Homeworld Cataclsym/Emergence on GOG - gog.la/SPACETERROR Won't be able to cover Deserts of Kharak directly next like I hoped for but it'll come in time.
The fact that the galaxy was saved because scrappy bottom-barrel miners looked up at the most powerful faction in the galaxy and said "Get the fuck back here and help, you cowards." Is incredible. I love it.
The scientist from 6:32 was absolutely based. His lab went from “#10 Safest Workplace in The Kith” to the set of The Thing in less than ten seconds. His response: We’re fucked, boss. Save the rest.
I love that the conversation is like, "Um are you guys doing something?" "...no?" "Something's wrong what are you doing?!" "Absolutely nothing! Oh no... We're boned!"
Dude I was thinking the exact same thing when I listened to that, like I was asking myself if I thought I could do the mental calculus that fast to know that I was going to die in the next few seconds and they needed to blow up our whole section of the ship immediately if there was going to be ANYbody left alive in 5 minutes. Primo VA and writing
After the tragedy that is Homeworld 3. This truly is the best sequel. Didn't have any major Retcons, didn't make anyone look Human, didn't add 3 magic hyperspace cores, and had THE BEST voice acting of the ENTIRE series, and some the best in video gaming Period.
@@Revan41411 For all of the money they spent on that crap pile that is HW3, they could of easily rebuilt Cataclysm/Emergence. Moreover the loss of the source code should be inconsequential to a Remaster like this, since they'd be using HW2s engine with HW2 logic system anyway, and Cataclysms assets can be easily unpacked. Only the games logic code is compiled into machine language. They had to rewrite HW1... same shtick.🤷♂
@@morbihan9857 Yeah, it wasn't bad, it made me cringe a little... but HW3 is just a whole a new level of cringe. It makes me want to go back to HW2, in the same way that Star Trek Discovery makes me realize Star Trek Enterprise wasn't that bad after all... I'm glad to have Faith of the Heart.
The journey to becoming Beast Slayers is probably hands down my favorite videogame story, not just RTS. Fun fact: Cataclysm was actually also setting up in a subtle way for the Kushan, the protagonists of the original Homeworld, to be the antagonists of Homeworld 2, as it would show how they have once again started acting kinda like how they did when they got exiled to the edge of known space. Such a shame it was not to be.
Chances for Homeworld 3 be anything else than a soft-reboot and a "new entry point", after 2 decades since 1, are rather slim. I suspect there will not even be Higarians there, just "S'Jets" ruled by Lord Karen.
25:25 Some context on that scene. It is more insane than what Mandalore shows it as. The fleet commander spends the entire campaign trying to be voice of reason in a horror story and either nobody listens to him or betrays him. He initially tries to be a voice of reason when approaching the fleeing bentusi and it again doesn't work. It's hinted that the commander had finally snapped from all the stress and guilt, and was just looking to die from something other than the beast. As shown by the quote a few moments before on why he refuses to retreat "better to be blown to atoms now than wait for the beast to hunt us down". The entire speech to bentusi was just a him venting all his frustrations built up to that point. Somehow after all attempts at diplomacy failed an emotional rant manages to guilt trip the Bentusi into joining the fight. Even the Bentusi hint at the insanity of it all by their quote "we see our own madness reflected in yours."
Yeah. Our good commander is the one sane person in the entire story. Doing the right thing, the reasonable thing, every time. Him finally getting fed up with the insanity around him and just venting for effect like that is cathartic for us the player, who's been there with him and struggling to deal with it all alongside him.
@@CompletelyNewguy he was fed up to the point that the Bentusi pretty much saw he wasn't kidding. They either relent and come to their senses or two factions were going to end up eradicating themselves in that situation.
@@olegoleg258 I mean arguably the Somtaaw had already eradicated the Bentusi if they refused to help them. Besides the few ships that escape before the gate is closed, it's implied that if the beast is not taken care of, the Bentusi are doomed. Thus if the Bentusi eradicate the Somtaaw, they're essentially dooming themselves
6:35 credit to the radio responder. he went from "dafuq is going on?" to "I am in danger" to "i am fucked" in literal seconds, and his first response wasn't self preservation, but to save the ship o7 godspeed to the guy.
At first he sounds like he's in the middle of his lunch break and just happened to be the first guy who picked up the phone. Like, he's in the middle of trying to heat up his dinner and he's like "what's going on? i have no idea, I was just putting my food in the microwave, bill just took over for the first tests on the thing we picked up...,HOLY STARS WAR, SPACE OUR ENTIRE SECTION, SAVE YOUR SELF"
I am sorry what? How did he Blizzard's trademarking of "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" in 2010 had any effect on the name of the "Homeworld Cataclysm" that came out in 2000? Cataclysm is a common noun, you shouldn't be able to trademark it to the extent that it cannot be used in other titles. And they even weren't first! If anything, it is Blizzard that should have changed the name of their expansion pack.
@@Holtijaar i mean.. Sky TV quite literally owns the word "Sky", and forced Microsoft to change SkyDrive to OneDrive lmao copyrights is a weird and wonky thing, it's possible they never thought anybody would go that far cus who the fuck would ever trademark a word, since many games share a word or two in their titles also this is a rerelease, so the original release date doesn't really matter, which i know is quite strange if you really think about it
“You thought you were getting thanked. You’re a dirty miner, fuck you.” This was my favorite part of this game. You were on the edge of society and interacted with other more powerful factions who consistently looked down on you.
And now you gotta figure out how to turn your dinky mining vessel into a proper flagship and combat ship factory all while punching far above your weight with clever, unorthodox tactics. (Leeches, sentinels, mimics)
@@LeonserGT One reviewer compared it to Dead Space. Limited Resources (Especially on harder difficulties) you have to use in order to survive? Check. Horror that kills and/or infests people to spread itself? Check. Improvised weapons consisting of engineering and mining equipment? Check. Isolation, with the only thing standing between you and the horrors, as well as any people you're protecting, being your sorry little ass? Check. Ascending from underdogs out of their depths to warriors who are the only hopes of saving the universe? Check. Cataclysm is a survival horror RTS.
I remember, back in the day, people trying to headcanon Kiith Somtaaw into Homeworld 2. One post stuck with me after all these years, it went something like: "Guys. Somtaaw can't be in Homeworld 2: these guys took a bunch of space trucks and retrofitted them so they could fight off the worst threat the galaxy had ever faced. They are absent from Homeworld 2 beacause they had already blown to bits their part of the Vaygr fleet and gone back to punch rocks by lunchtime."
Oh god I love the idea that they are the doom slayer of homeworld. "The Vagyr? Pfff, wake me up when there is an actual threat going on. If its not some eldritch abomination, then its too easy"
I believe it's said somewhere Somtaaw in the Diamid didn't want Karan monkeying with old relics (speaking from experience) and they were promptly ignored. So yeah they probably fucked off back to smashing rocks for the Frontline.
Remider: it is canon that for most of HW2 you are not facing the full or dedicated might of the Vaygr, in fact you are explicitly told that (until the last mission) your facing garrison forces and what the Vaygr can spare while every other Kith fleet keeps the Vaygr tied down so the mothership can complete her mission. so that head canon is very much real canon due to this fact. Kiith Somtaaw were likely competing with Kiith Soban for fleet kills, Elite irregulars Elite regulars style.
I'd call it an ascension, mainly because they could've ran away from it, being a low tier clan but no, they rose to the occasion despite the horrors they saw. I would've done the same thing as the Bentuzi considering how anything biological or mechanical was not safe from this thing.
I played this way back when it was Homeworld: Cataclysm (Blizzard's legal shenanigans be damned!) and it was truly gratifying to see Somtaaw get the respect I felt they were well and truly due. End cinematic was fun. I do remember from the old HW classic manual that Somtaaw were mentioned more than Mandalore here says. There was a section devoted to the Kiith leader being lead by some vision to the richest iron ore deposit on Kharak, and securing the services of Kiith Soban to guard one of their border passes for an entire century. Somtaaw came to great acclaim as creators of quality weapons, and had a decent amount of respect back on Kharak. Of course, that all went out the window when the tiny remnant of Somtaaw returned to Hiigara, but that's where this game comes in. This game being Cataclysm. Bloody Blizzard.
@@danielharvison7510 It's somewhere in the manual as well, the Kuun-Lan was the second ship they built when they had (very) limited time to the fabrication yard. The first ship was built fast, the second ship was vastly improved and built so fast they had time to spend on the Clee-San as a research vessel. So they are fast, improve and are willing to invest in scientific research. And then the guys with a shovel and a set of binoculars have to fight in a win or die type of war. When it comes to that, the motorized banana (ramming fregat) is the small version of this, originally they had to dock with the main ship during battle, but the crew said "screw that" and went off to push the enemy into a bunch of fast moving meteors. Medals are decals applied to their crash helmets.
Fun fact turing civilian Vessels to make shift warships aren't that fictional, during the Golden Age of Piracy and as recently as WW2, Raiders often convert Cargo ships to "Warships" and funnily enough some Warships pretend to be Civilian vessels.
"Despite being a viral organism, the Beast had a very high level command of Galactic Common - an in-universe trade language used by all races - and was fully capable of stating its thoughts. However, its ability to talk to others was compounded by the disjointed nature of its vocals. The disjointed nature meant it was unable to maintain a single voice at any time, alternating between a deep masculine voice and a raspy female voice throughout many of its conversations. This suggests that its communications were pieced together from log recordings and possibly victim memories." FUCK THAT SHIT!
Fun fact about the Kuun-Lan type mining vessels: They were designed in less than 2 days after Somtaaw pleaded with the Council and were granted 45 days access to the Mothership's manufacturing facilities. Given this limited time and the fact that they were more than likely not going to be granted access again in the near future, they had to design a vessel that was close in function to the Mothership itself (meaning as self sufficient as possible when it came to producing additional vessels), thus the Somtaaw mining mothership was born. Edit: They're officially called the Explorer-class mining mothership.
The game manual calls it an "Explorer" class Deep Space Mining Vessel. In-game it's only ever referred to as the Command Ship, and Encyclopedia Hiigara classifies it as a Flagship (which includes mothership-type vessels), and its purpose as a Command Ship. Googling "explorer-class mining mothership" doesn't show anything with that designation.
There's also a discrepancy in the game's manual over the "45 days" Somtaaw had. Did they have 6 months or 45 days? Quoting from "Kiith History: Somtaaw" (page 12) "While many of the established Kiith accused Somtaaw of further undermining the ancient social systems for their own benifit, the result was Somtaaw was granted access to the Mothership Station for a period of six months. Mothership access for other lesser Kiith soon followed. In their time, the Somtaaw built two enormous mining ships, the Kuun-Lan and the Fal-Corum, which were both launched, fully manned, within 45 days. In the final days of their control over the Mothership’s PDA, Kiith Somtaaw triumphantly built one final ship, the Clee San, a top-of-the-line deep space research frigate." and quoting from ""Explorer" Class Deep Space Mining Vessel" (page 95) "Through many political trials, (see History of Kiith Somtaaw) the New Daiamiid finally granted Somtaaw access to the Mothership for a mere 45 days. The Explorer Class design was finished within days when Somtaaw Engineers gained control of the Mothership’s PDA, and construction began immediately; all parties involved knew full well that this was probably the only time Somtaaw would have access to the massive construction facility. Accordingly, no expense was spared! The first Explorer was dubbed the Faal-Corum and launched on day 20, to the rousing cheers of thousands of Somtaaw watching from monitors planetside. Even before the Faal-Corum cleared the docks, engineers were modifying the design of the second Mining ship to incorporate the lessons learned in constructing the first. The Kuun-Lan launched on day 35 with more powerful engines, an extra layer of armor, and a 30% greater module capacity."
I love that at 24:10 as the Taidani commander is giving his speech about how the downfall of the galaxy is the fault of the Hiigarans they just cut off the transmission.
The Kuun-Lan's tactical controller (who Mandalore didn't have any clips of) outright says, "Sorry, command. They're just trying to distract us from this. Picking up multiple hyperspace signatures [nearby]."
Kiith Tambuur. They're mentioned in the Cataclysm / Emergence manual as being a Kiith literally made of ONE ANGRY DUDE that started off commanding a single, "I argued so well I got it for free" Frigate from the Kiith clans, filled it full of other disposessed from Kharak, and by the start of Catalysm was a renowned mercenary with an entire fleet of scrapyard nabbed ships. That's what I want. Fuck I love Cataclysm / Emergence. The story is so TIGHT, so well done, it's amazing.
Dude went around hunting any Taiidani war criminals or those involved in Kharak's destruction. You could easily see his own spinoff game. Lots of stories like that in there.
Kiith Tambuur mirrors Kiith Soban's origin. One angry dude pissed off that their kiith will not let them avenge the death of their family due to a rival Kiith, he just goes: Fuck it! If your rules will not let me do it. I will make a Kiith of my own, finds like minded followers and hunts down the rival Kiith themselves.
@@MandaloreGaming Odd question Mandalore, but if I thought to begin making a mod on that idea, would I be able to contact you on it for opinions? And if yes, how would I?
Something I just now noticed is that when the Bentusi are completely frightened out of their minds and running they outright refer to your existance as the Beast does: "flickerlives". Honestly that just adds so much more to the Kuun-Lan Captain calling them monsters.
