into that initial fray, it loving dies, or at least it did on my first playthrough. So the space macguffin isn't worth a moderate-size battlefleet of mediocre composition. I expected it to be the Hyper Beam from Super Metroid at that point--the game proper is over, and this mission is you loving up everything in sight because you already won. You're the Sajuuk-Khar! Instead, it turns out if Makaan had gotten it (HOW could he have possibly done that? Blown up Bentus? With WHAT?) you could've probably stopped him. In fact, doing that might've been a more interesting final mission, and made a lot more sense--the Great Maker, perverted, throwing Atmosphere Deprivation weapons into Hiigara? And what could stand against it? THE BANANASHIP SAVIOR OF HIIGARA HAS RETURNED RESEARCH "THE LADDER" IMMEDIATELY Of course, I never found out that Sajuuk had the not-scripted hyperdrive, so the mission was an absolute slog when I played it. I forget how I even beat it. Probably by leaving Sajuuk in the back to do nothing. sigh.
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Aug 11, 2015 00:49
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I'd be curious to see Sajuuk spawned into the mission with the Keepers. Not that Berryjon didn't keep those at bay perfectly well, but those seemed like far more deadly Progenitor ships than Sajuuk was.
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Aug 12, 2015 01:46
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RBA Starblade posted:...They could fit in anywhere else as "generic". They were designed to not fit into Homeworld 1; they are new. They could, however, fit into any number of things in 2003, which was kind of the point at the time. Homeworld 1's designs called back to the 70s specifically. Homeworld 2's looked to more modern designs and looked forward to where they might go next... I think that's why I don't like the HW2 ships. The HW1 ones are recognizable, distinct, and seem fit for their purposes. The HW2 ships could just all fit anywhere else.
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Aug 29, 2015 23:45
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