The line where the captain dubs the ship a warship instead of a mining vessel is such a small seemingly insignificant line. But after playing the whole game and seeing what the crew had to go through it comes off as such a massive FUCK YEAH! moment. Like you fucking bet we're a goddamn warship, saving the galaxy with retrofitted mining vessels and dollar store warships is such a massive flex. And seeing this clan go from below the bottom of the barrel mining Kiith to venerated and respected "beast hunters" is a 10/10 story arc. Sorry if this comment is too long I just think this game is fucking awesome.
No, it was an excellent journey, with the fleet having a whole character arc on the way. I remember feeling immensely proud when we returned in triumph from the final battle and they made sure the player would feel that way.
they took everyones shit treated like less then 0 besides a material to be used and still were the ones that said fuck this and rose up to save everyone even taking on the bentusi cause they were the only one with a pair even while scared and the weakest clan they had heart so seeing them respected i was like fuck ya you god damn earned it
The fun part of Cataclysm is the one engineer left who gets to somehow be chief scientist after the others get eaten with what you can only assume is the only microscope left on the Kuun-Lan
Command: Do you understand what it is? Engineer: Kinda. Command: That is a hell of a lot better than anyone else around here. You are now our chief scientist. Chief Scientist: But sir, it scares me. Command: It scares us all, son. It scares us all.
@@WingMaster562 Or that old Royal Navy toast: “To a bloody war or a sick season.” Basically toasting to superior officers getting killed in war or getting sick and dying, freeing up room for promotions
BTW in case mandalore didn't spell it out, when the Beast cells makes physical contact with organic matter, it mutates and stretches that matter into organic wiring to help make the ship work better. Basically the Meat Moss from dead space except the meat moss is still alive and screaming all the time as the beast uses it to transmit targeting data.
Even worse, not onle do you get turned into organic wiring, the beast also steals all your memories and thoughts and uses them for its own gains. Which means not only do you have to live as organic wiring, you have to do it while always watching a clump of infection pretend to be you for as long as the ship still lives.
I wonder if the advance flood stages were inspired by the concept of the beast, i mean some of the colors of the flood look like the infeccious matter that grows in the ships plagued with the beast
@@martinnavarrete5279 It is possible. The release date of Cataclysm lines up with combat evolved. But I mean Cataclysm didn't exactly come up wit the concept of alien infection taking over organic and inorganic matter.
Yeah the writers did a great job, its no boring old zombie virus, its remorseless nanites that twist your body beyond your still-living minds ability to comprehend, for the cold purpose of efficiency.@@spacecorpse3212
That moment when the lower decks are jettisoned and the panicked cries turn into screaming then silence has been seared into my mind for decades. One of the best moments of sci-fi horror out there.
To this day, the cries of "CUT US LOOOSE" amidst the panicked and pained screams of god knows how many crew, echoing out into the abyss has stayed with me since my one and only playthrough 22 years ago.
Yeah, that scene, and then later on when the Caal-Shto reappears as "reinforcements"; my child self didn't realize it was infected and when I moved my *entire fleet* over there and found only terror, it was a moment I will never forget in the same way, as nearly everything I had began to slowly either fall or become infected.
@@ArnieMcStrangleholdlol on my first playthrough when it was like “Assign at least 12 acolytes to protect the Clee San” I was like “Oh sure, just TWELVE? Yeah, I’m not stupid”, spent a ton of resources building up to around 30 acolytes and a couple frigates and sent them all only for the whole lot to get subverted and come back for me. 😂
17:31 The thing I love about this is that the Bentusi didn't suffer from the ancient Hiigarans. At this time the Bentusi were pretty much the most powerful race in the galaxy with sage wisdom and enigmatic technology. During the ancient war, the Bentusi who at this time was part of that super space council sent a single ship to Hiigara to make peace talks with them as the whole galaxy was kind of sick of the war at this point. The Hiigarans when they discovered the second warp core basically gained the OP jump drive technology that allowed them to jump ridiculous distances like the Bentusi could, using this they ran circles around the Ancient Taiiden who couldn't respond quick enough. The Hiigarans thought they were invincible so in their arrogance, they attacked the Bentsui, this resulted in that one Bentusi ship literally wiping out the entire Hiigaran navy. They basically crippled the Hiigaran empire and that's what allowed the Taiidan and other discontent races to commit revenge atrocities on the Hiigarans. The Bentusi felt so guilty and appalled by their own actions and fighting back that they abdicated their place on the council and underwent massive demilitarization and were the leading voice and calling for mercy for the Hiigarans and having them exiled instead. I suppose that's why they were so willing to help the Kushan in their journey home, they knew the Kushan were not the ancient Hiigarans and didn't deserve their surrogate homeworld getting destroyed and genocided again. The Bentsui dunking on the somtaaw with just their drone craft was them in their weakened state, that's how the Taiidan were able to almost kill one ship as well. The Bentusi at their full power were scary, they would probably be more willing to fight if they still had that power. Such an ancient and powerful race running in fear is definitely an extremely powerful moment. TLDR: The Bentsusi are so OP that they basically were the direct cause for the Ancient Hiigarans downfall and their ability to dunk on the player is just a bare hint of their full former power.
@@DarkOmegaMK2 yeah, it definitely was. *degrading* to hear and watch happen. It was a true nightmare, especially scary considering the most intelligent faction we see losing their shit and went Alah on them, detonating their ship.
@@DarkOmegaMK2 I think one particular line gets to me... during those screams one thing I hear is "All sides" but I like to hear it as "Blue skies" That sounds way more scarier to me because The Beast is assimilating them into the ship, dragging up their memories. The memory of the blue skies of their home world could be one such thing they're desperately trying to cling on to...
“It doesn’t matter how we die. One ancient monster is as good as another.” Holy shit that line slapped so hard this game just committed domestic battery
The voice acting in this was even better than in HW1. Everyone's bringing their 110%. Lines like "CUT US LOOSE", the Somtaw Science Officer analyzing the Beast having to choke back his own vomit and disgust, or that Taiidani Republic transport begging for help are fucking CHILLING and emotionally ladden to the extreme.
The final mission is so much more than mentioned in the video and has some of the best moments in Gaming for me. The giant siege cannon bolted to your main ship? Useless, against the taken over superweapon the shot will get bounced back and against Nagarrok it is too slow to hit. It´s the one case in an RTS where the end game superweapon ISN´T the solution. I also loved the scene where the Empire remnants abandon the Beast once the battle turns against it. It´s so cathartic to see the horrific beast ask for help and be denied. Also the Bentusi superfighter? Also a great moment, once you get them you replace all your ships of that category - two of your smallest craft bolted together. But then you research the final clue how to beat the Nagarrok - in order to turn off the frictionless drive you need to hit it with EMP. Which is the one original trick Somtaw had since the very beginning of the game. And it´s on the shitty ship that is two smaller ships smushed together that you JUST recycled in order to build the broken Bentursi superships. The solution was with us the whole way.
To be fair the Super Akolythes that the Bentusi give you are so powerful that you really don't need the EMP. They can kill the Naggarrok easily on their own which is the only criticism of Cataclysm I have. With those things, the Bentusi should have had no problems killing the Beast in the first place.
@@shaengar7440 Been a while but wastn the bentusis schtick that they are the spaceship and so wouldve had to "man" the little fighters themselves, if that was even an option? Felt that what they gave was nothing they couldve used themselves on their own even if they knew how to make it.
@@shaengar7440 The game definitely wants you to hit it with and emp then siege cannon it but you're right it is very easy ti just burn the Naggarrok down with super acolytes.
@@CareerKnight Right, I wish they made it so that you could only destroy the Naggarok with the Siege cannon. One well aimed shot should have been enough to finish it but it should not be able to be destroyed by the Super Akolythes.
"CUT US LOOSE!" One of the most bone chilling lines i've had the pleasure of hearing juxtaposed against "Okay Let's talk visuals." Gave me a laugh. So glad to see a Cataclysm vid, your work is appreciated as always!
@@BigPapaKaiser Eh, I rate "Something's come aboard! Help us! HEEEELP USSSSSssss...." as even more horrifying. Because that only happens because *you* failed to protect that colony ship.
"the Somtaaw are mentioned being against poking around in ancient ruins" If this does not make Cataclysm canon, I don't know what else could. Them being against digging out ancient ships would mean nothing on it's own, but given what them touching a million year old beacon unleashed on the galaxy makes their disdain for treasure hunting very understandable.
@KarSoban "We don't want you to poke at this shit, because we _know_ what it can mean. But since you refuse to listen to us, we're sending a strike force to follow you. So that _this time_ when something horrible is unleashed, at least someone will be there to try and slow it down." "Thanks?"
"You're worse than the beast! AT LEAST THE BEAST DOESN'T PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS!" Hot damn, the VA gave 101% on that dialogue line. EDIT: timestamp here 26:26 for the epic dialogue line!
I am simply amazed how decade old rts game without actual characters has MORE character than modern rpgs. That was a very strong scene. THAT kind of "cinematic" i wanted from games not 30 fps, black bars nonsesne.
@@trevordavis6830 Do it, I've played a ton of games and I think that one is still all time favorite. Still easy to pick up, still has a good bit going on mechanically, still has enough story to get you thinking about philosophy. Perhaps most uniquely I feel it carries narrative momentum the whole way through, despite taking a while to beat. Most old games are cool because they do one or two things well, cataclysm/emergence did everything but the graphics well. The gameplay can be slow sometimes, but that down time is actively used against you in this one as you frantically try to prepare for whatever is coming next.
I love how The Beast's origin is never explained at all. The Naggarock isn't the source of these nanomachines or anything, they just stumbled upon them much like the Kuun-Lan did. Where did it come from? Who created it? Why does it do what it does? Are there more out there?
My guess, extra-galactic. The Naggarock was made to test inter galaxy travel. Either it did a jump to one and came back infected, or it ran into it at the edge or in between galaxies. Best case, it consumed another galaxy already and the Naggarock was it's only possible vector for infecting another. Worst case, it found its way across galaxies by itself, has eaten multiple galaxies already, and may endemic to the rest of the universe. After all, even if it takes millions of years for a ship to reach the next galaxies, if the virus your spreading can survive that long, why wouldn't you send them in every direction? And why should we assume the Naggarock is the only ship that can travel across galaxies in normal lifespans?
@@fake-inafakerson8087 Or its basically a Warp-daemon - the cutscene implied that the Naggarok went into Long-Jump shiny and new and came out the other end *f u c k e d* Which could be a set-up for interesting stuff in HW3 if Randy didn't exist in the worst timeline alongside us. "Can we go to the Gate Of Arran?" "No honey we have intergalactic travel at home" Intergalactic travel at home: *THEY COME. **_G O O D._*
It's implied that the naggarok picked up the beast from hyperspace, like the naggarok jumped to deep into the hyperspace and entered some darker dimension where it picked up the beast
You see... Naggarock is actually a cipher. If you decode it... it comes out as "We ripped this idea from Event Horizon because that is the best damned idea that movie ever wasted." Its a very complicated cipher... >.>
I can vividly remember being so irritated learning that Halo Wars got the project shut down when it wasn't even going to come to PC at the time. I think it's stayed so tantalizing since it was an amazing looking total conversion that no one actually got to play.
I remember regularly checking Derelict Studios/Slipstream Productions for HaloGen updates waaaay back in the day. Lots of good memories (well, except for the whole cancelation part).
I checked every day for updates and watched every trailer multiple times. I think I was 12 at the time - still think about Halogen 1.0 vs Halo Wars every once in a while
It really is a shame that Cataclysm/Emergence not only didn't get the Remaster treatment, but is also considered non-canon. It deserves a lot better than to be brushed aside.
I think that might be partially WHY Cataclysm is so often ignored, honestly. It's just such a hard act to follow up on, with so few of the people involved left, that it casts a shadow over the entire franchise by pure comparison.
also biggest lore break between 2 and cataclysm: in 2 you see the last of the Bentusi sacrifice themselves. While if you played cataclysm, you know some bentusi ships eventually escaped the galaxy, meaning its unlikely bentus is really the last of their race. Also, the best thing about the Beast that wasn't really mentioned here.. is that while its goal is to just consume everything, its SMART about it; going for the strongest specie that possess the greatest knowledge they could assimilate immediately, using infected ships to lure others, and even using what it knows of galaxy politics to gain allies. "We know you better than you know yourselves", and the beast is probably not wrong in that regard with how long it has been listening to the entire galaxy. And sure the taidan imperialists were morons.... but they were desperate. The beast was the only thing willing and capable to help them regain their empire, and they were desperate to get back that power. And hell, the attempt of the Beast to offer Kiith Somtaaw a position of relevance may have worked to some degree if the beast made that offer way earlier on.. but even the Beast didn't take them seriously until it was way too late (hell even when you declare the kuun-laan a warship, the Beast scoffs at the idea that you are a soldier now, as if it thinks you are playing at war and not an actual threat).
Homeworld: Cataclysm is easily the best sequel that nobody remembered and utterly terrifying for all the right reasons. Top tier voice acting. I played it back shortly after finding a copy in a two-pack that came with the original I got at a book store way back in like 2005. The Zerg in Starcraft were supposed to be Warhammer Tyranids; alien, unsettling, all-consuming and assimilating and for the most part, they fit the part (in Starcraft 1). The Beast is much, much scarier than the Zerg ever were. From the moment it appears in the story until its defeat, it is an enemy that never feels trivialized, and always threatening. Model example: That superweapon you mount on your ship to kill the Beast? Turns out, even when fixed and fully operational, it still fails to slay the Beast and its superweapon. The Zerg, by comparison, have been punked out by ancient super-weapons twice...and then reduced into being the bitch of the "bigger bad" in Starcraft 2. ...Yeah. maybe there's a reason why Blizzard would prefer that everyone forget this Cataclysm in favor of theirs.
Probably because someone outdid them with story potential for the Zerg. Honestly I would love a Warhammer game that focuses on the horror of tyranids. Sure there is the combat side from soldiers, but we never see the civilian side, seeing areas being overwhelmed, corruption spreading, maybe new forms of the tyranids that literally haven’t been seen before. Potentially maybe hives that cause infighting and different goals, like ones that don’t care and ignore you even if they run into you, or others that will kill you/eat you on sight. Kind of like a horror based Warhammer Alien isolation of sorts, but with gameplay like This war of mine.
The beast are effectively the borg with the horror turned up to 11. The zerg, even in SC1 is a bit humanized with overmind being a talking individual and the cerebrates being their own persons. Of course some specially infected human being important also furthers to make them not terribly scary. The beast doesn't have 'characters'. Its a force of nature that speaks with the voice of those its assimalated. Communication is a means to an end, not something it uses within itself.
The problem of the zergs, in both starcraft, is that they alternate between "galactic menace that threaten to consume the world" and "savage beast that anyone save the Protoss can tame, avoid, or manipulate (the confederate, the sons of Kohral, the UED, Amon, Kerrigan...)".
Blizzard's writers have been really inconsistent about the Zerg (and most things, let's be fair). In the original Starcraft campaigns, you at least get the feeling that the Zerg are signficantly dangerous as they make steady headway through the sector. Most of the Terran campaign you're hopping from world to world as each gets consumed by the Zerg and then glassed by the Protoss as part of their containment procedure. Any world that gets infested with Zerg is a lost cause, the only option is to evacuate as all hell breaks loose. Then when you reach the Zerg campaign, you see that the Overmind is a terrifying Old One that speaks in biblical, vague phrases which hint at a grand strategy that spans uncountable years. The Zerg are ravenous apex predators under the control of a frightening intelligence. The Overmind has created Infested Kerrigan as a prototype for the total assimilation of the Terran race, and he has plans to assimilate the Protoss as well. But once the Overmind is killed at the end of the Protoss campaign, the Zerg degenerate into wild animals and never truly recover. The Queen of Blades is too petty and human to be a cosmic horror. And in SC2 everybody has gotten pretty good at killing Zerg, and feral hives are treated more like a nuisance than any sort of existential threat.
1:28 Whenever I hear about copyright eating a franchise title or _especially_ source code being lost, I think of one of the most horrible 'anti-piracy' psychopaths I've ever seen. He scoffed at the idea that we should care about preserving digital media from premature destruction because if nobody can profit from it, then surely one of those people should be able to make sure that nobody gets to enjoy it for free. If people like that ever got access to time travel, they'd use it to ensure that the Library of Alexandria was put to the torch because otherwise everything within it might have become public domain.
"Nobody remembers how to make anything anymore, mainly because of DRM and Copyright Laws... I'm not kidding; that's the actual in game reason. We can't reliably make new ships or machinery because all the corporations put copy protection on their design chips." ~SsethTzeentach explaining the setting lore of Starsector.
A lot of oldschool games' modern freeware "remasters" are rewrites because the original source exists today only in the executables. Duke Nukem II is an example.
In their eyes the world only exists for transactions and profit. These people would join the fucking Corpus from Warframe, it's not just a lack of respect for art. It's an obsession with market economics as the whole of society, the kinds of people who unironically think governments should be run as a business because they insanely think they're more "efficient". All relationships, transactional. It's an ignorance of not only how much of the current world of art is based on centuries of history, but also an ignorance of how humans naturally organize and the ways we've built societies throughout the ages. This brief flash of the systems of modern capitalism is all that is. Humanity's tribal nature of labor for mutual work, and preservation of writing and entire languages into stone freaking tablets, shows what we actually want. We will preserve knowledge out of the sheer wrongness we feel at the THOUGHT of it being destroyed. And these morons care more about keeping the money machine running, even though preserving all this would do more good for everyone overall, even financially. They're only helping executives with that garbage.
@@234ne14 Reminds me of a Tom Scott video, where he speculated on if some corp built the first AI as a DRM scheme... and it was smart enough to figure out how to encrypt human memories in its quest to 'protect' copies of copyrighted material. And since it was a corporate project that had gotten loose, it went considerably further than any legal system would countenance. Effectively erased human culture, because the AI was protecting the story of Robin Hood, not _Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,_ and so on.
I think it says so much about the character of the Bentusi that even though they didn't recognize the Beast immediately for what it was, once they realized what it was doing and what would happen once they were assimilated, they blew themselves to hell without hesitation. It sells the 'vast, but not infallible wisdom' of their race so well. They didn't have the knowledge to understand the threat, but they had foresight enough to know a true monster once it's revealed itself, and acted not out of self preservation but of defiance.
The mission where you have to save the civilian transports left me so shaken I had to step away from the game for a few days after beating it. When one gets infected, it doesn't fail the mission. You just have to listen to the screams, and then put down what those innocent people have become. No matter how frantically I played, how I split up my forces, I just could not save them all. Cataclysm is a true horror game that left me trembling after its strongest moments.
That moment when you think you destroyed all the missiles and suddenly see 6 dots approaching the ship you left undefended to destroy the missiles coming from the other way...
Reminds me of the final act of Star Trek Legacy, trying evacuate the Aurelia system while under attack by the Borg. No screaming thankfully, but the invasion was so massive entire worlds could be lost in the course of the mission, not to mention trying to defend the evacuation transports themselves. Truly made me feel powerless before the sheer scale of the borg
Homeworld: Cataclysm is my favorite homeworld. It's such a good story, I can't beleive how well cosmic horror fit into the homeworld setting. Not to mention i love how it expands the lore of the Bentusi. For an outside company to develop this they clearly had allot of passion and respect for the IP. That's why its so dissapointing to me that the guys at blackbird clearly don't like it and have yet to properly recognize it. Hell at this point I half expect them to officially uncannonize it with 3.
Excellent review. It's commonly pointed out that HW: Cataclysm is unique as a horror RTS in space, but watching this made it click just how closely the game follows classic monster movie structure. You've got the working-class protagonists on just another routine job, not terribly respected by peers and even expendable to their superiors. In the first act they make contact, barely survive, and try to make sense of what just happened. The second act is spent trying to warn various people - experts, the authorities, anyone that happens to be wandering by - and of course most don't take them seriously until it's far too late. Measures taken to stop the creature do little more than buy time to escape. Along the way they piece together what this thing is, where it's from, and what can possibly be done about it. Sure enough, other parties do know about the creature, and are either running from it or actively aiding it. An act of desperation bridges the gap between acts two and three, revealing some key weakness or other piece of information that can be used to fight it. And from act three to the finale they connect the remaining dots, rally what's left of their allies and resources, and confront the monster amidst its climactic rampage. The heroes aren't just going to hit the thing harder this time, they've actually grown and learned, tempered by knowledge and the willingness to challenge those previously seen as above them. It's a rock-solid execution of the concept, and that's before the details that elevate it to something special: mission scripting, the writing and acting, integrating the Beast as a unique gameplay threat, and so on. Even the Beast itself is novel. On the one hand it's frighteningly intelligent; possessing starships means it understands what starships even are, and it's both capable of articulating its wants and manipulating its enemies in service to them. And yet what it wants is the most basic of all biological impulses - to consume, and spread. It's a virus that can play chess, and if it wins it will eat the board. It remains one of the most effective horror stories I've seen in a video game, and of all the Homeworld titles it arguably most deserves the remaster treatment. Hopefully one day it'll get just that. In the meantime, thanks for putting a spotlight on this classic!
I love how something as terrifying and unstoppable as the Beast only has it's sights set on "the galaxy". The distance from one galaxy to the next is completely impossible even for eldritch horrors.
Interestingly the beast are from outside the galaxy, either from the space in between or extra-dimensional. The Naggarok accidently picked them up on a test flight of a new galaxy-to-galaxy hyperdrive. Presumably, if they got the Naggarok fully operational again, they could start invading other galaxies with ease.
The really scary thing? It *isn't*. The Naggarock's drive was litterally made for the express purpose of hopping between galaxies. If the Beast organism that it became had thought of things on a bit broader scale instead of just chasing down the first source of food it could find (the Whirlpool galaxy), the Naggarock could have just started hopping from galaxy to galaxy unleashing the Beast like a sci-fi Typhoid Mary and there is absolutely nothing anyone could have done to stop it. The minute its' engines got fixed, the Naggarock genuinely became an existential threat to the *entire universe*. But nah m8, we need to bring Sajuuk to Bear. Bear really needs that over-glorified derelict.
Interesting! I had no idea the game featured intergalactic travel or that it was set in another galaxy. As a side note: While I do think it's highly possible that an alien civilization somewhere will accidentally unleash an unstoppable galaxy devouring bioweapon (or has already done so), I think intergalactic travel will forever be impossible. At least we can rest assured that these horrors will be forever confined to their galaxy of origin.
@@beebomcgroober9316 you see that if you look at the galactic map of Homeworld I. That is not our galaxy. It looks completely different from the Milky Way.
@@iguanamoat This is one of the reasons why the Captain of the Kun-Laan was able to convince the Bentuzi as to how they had to kill the Beast THEN and NOW. It wasn't just gonna stop in that galaxy, it would follow them eventually once it's done devouring anything mechanical and biological.
11:29 "Professionals under stress voice acting" is a fantastic descriptor of the Homeworld universe. From "The subject did not survive interrogation" to the damage reports given in Homeworld 2's final mission as the Planet Killer missiles eradicate Hiigara's population, the nuances of the voice acting always made it stand out to me as some of the best, enriching the experience so much as to make the graphical shortcomings of 90's tech seem to disappear.
It was not mentioned in the video, but the game also had some interesting explanation about why somtaaw capital class ships were immune against infection. They were designed in a specific way, where if ship detected infection then that particular sector of the ship would be purged by plasma or something like that, effectively wiping beast cells and part of the crew. Thats why infection beam was only doing some damage to those ships instead of capturing them.
Not quite. The description of the Deacon-class Destroyer mentions the Naar Directive. Named after Naar-Tel, the senior vessel of a destroyer duo left behind to fend off a Beast Heavy Cruiser and its escorts. The Beast fired its infection beam at the Naar-Tel, but the captain ordered that the affected decks be purged with plasma. He killed many of his crew and destroyed a quarter of the ship, but it remained combat effective long enough to destroy the Beast ships. His desperate decision became the standard protocol for infected capital ships. It even mentions how quick death by plasma is preferable to become a part of the Beast. (It's possible that I got some detail wrong because my Cataclysm manual is written in Portuguese, but I consider it a very good translation)
I am so glad you mentioned the change in designation from mining vessel to warship at the end. That moment has stuck with me over these decades. Such a powerful game. I will always love Kiith Somtaaw and was super sad they barely existed in 2.
DOK seems to at least mention and recognize the Somtaaw as the salvager units and with some additional references in their "virtual manual". Hopefully that shows a bit of a warming from the folks at BBI to cata.
I love how the Captain at first is all meek and "Hey maybe we shouldn't be the ones doing this...," to by the end "We're gonna do this, because no one else can!"
26:13 what great delivery. Literally so angry that he would rather be devoured by a malicious space monster versus a race just as afraid as they are but too horrified to fight.
The best part is if you keep the last few lines in mind he goes, "I'd rather crash my ship into you than let you leave. No, even still I'd rather have the Beast take me because at least _it didn't LIE to me._ "
@@TychoHoward The hilarious thing is that the Beast will not hesitate in lying if it's something that serves it means. The Tiedani Empire was lied on when The Beast offered half the Galaxy for it's cooperation. It also tries to lie later about reconstituting its victims from it's biomass in exchange for being spared.
@@StrikeWarlock think it also attempted to promise the Somtaaw something else they always wanted: a position of importance. And its didn't juwt try to be spared: the Beast tried to turn the somtaaw into allies, like it did with the taiidani. Its the most scary part about the beasy: it may have the simplest goal ever, but it is smart in how its tries to reach that goal.
Homeworld Cataclysm is one of the most interesting games every made to me, as it clearly shows the difference between Being something, and wearing the aesthetics of something. Horror can be about anything, but in games they're often categorized by camera angles, spooky monsters chasing you down dark hallways, hiding in closets, systems and mechanics that don't mean anything on their own but are supposed to matter to be "survival horror" or such. Homeworld:C is a space rts about micromanaging, and captures fear, tensions, limited resources, desperation, hope, and everything that matters for horror with repurposed systems not built for it in any way. It's wildly creative and a good reminder about how good games can be, and the power of using limited tools to create new experiences.
Agreed. One of my favorite horror games is Irisu by wtetsu and its a puzzle game. Like, a Tetris style falling block puzzle game. Super good, if you try it play as far as you absolutely can before looking up anything about it, it's well worth stumbling in the dark.
It's a classic case of cargo cult in design. People see the thing that succeeded without understanding the why of it's success, and just copy as much as they can with only a surface level of understanding. Thats why something that actually understands something will stand out so much stronger vs something that just feels like generic or a bad sequel.
Even filtered through second-hand experience, I'm still feeling all those emotions the game wanted to convey. Fear of The Beast, desperation, pride at seeing the mining rig rise up and finally get respect... I'd argue it's the New Vegas of the franchise - a side game that had main entry soul and magic. Soul and magic that upstages any mainline sequels, and that a remaster might never quite recapture.
>come from Homeworld 3 video >the comments are talking about Cataclysm and how fucking horrifying the comms are >"surely it isn't that bad" >proceed to absolutely shit bricks for the first time in years after 11:45 Holy actual fuck what the shit were these people on when they made this. If the sun hadn't JUST risen I think I might've fucking cried from how actually scary this is. You know I watch horror shit in the middle of the night for fun but that was actually soul-numbingly terrifying. I felt my heart stop from a fucking dialogue line.
Play the game dude. Before I first played it I wasn't sure you could even do horror in an RTS, yet they knocked it out of the park so hard that it's probably one of the scariest bits of media ever made
First Mission: "This is the Kiith Somtaaw Mining Vessel, Kuun-Lan" Final Mission: "This is the Kiith Somtaaw *Warship*, Kuun-Lan" Also, the best line in the game: "You're worse than the beast! Atleast the beast doesn't pretend to be righteous!" Also also, did you know that the beast came from INSIDE hyperspace?
oh man i forgot it came from hyperspace. I thought that the Bentussi meant it came from outside the galaxy but coming from outside our dimension is so much cooler.
Ayup. The Naggarok picked the infection up during an extreme range Hyperspace Jump from a neighboring galaxy as I recall. Not sure if that was from being in H-Space for too long or just one of the horrors of Dark Space or what. It's never fully explained, probably because well, *not* knowing is scarier. Unrelated note. String. When you gonna do some HW inspired stuff now? You know you wanna. Doooooooo Eeeeeeeeeeeeet.
@@McDonaldWilliamT I think supposedly they jumped to deep into hyperspace, like another layer of the hyperspace dimension and that lower dimension is where the beast is from.
The beast was such an incredible villain in so many ways, to this day the only rts villain I have not only, ever been genuinely intimidated by, but put me through honest to God desperation
God, the part where you convince the Bentusi to join you. The "Shaming the Unbound" video I watch a lot cause the voice acting is just...so good. The Flagship's VA killed it, as did Campbell Lane as the Bentusi, may he rest in peace. My favorite of all the Homeworld games, for sure.
7:00 A mining vessel, an ancient alien artifact, a biohazard breach that start to slaughter the crew... Who poured this Dead Space sauce in my space-RTS game?
@@aravindpallippara1577 I'm pretty sure he knows that, it's a reference joke about the theme of both games. A joke that wouldn't work the other way because Dead Space is a pop cultural name known by every horror fan out there while the other is a game barely anyone knows about.
This game actually managed to all but traumatize me as a kid. I never managed to finish it because the Beast was absolutely TERRIFYING to me, and to this day it´s one of the few sci-fi entities I have an instinctual "BURN IT, BURN IT THE FUCK DOWN TO THE GROUND" reaction towards. It terrified me on a deep level. Not because it was a scary beastie that I was afraid would shank me in the dark. But on a deep, conceptual level. It might be what gave me the fear of the loss of self.
Thats the biggest strenght of the Beast IMO, that concept of losing yourself. Thats whats so scary about it and your typical zombie/vampire/werewolf stuff, being infected by something and becoming something else. Its terrifying
@@Ar1AnX1x The funny thing is... I am not scared of cosmic horror. Existential horror does not particularly do anything to me, and never did. I am not afraid of my own, or our own overall insignificance in space and time. The Beast, however... the Beast is fucking terrifying, not because it's an existential threat, but because it's a very, very PERSONAL threat, more personal than any monster from any other setting.
That exchange at 25:29…I think that’s legitimately one of the best, if not the best, voice acting/dialogue I’ve heard. The white hot rage behind “…at least the BEAST DOESNT PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS!!” is something else. Thanks Mandalore for another great review and bringing attention to another great game/story/experience that I likely would have never discovered myself.
My favorite line is the Bentusi "We... are... not... monsters..." They sound so heartbroken. In the lore during the Ancient Higgaran war a single Bentsui ship went to Hiigara to engage in peace talks, the Higgarans in their arrogance attacked the Bentusi ship so the Bentusi fought back and annihilated the entire Hiigaran navy. The Bentsui were fully in the right for fighting back as the Hiigarans were a pompous tyrannical race at the time but the Bentusi still felt such immense guilt that they left the council and demilitarized themselves. Imagine the guilt they must feel for attacking a small desperate group that was just as scared as them and literally BEGGING for help.
I remember being terrified of the Beast the first time hearing all those screams. It made me very attached to my rag tag fleet of "not soldiers" and when you get to the final mission being called a "Somtaaw Warship" I was absolutely giddy because it felt like something I earned and it was time for some payback
Good god, the screams coming from ships being taken then fading is terrifying. Similar to what I said in your review for "No one lives under the lighthouse" I think why horror moments can be that much more intense in games not sold as horror is because horror games tease you with something scary, usually putting the scary thing up for display, you know what you are getting; however what you don't know, or expect is usually much more terrifying, especially when they leave it mostly up to your own imagination to fill in the blanks.
The screams remind me of The Event Horizon movie, where the rescue team finds a security footage of the previous crew with demonic screaming in the background.
and even better is that Cataclysm leaves NO CLUE as to what you will face. You pass the first 3 missions of the game without a hint that the Beast even exists... and then, the SCREAMS. And yes its similar to halo CE's flood in that regard: and enemy that comes without warning and after the game's missions are already well on their way.
@@padmanabhanvaidyanathan7182 Event Horizon is apt a comparison since the Beast is implied to have latched on to the Naggarok on Hyperspace, basically the same as the Event Horizon.
Shaming The Unbound is still one of the greatest bits of video game writing I’ve ever seen. I was probably 9 or ten years old, playing this game right after it released because my father enjoyed the first one. I barely knew what was going on most of the time because I was a dumb child and even then that mission shook me up. It’s so good. The voice acting, the actual dialogue writing, the way you get to see the fleet you’ve spent hours building get wiped out so callously. And then you call the bastards out on their actions.
I'm so happy that guys like Mandalore exist, shining a light onto the mostly forgotten works of teams who put blood, tears and soul into the art they created. Their recognition might come late, but at the very least they now get the recognition they deserved.
I think a nice hidden benefit of your ships looking like everything under the kitchen sink is that you don't get comfortable with what you have and that you want to try anything new to get an advantage. It feels like a nice decision, and it directly leads into you becoming the KUUN-LAN Beast Slayers, the ones who will use any means to become the big guys.
If anything, the Kiith Somtaaw are the perfect foil to the Beast because they both get stronger by evolving, but the Beast does it by forcefully assimilating everything into itself unchanged while the Somtaaw scavenge and salvage and take inspiration from old ideas while putting their own spin on it. Their dreadnoughts, fighters and corvettes are modified designs inspired by pirates, Taiidan and Bentusi, their carriers and ramming frigates are just their old mining equipment remade into combat worthy designs and their strongest weapon is literally just a salvaged siege cannon duct taped to their ship then fixed up by the Bentusi. It's amazing.
Bit of a random thing, but I kinda love how the Kuun Laan is essentially in two pieces. The manual (I think it was in the manual) mentioned how Kith Somtaaw basically had very limited access to the mothership to get a couple ships built, and the modular nature kind of emphasizes "we squeezed everything we could out of that shipyard and actually just finished the ships later. Obviously, though, the more direct narrative use is that by the lower decks effectively being a full ship with propulsion, hangar and resourcing, it allows for the beast mothership to grow from it.
It's canon that they built the Faal-Corum, Kuun-Lan and Clee-San in just 60 days, because they only had a two-month slot to use the Mothership fabricators
I always really liked the more natural tone of the Cataclysm dialoque. Especially during the middle of the game, the captain of the Kuun-Lan sounds so tired and desperate, just as he should be.
Yeah, I've never considered Homeworld's voice acting the high point. It works but the fact that people actually emote in Cataclysm elevates everything. Staggering difference in quality.
Games like these remind me of how amazing games can be when the people working on them actually give a damn. Now more than ever, we need people like you bringing attention to these gems.
I never noticed it before, but seeing multiple Bentusi ships together made me realize how much they look like Trilobites. Perhaps a design inspiration, owing to their ancient status?
I just went and bought emergence because the simple fact this game hits me like a truck on how the plot is this absolutely compelling and how desperately I've wanted my "space is fucking terrifying" vibe for so incredibly long now, and the simple fact it's not on steam is just criminal so first game on GOG I have that going for me. I can't think of the reason why no one wanted to go and make this game more canon compared to Homeworld 2 because yes Homeworld 2 looks pretty as could be but the plot is, meh, and the plot for this hits both like a truck and it's a horror filled organic hell truck that hates all life.
I mean it's about as canon as any of the other titles until BBI/Gearbox says otherwise. the Homeworld Revelations RPG even includes its events according to the summary as well lol
"the plot for this hits both like a truck and it's a horror filled organic hell truck that hates all life." I'm going to remember to use that, because lord above that's accurate.
Cataclysm was the real Homeworld 2. HW2 felt like it was written by a marketing committee and I'm getting that vibe from what I've seen from 3. It's worth noting that the same guy that came up with the lore for the original also wrote for this one. If you are interested in the development process for Cataclysm, a couple of Barking Dog employees did a fantastic interview here: ruclips.net/video/XXmfcXz-dZM/видео.html
@@GepardenK DoK also played very fast and loose with the old lore, the badguys in that were originally a fanatical religious kiith that rejected all technology past the iron age and only showed up to occasionally raid minor outposts so it was a bit of a shock when in DoK they show up with way better tech than you.
Honestly, I'm with you 200% on Cataclysm being the better sequel. I love the arc from Dok, to OG, to Cataclysm. It feels like a virtually unbroken line of continuity. DoK gives the Kushan a reason to leave Kharak. OG has the Kushan about to leave Kharak, only to be forced to do so when the Taiidan set the entire planet to the torch (Kiith Gaalsien did nothing wrong). Cataclysm has the Kushan-turned-Hiigarans fighting off threats from all sides as they try to establish themselves, only to end up fighting something far worse than anything that came before. By comparison, Homeworld 2 has always felt rather disjointed and disconnected from the rest of the series. I still really like it, just nowhere near as much as the three that take place beforehand.
Man, hearing the dying screams of your doomed comrades as you jettison them out into the void of space STILL raises goosebumps up and down my arm. That and, of course, The Beasts first words: "WEEEEEEE. LIIIIIIIIIVE."
This plot screams Babylon 5 to me, so much so. The miner captain sounds like Sheridan when he yells at the Shadows and Vorlons. I LOVE THIS. Also the whole re-using of a protagonist like Homeworld 1, 2 and Deserts of Kharak is emblematic of an issue in fiction that's not unlike sins of the father. Take our favorite heroine, Ellen Ripley. Instead of using a different protagonist to Alien Resurrection, they took her. Instead of having a unique protagonist for Alien Isolation, they took her daughter. And in a non-canon old comic, it's Ellen Ripley's great great great grandfather that battles the Xenos on Earth. It's this issue of that once a character gets caught by destiny, they can never escape it and they have to come back, or their family have to keep fighting it. I do not like this trope very much.
They do attempt to have new leads in the "series" [Prometheus and Covenant are something], but they are weird bootleg Ripleys each time. Not sure if either of them really got a big following or not.
@Code Turtle I disagree. I loved Mandalorian as I am loving Book of Boba Fett, The Bad Batch, SW Rebels and Clone Wars. But I thoroughly agree on the Terminator part, though it's not the same as I mentioned here since it's always the same protagonist in that case. But in general, the whole, it has to be a predecessor or a descendant of the main character all the time time, that trope is vexing.
The strength of the original Homeworld wasn't just the space combat but the story and atmosphere they managed to weave through the missions. Amazed I never heard of this 'sequel' until now, the story is awesome and the voice acting superb. Just like Starcraft, Homeworld creates a universe, ambience and characters which make you want to play and see what happens. I really hope they learn from this one with Homeworld 3.
When I joined Barking Dog I was a programmer on their next thing but it was all hands on deck as Cataclysm was wrapping up so I wound up doing quite a bit of playtesting on Cataclysm. I kinda wish I had slipped a CDROM of the source into a back pocket so I could now secretly mail it to Gearbox and they could make a proper remaster. I haven't actually played through the campaign - typically it was playing mass multiplayer looking for crashes and sync errors. I def will now after watching your vid tho. I still can't quite understand how the source was lost. It's not like they went bankrupt - they were absorbed into Rockstar. I don't know if it got lost when the Vancouver office was closed or what but someone dropped the ball there. One small point - you said we developed Bully before being absorbed into Rockstar/Take Two - but I seem to remember us working on it in the Rockstar days, not before (tho it's possible we started it under contract to Take Two before the acquisition? - it's bit hazy now and I was on Global Operations and the follow-up not Bully).
You should post a story of that dev testing cycle. HW:C multiplayer was some of the best multiplayer RTS of the era, and most of what got seared into my brain about that era of gaming for me.
Slamming Sbarro as either cancer itself or as aligning with a sentient cancer (and perhaps by inference slamming all mall foodcourt fast-food chains), without missing a beat, using only a second-long image was priceless.
The way the new writers decided to focus Homeworld 2 (and seemingly 3) around one single character is just the perfect example of bad writing that is killing a LOT of franchise, from starwars to world of warcraft. It just reduce to world to a backdrop for a small set of protagonist rather than an actual vast and living place, where each story is just a spark, a brief moment in the vast universe. A shame really, I wish more IP were under the direction of actual creative people and not talent-less hacks trying to reproduce again and again what the creative people that started everything did.
'hero games' are not all-applicable, but companies act like they are. can we not rely on ourselves? must we always put our faith in some unapproachable hero?
Yeah WoW is one of the worst cases of that Used to have genuinely excellent and compelling world building until the writers decided to turn it into a bargain bin superhero story. I've seen franchises get their lore and storytelling destroyed before, but WoW's case is the most thorough annihilation of any trace of quality in storytelling I've seen so far
FEAR as well. The criticisms and lamentations Mandy has for Cataclysm is 1:1 he had for what happened to the FEAR franchise. Each game could've been a brand new threat since FEAR was supposed to be a tactical response team against the supernatural and the paranormal but noo, we just doing Alma for 4 straight games.
The venom in that one line. "At least thr Beast doesn't pretend to be righteous!" That guy had better have been paid for that because he cooked a whole meal.
Never played these games before but hearing the change in the mission intros go from Mining Vessel to Warship is one of those emotional Hell Yeah moments. To hear what they've been through they definitely deserved it :)
In regards to the weird timeline of the games. One way to look at it is through the lense of Ibn Khaldun’s sociological interpretation of middle eastern progression known as Asabiyyah. Which is the concept of group unity and , key for homeworld,group consciousness. The concept basically is that the more United a group is the stronger they are. They are strongest at the start of a civilization when everyone is still united , declines as the civilization becomes more concerned with maintaining their new power and lifestyle. Which dissolves the once unified group into factionalism and individualism, and then gets replaced by the conditions the ruling group themselves created where a new power can emerge at the periphery of their control, grow strong, and effect a change in leadership. With the mothership being the literal and metaphorical consciousness of the Kushan it being put off to the side as the clans bicker is a great lead into them being defeated in 2, and then the Kushans valiant return after being unified and guided by said group consciousness once more. Just a fun way to view it
@@RabbiHerschel Ibn actually discusses how diversity and accepting and incorporating of other beliefs helps stop stagnation. “Blindly following ancient customs and traditions doesn’t mean that the dead are alive, but that the living are dead.”
I’ve never played these games and yet every time I watch this video “AT LEAST THE BEAST DOESNT PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS” gets me pumped, it’s such a powerful moment.
I remember Homeworld: Cataclysm coming out and seeing it in the shop. As a fan of the original Homeworld I bought it immediately, went straight home and played it through in a couple of days. I was not disappointed at all and loved every minute of it. When you announce your arrival as "The Warship Kuun-Laan" in the final mission it felt great. You're right. You have fucking earned that title by the end. I also loved firing the big cannon and hearing the captain say things like "BURN!" as the shot was fired. He fucking meant it. Amazing game and I was shocked and couldn't understand why it wasn't truly considered part of the story. Great review. You nailed it.
To be honest, this is what I'd imagine coming across the prethoryn scourge in Stellaris in the initial encounters is like: unknown contacts, biologically hazardous and consuming all form of bio material, unwilling or incapable to communicate, merely just something that feasts and feasts, taking the ships you send against it, destroying them, consuming them and making their own bastardized version of them to send against you. In the RTS style of stellaris it isn't as terrifying bar the fact of frustrating to how strong the scourge can get, but if it had aspects like this? Hell I'd be fuckin terrified as hell of the scourge.
@@RabbiHerschel Aye true, though it doesn't put too much into perspective considering we never really encounter these enemies their running from, I mean, sure it's a pretty scary thought to consider that something as odd, disastrous and biologically terrifying as the Scourge is could be scared of something, so much so that they become ever running nomads who only destroy to feed and move on. I would like some more information on the hunters, maybe even a degree of an event or maybe some technology during the crisis as a means to counter the scourge, I don't know exactly, but I'd like to see some proof of the thing the scourge fears so much. As for the psionic empires its kinda something I'm unsure I like? I imagine it in two ways really for psionics, one in the sense they communicate with the singular hivemind, one voice, very powerful and very ancient, or they listen and communicate to the hive as a whole, i.e millions of voices as one, some old, some new, but all with the same thoughts. But in my eyes, I see it similar to the tyranids in the sense that the sheer scale, size and amount of voices and the power behind them would either be incomprehensible to the psionics, or would just be too damn loud for them to even get a grasp at, or in a worse case, so eldritch that it backfires and hurts the psionic. Can't say which I prefer but those are my ideas at least.
And The Beast is outright worse than the Prethoryn Scourge. It consumes all the tech and memories while directly converting biology into tools. There is intelligence there, and it is _not_ scared, it's smugly assured of it's right to do that to you.
@@xonxt7479 Shit that's something both I want and bare not thinking about at the same time cause of how traumatising that shit would be. Fleets of several hundreds of ship, presumably thousands if not millions of crew members. Gives me shudders just imagining it.
The developer of this, Barking Dog Studios, was also behind Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon. Which is another somewhat obscure game that Mandalore might find interesting video material.
The fact that so many people are going to play this game thanks to you make me smile. homeworld is hands down my favorite all time game, mainly because i was pretty deep in the modding and multiplayer community. cataclysm is an absolute gem its weird buts its beautiful.
2:10 hearing the voice of late Campbell Lane once again, gives me goosebumps. That man was always the perfect narrator and to think he was even in Battlestar Galactica: Razor movie, makes this narration even sweeter. Of course, he also did great work at Gundam Wing as well. Rest in Peace Mr. Campbell Lane, you'll be missed. EDIT: 4:13 If you remember after the end of the first combat mission in Homeworld: Cataclysm, the aftermath of the battle, where Kiith Somtaaw Workers/Miners, are buzzing about, saving stragglers... Command bridge commends the crew about Kaalel frigate saying: "I'm sure they'll forget to thank us later". At the time it was hilarious to me two decades ago, but after finishing the game I realized how far Kiith Somtaaw got, from being an insignificant (As Kiith Naabal carrier in the next mission said: "Even a mining Kiith should be able to handle a few pirates"), to fully fledged-battle hardened warship and warrior clan.
Dead Space, Halo, Space Pirates and Zombies are just a few that quickly came to my mind. When I think about it, it's pretty cliche by now. Does your story need a nigh unstoppable threat that can possibly destroy universe? Just add some amorphous flesh! Too bad that many authors overdo it and include "regenerates from a single cell"/"one cell can infect you"-type bullshit (I'm looking at you, Flood spores).
@@Ikar660 I mean an amorphous sentient mass is one of the only few things that can threaten a futuristic space era galaxy after all space era tech (even the scientifically possible) is extremely overpowered just look at a.i. even non-sapient a.i. can klll millions and allow us to do many things we could only dream of in the past, I don't disagree that it is very cliche but it's cliche for a reason /: (this isn't trying to be agressive0
@@Ikar660 The Flood's 'evolution' over the course of that series is a perfect cautionary tale of why you need to resist the urge to 'one up' the threat of something every time. The originally presented threat of The Flood was more than enough. Everything beyond that just got more and more apathy inducingly stupid.
Speaking of 40K the studio that made Homeworld also made Dawn of War so insert Fan theory that the Galaxy of Homeworld is where remnants of the Humans in the Dark age of Mankind in 40k escaped to. (making Homeworld 40k's "lighter" brother.) Atmospheric destruction is even a method of Exterminatus in 40K.
"They're an ancient bio-technological plague that merges organic material with inorganic technology to fuse into some wretched abomination of a Hive mind." So basically the Infested from Warframe if they were actually done by talented writers.
I think my favorite thing about these voicelines is the audio compression. If this game were ever remastered, I feel like it would be a must-have. It really contributes to the horror elements of the game.
The research team getting massacred scared me to death back when I first played Cataclysm - and the refugees mission... Yeegh. They really got the atmosphere perfect.
Even the general overview of the story makes me feel hyped. It seems like a golden standard of how to portray an overwhelming force that the most helpless push through the best they can despite the lack of hope. Feels miles more impactful than any hollywood film that has tried the same theme.
On the topic of final mission speeches, I just realized: You did not say what happens at the beginning of the last mission of the original Homeworld. Yes, the burning of Kharak is heartbreaking, one of the greatest emotional moments in gaming, but realizing at the beginning of the finale that Mothership is silent, that the voice you had been hearing for the entire game, that helped you through the dark and uncertain times is gone, maybe even forever, is also, if not more, gut-wrenching.
Ahahah Awesome! I was an intern at Barking Dog when they were developing Bully and they had all those Cataclysm Posters Everywhere. Mostly in the bathroom though so it was not a good memory for them.
For some people, bathrooms are solace of refuge and safety. A place to relieve yourself of your wastes but also a place you can escape from social situations. Maybe that's the case here? Then again, I see bathrooms as a battlefield and exorcism chambers rather than sanctuary
I still recall the shudder I felt when you heard, spoiler prevention: X X X X The Nagorath actually speak. In proper syntax, and everything. It even freakin' sounds SMUG. Like, holy shit. That thing that ate half your ship, and you've floundered against? It doesn't sound like that because it's some alien goo. It sounds like that because it's an alien goo INFANT. And now fools are about to unleash a fully mature specimen with an age measured in millions of years old. When the freakin' barely crawling around infant version is a genuine threat to the galaxy. Like, WOW. There's multi million sci-fi movies out there that has failed spectacularly at raising the stakes half as well as that.
You know, I actually love the sound compression in both the voices and music. It gives a really great vibe. When I played the Remasters, albeit that they're great, it felt so jarring, being used to hearing everything with compression. My mind filled in the gaps as the compression being just an "effect" instead of "lack of details".
I have heard something similar about the Halo 3 and Reach Xbox 360 versions vs the Halo MCC versions on the PC. I'm surprised that we're steadily getting nostalgia for 2000s era sound tech, I didn't expect that at all.
It really fits in with the whole "lowly miners" theme with borrowed tech and jury rigged designs where everything gotta be lower quality stuff that is easy to maintain and repair.
Homeworld Cataclsym/Emergence on GOG - gog.la/SPACETERROR
Won't be able to cover Deserts of Kharak directly next like I hoped for but it'll come in time.
Thanks for all the discounts!
Also, STILL WAITING FOR THAT GOTHIC 2 VIDEO, MASTER!
3 games €2, seems about right
Thanks very much for the sale !
Nothing like a new video to begin my work week. Thank you sir
Literally paid R$1,09 for Homeworld Emergence. Thank you so much for this coupon Mandalore!
The fact that the galaxy was saved because scrappy bottom-barrel miners looked up at the most powerful faction in the galaxy and said "Get the fuck back here and help, you cowards." Is incredible. I love it.
Not to mention fighting like cats in a corner up to that point with everything tiny little thing they had because no one else was.
Support your local union.
Kuun-Lan's captain called the Bentusi and he was like "Vada a bordo, cazzo!"
@@timcronic2341 The only thing that can defeat the Beast: organized labor
"Together we will kill the Beast!"
"Nah we gonna dip."
"I wasn't asking." [blows up slipgate]
The scientist from 6:32 was absolutely based. His lab went from “#10 Safest Workplace in The Kith” to the set of The Thing in less than ten seconds. His response: We’re fucked, boss. Save the rest.
IKR?
legends never die
"CUT US LOOSE!!!"
I love that the conversation is like, "Um are you guys doing something?"
"...no?"
"Something's wrong what are you doing?!"
"Absolutely nothing! Oh no... We're boned!"
Dude I was thinking the exact same thing when I listened to that, like I was asking myself if I thought I could do the mental calculus that fast to know that I was going to die in the next few seconds and they needed to blow up our whole section of the ship immediately if there was going to be ANYbody left alive in 5 minutes. Primo VA and writing
After the tragedy that is Homeworld 3. This truly is the best sequel.
Didn't have any major Retcons, didn't make anyone look Human, didn't add 3 magic hyperspace cores, and had THE BEST voice acting of the ENTIRE series, and some the best in video gaming Period.
Imagine the universe where we got a remaster of this instead of homeworld 3……. I'd rather live there
@@Revan41411
For all of the money they spent on that crap pile that is HW3, they could of easily rebuilt Cataclysm/Emergence.
Moreover the loss of the source code should be inconsequential to a Remaster like this, since they'd be using HW2s engine with HW2 logic system anyway, and Cataclysms assets can be easily unpacked.
Only the games logic code is compiled into machine language.
They had to rewrite HW1... same shtick.🤷♂
Homeworld 2 is a good game. Not quite on the level of 1, nor cataclysm campaign wise, but good non the less. 3 is a travesty.
@@morbihan9857 Yeah, it wasn't bad, it made me cringe a little... but HW3 is just a whole a new level of cringe.
It makes me want to go back to HW2, in the same way that Star Trek Discovery makes me realize Star Trek Enterprise wasn't that bad after all...
I'm glad to have Faith of the Heart.
@@partmemjustin Ironically, I actually like (most of) star trek enterprise
The journey to becoming Beast Slayers is probably hands down my favorite videogame story, not just RTS.
Fun fact: Cataclysm was actually also setting up in a subtle way for the Kushan, the protagonists of the original Homeworld, to be the antagonists of Homeworld 2, as it would show how they have once again started acting kinda like how they did when they got exiled to the edge of known space. Such a shame it was not to be.
It's possible Homeworld 3 might go this direction. That could rule.
All of this has happened before.
And it will happen again.
@@MandaloreGaming *yes!*
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes" - Mark Twain
That would be so sweet, a perfect setup.
Chances for Homeworld 3 be anything else than a soft-reboot and a "new entry point", after 2 decades since 1, are rather slim.
I suspect there will not even be Higarians there, just "S'Jets" ruled by Lord Karen.
25:25 Some context on that scene. It is more insane than what Mandalore shows it as. The fleet commander spends the entire campaign trying to be voice of reason in a horror story and either nobody listens to him or betrays him. He initially tries to be a voice of reason when approaching the fleeing bentusi and it again doesn't work. It's hinted that the commander had finally snapped from all the stress and guilt, and was just looking to die from something other than the beast. As shown by the quote a few moments before on why he refuses to retreat "better to be blown to atoms now than wait for the beast to hunt us down". The entire speech to bentusi was just a him venting all his frustrations built up to that point. Somehow after all attempts at diplomacy failed an emotional rant manages to guilt trip the Bentusi into joining the fight. Even the Bentusi hint at the insanity of it all by their quote "we see our own madness reflected in yours."
Yeah. Our good commander is the one sane person in the entire story. Doing the right thing, the reasonable thing, every time. Him finally getting fed up with the insanity around him and just venting for effect like that is cathartic for us the player, who's been there with him and struggling to deal with it all alongside him.
Especially after the commander says: "Now are you going to help us? Or am I going to have to ram this ship into you?"
@@CompletelyNewguy he was fed up to the point that the Bentusi pretty much saw he wasn't kidding.
They either relent and come to their senses or two factions were going to end up eradicating themselves in that situation.
@@StrikeWarlock the bentusi wouldn't be eradicated considering they wiped the floor with them moments prior
@@olegoleg258 I mean arguably the Somtaaw had already eradicated the Bentusi if they refused to help them. Besides the few ships that escape before the gate is closed, it's implied that if the beast is not taken care of, the Bentusi are doomed. Thus if the Bentusi eradicate the Somtaaw, they're essentially dooming themselves
6:35 credit to the radio responder. he went from "dafuq is going on?" to "I am in danger" to "i am fucked" in literal seconds, and his first response wasn't self preservation, but to save the ship
o7 godspeed to the guy.
That's a running thing in the game. A Taidani Republic Capital ship also does the same thing in the final mission.
What makes it even better is how when he says "You gotta jettison the lower decks." You can hear him tearing up.
At first he sounds like he's in the middle of his lunch break and just happened to be the first guy who picked up the phone. Like, he's in the middle of trying to heat up his dinner and he's like "what's going on? i have no idea, I was just putting my food in the microwave, bill just took over for the first tests on the thing we picked up...,HOLY STARS WAR, SPACE OUR ENTIRE SECTION, SAVE YOUR SELF"
"Then Blizzard higher ups did what they do best - putting their hands where they shouldn't"
Flawless victory right here.
oh fuck i only just caught that after reading this LMFAO
The shade covered all of the Sahara.
I am sorry what? How did he Blizzard's trademarking of "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" in 2010 had any effect on the name of the "Homeworld Cataclysm" that came out in 2000? Cataclysm is a common noun, you shouldn't be able to trademark it to the extent that it cannot be used in other titles. And they even weren't first! If anything, it is Blizzard that should have changed the name of their expansion pack.
@@Holtijaar i mean.. Sky TV quite literally owns the word "Sky", and forced Microsoft to change SkyDrive to OneDrive lmao
copyrights is a weird and wonky thing, it's possible they never thought anybody would go that far cus who the fuck would ever trademark a word, since many games share a word or two in their titles
also this is a rerelease, so the original release date doesn't really matter, which i know is quite strange if you really think about it
@@Holtijaar much the same how candy crush saga sent the developers of banner saga into panic
“You thought you were getting thanked. You’re a dirty miner, fuck you.” This was my favorite part of this game. You were on the edge of society and interacted with other more powerful factions who consistently looked down on you.
And now you gotta figure out how to turn your dinky mining vessel into a proper flagship and combat ship factory all while punching far above your weight with clever, unorthodox tactics. (Leeches, sentinels, mimics)
"I'm sure they'll forget to thank us later."
Ironically the Taiidan republic have more respect for you than your own people because the caste system is nothing to them.
That sounds like "Gothic: The sci-fi RTS edition"
@@LeonserGT
One reviewer compared it to Dead Space.
Limited Resources (Especially on harder difficulties) you have to use in order to survive? Check.
Horror that kills and/or infests people to spread itself? Check.
Improvised weapons consisting of engineering and mining equipment? Check.
Isolation, with the only thing standing between you and the horrors, as well as any people you're protecting, being your sorry little ass? Check.
Ascending from underdogs out of their depths to warriors who are the only hopes of saving the universe? Check.
Cataclysm is a survival horror RTS.
I remember, back in the day, people trying to headcanon Kiith Somtaaw into Homeworld 2. One post stuck with me after all these years, it went something like:
"Guys. Somtaaw can't be in Homeworld 2: these guys took a bunch of space trucks and retrofitted them so they could fight off the worst threat the galaxy had ever faced. They are absent from Homeworld 2 beacause they had already blown to bits their part of the Vaygr fleet and gone back to punch rocks by lunchtime."
no they are provably eithers punching rocks or killing some antient threat
@@spacecorpse3212 cuts to them ripping apart some space demon warship.
Oh god I love the idea that they are the doom slayer of homeworld. "The Vagyr? Pfff, wake me up when there is an actual threat going on. If its not some eldritch abomination, then its too easy"
I believe it's said somewhere Somtaaw in the Diamid didn't want Karan monkeying with old relics (speaking from experience) and they were promptly ignored. So yeah they probably fucked off back to smashing rocks for the Frontline.
Remider:
it is canon that for most of HW2 you are not facing the full or dedicated might of the Vaygr, in fact you are explicitly told that (until the last mission) your facing garrison forces and what the Vaygr can spare while every other Kith fleet keeps the Vaygr tied down so the mothership can complete her mission.
so that head canon is very much real canon due to this fact.
Kiith Somtaaw were likely competing with Kiith Soban for fleet kills, Elite irregulars Elite regulars style.
The evolution from mining vessel to a legitimate warship is such a great arc
I'd call it an ascension, mainly because they could've ran away from it, being a low tier clan but no, they rose to the occasion despite the horrors they saw.
I would've done the same thing as the Bentuzi considering how anything biological or mechanical was not safe from this thing.
I played this way back when it was Homeworld: Cataclysm (Blizzard's legal shenanigans be damned!) and it was truly gratifying to see Somtaaw get the respect I felt they were well and truly due. End cinematic was fun.
I do remember from the old HW classic manual that Somtaaw were mentioned more than Mandalore here says. There was a section devoted to the Kiith leader being lead by some vision to the richest iron ore deposit on Kharak, and securing the services of Kiith Soban to guard one of their border passes for an entire century. Somtaaw came to great acclaim as creators of quality weapons, and had a decent amount of respect back on Kharak.
Of course, that all went out the window when the tiny remnant of Somtaaw returned to Hiigara, but that's where this game comes in. This game being Cataclysm. Bloody Blizzard.
@@danielharvison7510 It's somewhere in the manual as well, the Kuun-Lan was the second ship they built when they had (very) limited time to the fabrication yard. The first ship was built fast, the second ship was vastly improved and built so fast they had time to spend on the Clee-San as a research vessel.
So they are fast, improve and are willing to invest in scientific research.
And then the guys with a shovel and a set of binoculars have to fight in a win or die type of war.
When it comes to that, the motorized banana (ramming fregat) is the small version of this, originally they had to dock with the main ship during battle, but the crew said "screw that" and went off to push the enemy into a bunch of fast moving meteors.
Medals are decals applied to their crash helmets.
@@dikkie1000 That actually does sound pretty fun. Especially if they have something to ram the enemy into, which space is sadly lacking in.
Fun fact turing civilian Vessels to make shift warships aren't that fictional, during the Golden Age of Piracy and as recently as WW2, Raiders often convert Cargo ships to "Warships" and funnily enough some Warships pretend to be Civilian vessels.
"Despite being a viral organism, the Beast had a very high level command of Galactic Common - an in-universe trade language used by all races - and was fully capable of stating its thoughts. However, its ability to talk to others was compounded by the disjointed nature of its vocals. The disjointed nature meant it was unable to maintain a single voice at any time, alternating between a deep masculine voice and a raspy female voice throughout many of its conversations. This suggests that its communications were pieced together from log recordings and possibly victim memories." FUCK THAT SHIT!
That is genuinely creepy
Where's this quote from?
@@ES21007 I'd imagine the manual
shit that literallya scp concept, they should have expanded more of cataclysm...
I always imagined the infected crew's vocal cords were still being puppeted by the Beast, the victims still half alive but no longer in control...
Fun fact about the Kuun-Lan type mining vessels: They were designed in less than 2 days after Somtaaw pleaded with the Council and were granted 45 days access to the Mothership's manufacturing facilities. Given this limited time and the fact that they were more than likely not going to be granted access again in the near future, they had to design a vessel that was close in function to the Mothership itself (meaning as self sufficient as possible when it came to producing additional vessels), thus the Somtaaw mining mothership was born.
Edit: They're officially called the Explorer-class mining mothership.
"It's my turn to use mom"
-"Alright, but you only get 45 days"
"Fine, I will just make a new mom from mom"
The game manual calls it an "Explorer" class Deep Space Mining Vessel. In-game it's only ever referred to as the Command Ship, and Encyclopedia Hiigara classifies it as a Flagship (which includes mothership-type vessels), and its purpose as a Command Ship. Googling "explorer-class mining mothership" doesn't show anything with that designation.
@@GogOnMagog I might've misread the wiki then.
There's also a discrepancy in the game's manual over the "45 days" Somtaaw had. Did they have 6 months or 45 days?
Quoting from "Kiith History: Somtaaw" (page 12)
"While many of the established Kiith accused Somtaaw of further undermining the ancient social systems for their own benifit, the result was Somtaaw was granted access to the Mothership Station for a period of six months. Mothership access for other lesser Kiith soon followed. In their time, the Somtaaw built two enormous mining ships, the Kuun-Lan and the Fal-Corum, which were both launched, fully manned, within 45 days. In the final days of their control over the Mothership’s PDA, Kiith Somtaaw triumphantly built one final ship, the Clee San, a top-of-the-line deep space research frigate."
and quoting from ""Explorer" Class Deep Space Mining Vessel" (page 95)
"Through many political trials, (see History of Kiith Somtaaw) the New Daiamiid finally granted Somtaaw access to the Mothership for a mere 45 days. The Explorer Class design was finished within days when Somtaaw Engineers gained control of the Mothership’s PDA, and construction began immediately; all parties involved knew full well that this was probably the only time Somtaaw would have access to the massive construction facility. Accordingly, no expense was spared! The first Explorer was dubbed the Faal-Corum and launched on day 20, to the rousing cheers of thousands of Somtaaw watching from monitors planetside. Even before the Faal-Corum cleared the docks, engineers were modifying the design of the second Mining ship to incorporate the lessons learned in constructing the first. The Kuun-Lan launched on day 35 with more powerful engines, an extra layer of armor, and a 30% greater module capacity."
@@GogOnMagog Homeworld's manuals are well known for having contradictions for details, the most notorious being the size of the Kushan Mothership.
I love that at 24:10 as the Taidani commander is giving his speech about how the downfall of the galaxy is the fault of the Hiigarans they just cut off the transmission.
“We heard this story before” *click*
How to sum it up.
The Kuun-Lan's tactical controller (who Mandalore didn't have any clips of) outright says, "Sorry, command. They're just trying to distract us from this. Picking up multiple hyperspace signatures [nearby]."
@@RustyDroid Mandalore talks off thr Captains arc, but the Tactical Officer also gets a bit of that in the background.
The Taidani seething and coping about the once great Higaran Imperium.
@@RustyDroid It leads me to believe the Tactical officer might be from Kith Soban.
Kiith Tambuur. They're mentioned in the Cataclysm / Emergence manual as being a Kiith literally made of ONE ANGRY DUDE that started off commanding a single, "I argued so well I got it for free" Frigate from the Kiith clans, filled it full of other disposessed from Kharak, and by the start of Catalysm was a renowned mercenary with an entire fleet of scrapyard nabbed ships. That's what I want.
Fuck I love Cataclysm / Emergence. The story is so TIGHT, so well done, it's amazing.
That sounds like an ideal RTS/RPG hybrid plot line for the setting.
Dude went around hunting any Taiidani war criminals or those involved in Kharak's destruction. You could easily see his own spinoff game. Lots of stories like that in there.
Kiith Tambuur mirrors Kiith Soban's origin. One angry dude pissed off that their kiith will not let them avenge the death of their family due to a rival Kiith, he just goes: Fuck it! If your rules will not let me do it. I will make a Kiith of my own, finds like minded followers and hunts down the rival Kiith themselves.
@@MandaloreGaming Odd question Mandalore, but if I thought to begin making a mod on that idea, would I be able to contact you on it for opinions? And if yes, how would I?
@@Quadrolithium That reminds me of that scene from Futurama with Bender. "I'm gonna go build my own theme park!"
Something I just now noticed is that when the Bentusi are completely frightened out of their minds and running they outright refer to your existance as the Beast does: "flickerlives". Honestly that just adds so much more to the Kuun-Lan Captain calling them monsters.
Like the rich man fleeing the zombies with the poor people, and then dropping the N-bomb as the zombies pour through the stairwell.
Well, it's about the only thing the Bentusi and the Beast have in common other than being ancient: They're de-facto immortal.
The line where the captain dubs the ship a warship instead of a mining vessel is such a small seemingly insignificant line. But after playing the whole game and seeing what the crew had to go through it comes off as such a massive FUCK YEAH! moment.
Like you fucking bet we're a goddamn warship,
saving the galaxy with retrofitted mining vessels and dollar store warships is such a massive flex.
And seeing this clan go from below the bottom of the barrel mining Kiith to venerated and respected "beast hunters" is a 10/10 story arc.
Sorry if this comment is too long I just think this game is fucking awesome.
No, it was an excellent journey, with the fleet having a whole character arc on the way. I remember feeling immensely proud when we returned in triumph from the final battle and they made sure the player would feel that way.
they took everyones shit treated like less then 0 besides a material to be used and still were the ones that said fuck this and rose up to save everyone even taking on the bentusi cause they were the only one with a pair even while scared and the weakest clan they had heart so seeing them respected i was like fuck ya you god damn earned it
It's subtle out of context but even the Beast praises them on it.
@@StrikeWarlock I wouldn’t say praise but it definitely taunts them which makes you even more wanna prove the beast how far you’ve come
Beast "We will never be contained again."
Kuun-Laan "Containment is not our plan Monster! Prepare yourself! Kiith Somtaww is coming... for you!"
The fun part of Cataclysm is the one engineer left who gets to somehow be chief scientist after the others get eaten with what you can only assume is the only microscope left on the Kuun-Lan
Command: Do you understand what it is?
Engineer: Kinda.
Command: That is a hell of a lot better than anyone else around here. You are now our chief scientist.
Chief Scientist: But sir, it scares me.
Command: It scares us all, son. It scares us all.
Reminds me of the grim wartime jokes, where it's about being promoted only because the ranks above got killed in action.
Now all I can think is he went to take a piss only to find out he now the chief scientist and engineer
@@gmradio2436 I heard this in their coices.
@@WingMaster562 Or that old Royal Navy toast: “To a bloody war or a sick season.” Basically toasting to superior officers getting killed in war or getting sick and dying, freeing up room for promotions
BTW in case mandalore didn't spell it out, when the Beast cells makes physical contact with organic matter, it mutates and stretches that matter into organic wiring to help make the ship work better.
Basically the Meat Moss from dead space except the meat moss is still alive and screaming all the time as the beast uses it to transmit targeting data.
Even worse, not onle do you get turned into organic wiring, the beast also steals all your memories and thoughts and uses them for its own gains. Which means not only do you have to live as organic wiring, you have to do it while always watching a clump of infection pretend to be you for as long as the ship still lives.
I wonder if the advance flood stages were inspired by the concept of the beast, i mean some of the colors of the flood look like the infeccious matter that grows in the ships plagued with the beast
@@martinnavarrete5279 It is possible. The release date of Cataclysm lines up with combat evolved. But I mean Cataclysm didn't exactly come up wit the concept of alien infection taking over organic and inorganic matter.
that's even worse than what i thought it did and what i thought it did was bad
Yeah the writers did a great job, its no boring old zombie virus, its remorseless nanites that twist your body beyond your still-living minds ability to comprehend, for the cold purpose of efficiency.@@spacecorpse3212
That moment when the lower decks are jettisoned and the panicked cries turn into screaming then silence has been seared into my mind for decades. One of the best moments of sci-fi horror out there.
Kinda reminds me of the opening sequence to Xenogears: ruclips.net/video/8RLf0O8eofU/видео.html&ab_channel=JRPGopenings
WEEEEEE LIIIIIIIIVVVVVEEE!
That was legit story-telling considering the graphical resources and technical specs they had to work with.
To this day, the cries of "CUT US LOOOSE" amidst the panicked and pained screams of god knows how many crew, echoing out into the abyss has stayed with me since my one and only playthrough 22 years ago.
Same
Yeah, that scene, and then later on when the Caal-Shto reappears as "reinforcements"; my child self didn't realize it was infected and when I moved my *entire fleet* over there and found only terror, it was a moment I will never forget in the same way, as nearly everything I had began to slowly either fall or become infected.
Damn. Reading the comments through the intro and then reading this, I instantly heard it. That scene really sticks.
I did replay it a few times since back in the day, but it always takes some considerable self motivation to get my ass back into it!
@@ArnieMcStrangleholdlol on my first playthrough when it was like “Assign at least 12 acolytes to protect the Clee San” I was like “Oh sure, just TWELVE? Yeah, I’m not stupid”, spent a ton of resources building up to around 30 acolytes and a couple frigates and sent them all only for the whole lot to get subverted and come back for me. 😂
17:31 The thing I love about this is that the Bentusi didn't suffer from the ancient Hiigarans. At this time the Bentusi were pretty much the most powerful race in the galaxy with sage wisdom and enigmatic technology. During the ancient war, the Bentusi who at this time was part of that super space council sent a single ship to Hiigara to make peace talks with them as the whole galaxy was kind of sick of the war at this point. The Hiigarans when they discovered the second warp core basically gained the OP jump drive technology that allowed them to jump ridiculous distances like the Bentusi could, using this they ran circles around the Ancient Taiiden who couldn't respond quick enough. The Hiigarans thought they were invincible so in their arrogance, they attacked the Bentsui, this resulted in that one Bentusi ship literally wiping out the entire Hiigaran navy. They basically crippled the Hiigaran empire and that's what allowed the Taiidan and other discontent races to commit revenge atrocities on the Hiigarans. The Bentusi felt so guilty and appalled by their own actions and fighting back that they abdicated their place on the council and underwent massive demilitarization and were the leading voice and calling for mercy for the Hiigarans and having them exiled instead. I suppose that's why they were so willing to help the Kushan in their journey home, they knew the Kushan were not the ancient Hiigarans and didn't deserve their surrogate homeworld getting destroyed and genocided again. The Bentsui dunking on the somtaaw with just their drone craft was them in their weakened state, that's how the Taiidan were able to almost kill one ship as well. The Bentusi at their full power were scary, they would probably be more willing to fight if they still had that power. Such an ancient and powerful race running in fear is definitely an extremely powerful moment.
TLDR: The Bentsusi are so OP that they basically were the direct cause for the Ancient Hiigarans downfall and their ability to dunk on the player is just a bare hint of their full former power.
how terrifying the audio in this game
When the civilian transport ship screamed "HELP US!" i really felt that.
Terrifying indeed 🙀😯🙀🙀😯
cool
@@DarkOmegaMK2 yeah, it definitely was.
*degrading* to hear and watch happen. It was a true nightmare, especially scary considering the most intelligent faction we see losing their shit and went Alah on them, detonating their ship.
@@DarkOmegaMK2
I think one particular line gets to me... during those screams one thing I hear is "All sides" but I like to hear it as "Blue skies"
That sounds way more scarier to me because The Beast is assimilating them into the ship, dragging up their memories. The memory of the blue skies of their home world could be one such thing they're desperately trying to cling on to...
“It doesn’t matter how we die. One ancient monster is as good as another.” Holy shit that line slapped so hard this game just committed domestic battery
The following line "ATLEAST THE BEAST DOESNT PRETEND TO BE RIGHTIOUS!" is fukken NUCLEAR
The dialogue and the voicework are amazing!
@@DrWhite And lo, an entire of ancients looked at their own feet in shame, all at once.
@@DrWhite as a fellow 40k fan: the univers as a lot of badass quotes, but I think Homeworld outshines them on this one
The little pause before the Bentusi responds sells it so hard.
The voice acting in this was even better than in HW1. Everyone's bringing their 110%. Lines like "CUT US LOOSE", the Somtaw Science Officer analyzing the Beast having to choke back his own vomit and disgust, or that Taiidani Republic transport begging for help are fucking CHILLING and emotionally ladden to the extreme.
The final mission is so much more than mentioned in the video and has some of the best moments in Gaming for me. The giant siege cannon bolted to your main ship? Useless, against the taken over superweapon the shot will get bounced back and against Nagarrok it is too slow to hit. It´s the one case in an RTS where the end game superweapon ISN´T the solution.
I also loved the scene where the Empire remnants abandon the Beast once the battle turns against it. It´s so cathartic to see the horrific beast ask for help and be denied.
Also the Bentusi superfighter? Also a great moment, once you get them you replace all your ships of that category - two of your smallest craft bolted together. But then you research the final clue how to beat the Nagarrok - in order to turn off the frictionless drive you need to hit it with EMP. Which is the one original trick Somtaw had since the very beginning of the game. And it´s on the shitty ship that is two smaller ships smushed together that you JUST recycled in order to build the broken Bentursi superships. The solution was with us the whole way.
To be fair the Super Akolythes that the Bentusi give you are so powerful that you really don't need the EMP. They can kill the Naggarrok easily on their own which is the only criticism of Cataclysm I have. With those things, the Bentusi should have had no problems killing the Beast in the first place.
@@shaengar7440 Been a while but wastn the bentusis schtick that they are the spaceship and so wouldve had to "man" the little fighters themselves, if that was even an option? Felt that what they gave was nothing they couldve used themselves on their own even if they knew how to make it.
@@shaengar7440 The game definitely wants you to hit it with and emp then siege cannon it but you're right it is very easy ti just burn the Naggarrok down with super acolytes.
@@CareerKnight Right, I wish they made it so that you could only destroy the Naggarok with the Siege cannon. One well aimed shot should have been enough to finish it but it should not be able to be destroyed by the Super Akolythes.
@@TheGahta The Bentusi use those fighters themselves. You can see them at 24.54.
"CUT US LOOSE!" One of the most bone chilling lines i've had the pleasure of hearing juxtaposed against "Okay Let's talk visuals." Gave me a laugh.
So glad to see a Cataclysm vid, your work is appreciated as always!
Next to "They come. Good."
22 years later and it still gives me chills
No fucking lies. I heard that shit in my nightmares when I was a kid.
@@BigPapaKaiser Eh, I rate "Something's come aboard! Help us! HEEEELP USSSSSssss...." as even more horrifying. Because that only happens because *you* failed to protect that colony ship.
"The more ass they kick the bigger there foot gets" - Never has unit veterancy been explained better.
Damm man, ive been subbed to you sincd the OG Empire at War playthrough
Attention, officer on deck!
Their* Sorry, that was going to bug me
Fancy seeing you here Cap!
"I've come to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of ass."
- a veteran (probably)
"the Somtaaw are mentioned being against poking around in ancient ruins"
If this does not make Cataclysm canon, I don't know what else could. Them being against digging out ancient ships would mean nothing on it's own, but given what them touching a million year old beacon unleashed on the galaxy makes their disdain for treasure hunting very understandable.
@KarSoban "We don't want you to poke at this shit, because we _know_ what it can mean. But since you refuse to listen to us, we're sending a strike force to follow you. So that _this time_ when something horrible is unleashed, at least someone will be there to try and slow it down."
"Thanks?"
I want to say the Somtaaw are mentioned to be holding the line at Hiigara in 2, but I have no idea where I heard or read that.
@@Sorain1 considering everything, i think this fits them very well. I love it
Largely because the Beast War _really_ spooked the Somtaaw. As in _horrifically_ spooked...
I really hope homeworld 3 at least includes the beast... If not, then another good spin off with a different name.
"You're worse than the beast! AT LEAST THE BEAST DOESN'T PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS!"
Hot damn, the VA gave 101% on that dialogue line.
EDIT: timestamp here 26:26 for the epic dialogue line!
I am simply amazed how decade old rts game without actual characters has MORE character than modern rpgs. That was a very strong scene. THAT kind of "cinematic" i wanted from games not 30 fps, black bars nonsesne.
Dude, that line is so amazing.
When he yelled that - I was physically moved in awe. Seriously.
26:00
@@trevordavis6830 Do it, I've played a ton of games and I think that one is still all time favorite. Still easy to pick up, still has a good bit going on mechanically, still has enough story to get you thinking about philosophy. Perhaps most uniquely I feel it carries narrative momentum the whole way through, despite taking a while to beat. Most old games are cool because they do one or two things well, cataclysm/emergence did everything but the graphics well.
The gameplay can be slow sometimes, but that down time is actively used against you in this one as you frantically try to prepare for whatever is coming next.
The dialogue is so good.
I can't remember most of it, but that just means every time I hear it again, I'm left in awe at how good it is :)
I love how The Beast's origin is never explained at all. The Naggarock isn't the source of these nanomachines or anything, they just stumbled upon them much like the Kuun-Lan did.
Where did it come from? Who created it? Why does it do what it does?
Are there more out there?
My guess, extra-galactic. The Naggarock was made to test inter galaxy travel. Either it did a jump to one and came back infected, or it ran into it at the edge or in between galaxies. Best case, it consumed another galaxy already and the Naggarock was it's only possible vector for infecting another. Worst case, it found its way across galaxies by itself, has eaten multiple galaxies already, and may endemic to the rest of the universe. After all, even if it takes millions of years for a ship to reach the next galaxies, if the virus your spreading can survive that long, why wouldn't you send them in every direction? And why should we assume the Naggarock is the only ship that can travel across galaxies in normal lifespans?
@@fake-inafakerson8087 Or its basically a Warp-daemon - the cutscene implied that the Naggarok went into Long-Jump shiny and new and came out the other end *f u c k e d*
Which could be a set-up for interesting stuff in HW3 if Randy didn't exist in the worst timeline alongside us.
"Can we go to the Gate Of Arran?"
"No honey we have intergalactic travel at home"
Intergalactic travel at home: *THEY COME. **_G O O D._*
It’s especially ominous with the description given from the Bentusi. “Something older. Something other. Something from outside.”
It's implied that the naggarok picked up the beast from hyperspace, like the naggarok jumped to deep into the hyperspace and entered some darker dimension where it picked up the beast
You see... Naggarock is actually a cipher. If you decode it... it comes out as "We ripped this idea from Event Horizon because that is the best damned idea that movie ever wasted." Its a very complicated cipher... >.>
Good lord, people remember Halogen? If you're talking about the C&C Generals mod I used to work on that.
I can vividly remember being so irritated learning that Halo Wars got the project shut down when it wasn't even going to come to PC at the time. I think it's stayed so tantalizing since it was an amazing looking total conversion that no one actually got to play.
We remember.
We do remember.
I remember regularly checking Derelict Studios/Slipstream Productions for HaloGen updates waaaay back in the day. Lots of good memories (well, except for the whole cancelation part).
I checked every day for updates and watched every trailer multiple times. I think I was 12 at the time - still think about Halogen 1.0 vs Halo Wars every once in a while
It really is a shame that Cataclysm/Emergence not only didn't get the Remaster treatment, but is also considered non-canon. It deserves a lot better than to be brushed aside.
I think that might be partially WHY Cataclysm is so often ignored, honestly. It's just such a hard act to follow up on, with so few of the people involved left, that it casts a shadow over the entire franchise by pure comparison.
Poetic. The treatment for the game reflects the treatment for the protagonists in the beginning.
source code was lost.
I say its the true cannon
why not, if twos story was that disappointing
also biggest lore break between 2 and cataclysm: in 2 you see the last of the Bentusi sacrifice themselves. While if you played cataclysm, you know some bentusi ships eventually escaped the galaxy, meaning its unlikely bentus is really the last of their race.
Also, the best thing about the Beast that wasn't really mentioned here.. is that while its goal is to just consume everything, its SMART about it; going for the strongest specie that possess the greatest knowledge they could assimilate immediately, using infected ships to lure others, and even using what it knows of galaxy politics to gain allies. "We know you better than you know yourselves", and the beast is probably not wrong in that regard with how long it has been listening to the entire galaxy. And sure the taidan imperialists were morons.... but they were desperate. The beast was the only thing willing and capable to help them regain their empire, and they were desperate to get back that power.
And hell, the attempt of the Beast to offer Kiith Somtaaw a position of relevance may have worked to some degree if the beast made that offer way earlier on.. but even the Beast didn't take them seriously until it was way too late (hell even when you declare the kuun-laan a warship, the Beast scoffs at the idea that you are a soldier now, as if it thinks you are playing at war and not an actual threat).
Not so smart considering it died.
@@DarkOmegaMK2 well, being an infectious space meat moss doesn't tend to make you a lot of friends to be fair XP
@@thorveim1174 Maybe the infection space meat moss was inside us all along.
Homeworld: Cataclysm is easily the best sequel that nobody remembered and utterly terrifying for all the right reasons. Top tier voice acting.
I played it back shortly after finding a copy in a two-pack that came with the original I got at a book store way back in like 2005.
The Zerg in Starcraft were supposed to be Warhammer Tyranids; alien, unsettling, all-consuming and assimilating and for the most part, they fit the part (in Starcraft 1).
The Beast is much, much scarier than the Zerg ever were. From the moment it appears in the story until its defeat, it is an enemy that never feels trivialized, and always threatening.
Model example: That superweapon you mount on your ship to kill the Beast? Turns out, even when fixed and fully operational, it still fails to slay the Beast and its superweapon.
The Zerg, by comparison, have been punked out by ancient super-weapons twice...and then reduced into being the bitch of the "bigger bad" in Starcraft 2.
...Yeah. maybe there's a reason why Blizzard would prefer that everyone forget this Cataclysm in favor of theirs.
Probably because someone outdid them with story potential for the Zerg. Honestly I would love a Warhammer game that focuses on the horror of tyranids. Sure there is the combat side from soldiers, but we never see the civilian side, seeing areas being overwhelmed, corruption spreading, maybe new forms of the tyranids that literally haven’t been seen before. Potentially maybe hives that cause infighting and different goals, like ones that don’t care and ignore you even if they run into you, or others that will kill you/eat you on sight.
Kind of like a horror based Warhammer Alien isolation of sorts, but with gameplay like This war of mine.
The beast are effectively the borg with the horror turned up to 11. The zerg, even in SC1 is a bit humanized with overmind being a talking individual and the cerebrates being their own persons. Of course some specially infected human being important also furthers to make them not terribly scary.
The beast doesn't have 'characters'. Its a force of nature that speaks with the voice of those its assimalated. Communication is a means to an end, not something it uses within itself.
@@Janx14 yeah. We do need more horror done right in space.
The problem of the zergs, in both starcraft, is that they alternate between "galactic menace that threaten to consume the world" and "savage beast that anyone save the Protoss can tame, avoid, or manipulate (the confederate, the sons of Kohral, the UED, Amon, Kerrigan...)".
Blizzard's writers have been really inconsistent about the Zerg (and most things, let's be fair). In the original Starcraft campaigns, you at least get the feeling that the Zerg are signficantly dangerous as they make steady headway through the sector. Most of the Terran campaign you're hopping from world to world as each gets consumed by the Zerg and then glassed by the Protoss as part of their containment procedure. Any world that gets infested with Zerg is a lost cause, the only option is to evacuate as all hell breaks loose. Then when you reach the Zerg campaign, you see that the Overmind is a terrifying Old One that speaks in biblical, vague phrases which hint at a grand strategy that spans uncountable years. The Zerg are ravenous apex predators under the control of a frightening intelligence. The Overmind has created Infested Kerrigan as a prototype for the total assimilation of the Terran race, and he has plans to assimilate the Protoss as well.
But once the Overmind is killed at the end of the Protoss campaign, the Zerg degenerate into wild animals and never truly recover. The Queen of Blades is too petty and human to be a cosmic horror. And in SC2 everybody has gotten pretty good at killing Zerg, and feral hives are treated more like a nuisance than any sort of existential threat.
1:28 Whenever I hear about copyright eating a franchise title or _especially_ source code being lost, I think of one of the most horrible 'anti-piracy' psychopaths I've ever seen. He scoffed at the idea that we should care about preserving digital media from premature destruction because if nobody can profit from it, then surely one of those people should be able to make sure that nobody gets to enjoy it for free.
If people like that ever got access to time travel, they'd use it to ensure that the Library of Alexandria was put to the torch because otherwise everything within it might have become public domain.
Well that sounds like a Bond Villain to me. (And yet there are real people like that... God help us.)
"Nobody remembers how to make anything anymore, mainly because of DRM and Copyright Laws... I'm not kidding; that's the actual in game reason. We can't reliably make new ships or machinery because all the corporations put copy protection on their design chips."
~SsethTzeentach explaining the setting lore of Starsector.
A lot of oldschool games' modern freeware "remasters" are rewrites because the original source exists today only in the executables. Duke Nukem II is an example.
In their eyes the world only exists for transactions and profit. These people would join the fucking Corpus from Warframe, it's not just a lack of respect for art. It's an obsession with market economics as the whole of society, the kinds of people who unironically think governments should be run as a business because they insanely think they're more "efficient". All relationships, transactional. It's an ignorance of not only how much of the current world of art is based on centuries of history, but also an ignorance of how humans naturally organize and the ways we've built societies throughout the ages. This brief flash of the systems of modern capitalism is all that is. Humanity's tribal nature of labor for mutual work, and preservation of writing and entire languages into stone freaking tablets, shows what we actually want. We will preserve knowledge out of the sheer wrongness we feel at the THOUGHT of it being destroyed. And these morons care more about keeping the money machine running, even though preserving all this would do more good for everyone overall, even financially. They're only helping executives with that garbage.
@@234ne14 Reminds me of a Tom Scott video, where he speculated on if some corp built the first AI as a DRM scheme... and it was smart enough to figure out how to encrypt human memories in its quest to 'protect' copies of copyrighted material. And since it was a corporate project that had gotten loose, it went considerably further than any legal system would countenance. Effectively erased human culture, because the AI was protecting the story of Robin Hood, not _Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,_ and so on.
I think it says so much about the character of the Bentusi that even though they didn't recognize the Beast immediately for what it was, once they realized what it was doing and what would happen once they were assimilated, they blew themselves to hell without hesitation. It sells the 'vast, but not infallible wisdom' of their race so well. They didn't have the knowledge to understand the threat, but they had foresight enough to know a true monster once it's revealed itself, and acted not out of self preservation but of defiance.
The mission where you have to save the civilian transports left me so shaken I had to step away from the game for a few days after beating it. When one gets infected, it doesn't fail the mission. You just have to listen to the screams, and then put down what those innocent people have become. No matter how frantically I played, how I split up my forces, I just could not save them all. Cataclysm is a true horror game that left me trembling after its strongest moments.
That moment when you think you destroyed all the missiles and suddenly see 6 dots approaching the ship you left undefended to destroy the missiles coming from the other way...
Sometimes you cant save them all. Sacrifice have to be made
Damn I wanna watch a vid on that what mission is that?
Reminds me of the final act of Star Trek Legacy, trying evacuate the Aurelia system while under attack by the Borg. No screaming thankfully, but the invasion was so massive entire worlds could be lost in the course of the mission, not to mention trying to defend the evacuation transports themselves. Truly made me feel powerless before the sheer scale of the borg
Don't play Warcraft 3's Culling of Stratholme if this made you squeamish.
Homeworld: Cataclysm is my favorite homeworld. It's such a good story, I can't beleive how well cosmic horror fit into the homeworld setting. Not to mention i love how it expands the lore of the Bentusi. For an outside company to develop this they clearly had allot of passion and respect for the IP. That's why its so dissapointing to me that the guys at blackbird clearly don't like it and have yet to properly recognize it. Hell at this point I half expect them to officially uncannonize it with 3.
They've been on the fence as the Sometaaw are clearly canon. The only thing that outright decanonizes Cataclysm so far is Homeworld 2's manual.
The somtaaw is a playable faction in the mobile game. I wouldn't be shocked is the somtaaw make an appearance in hm3
@@AAhmou well the somtaaw are also never represented with their beastslayers logo either so that alone is a red flag to me
Holy crap hearing that radio chatter and people begging for help against an unstoppable force was absolutely puckering
Excellent review. It's commonly pointed out that HW: Cataclysm is unique as a horror RTS in space, but watching this made it click just how closely the game follows classic monster movie structure. You've got the working-class protagonists on just another routine job, not terribly respected by peers and even expendable to their superiors. In the first act they make contact, barely survive, and try to make sense of what just happened. The second act is spent trying to warn various people - experts, the authorities, anyone that happens to be wandering by - and of course most don't take them seriously until it's far too late. Measures taken to stop the creature do little more than buy time to escape.
Along the way they piece together what this thing is, where it's from, and what can possibly be done about it. Sure enough, other parties do know about the creature, and are either running from it or actively aiding it. An act of desperation bridges the gap between acts two and three, revealing some key weakness or other piece of information that can be used to fight it. And from act three to the finale they connect the remaining dots, rally what's left of their allies and resources, and confront the monster amidst its climactic rampage. The heroes aren't just going to hit the thing harder this time, they've actually grown and learned, tempered by knowledge and the willingness to challenge those previously seen as above them.
It's a rock-solid execution of the concept, and that's before the details that elevate it to something special: mission scripting, the writing and acting, integrating the Beast as a unique gameplay threat, and so on. Even the Beast itself is novel. On the one hand it's frighteningly intelligent; possessing starships means it understands what starships even are, and it's both capable of articulating its wants and manipulating its enemies in service to them. And yet what it wants is the most basic of all biological impulses - to consume, and spread. It's a virus that can play chess, and if it wins it will eat the board.
It remains one of the most effective horror stories I've seen in a video game, and of all the Homeworld titles it arguably most deserves the remaster treatment. Hopefully one day it'll get just that. In the meantime, thanks for putting a spotlight on this classic!
An excellent comment all around. Writing is certainly a strength of yours!
"It's a virus that can play chess and, if it wins, it will eat the board."
I love how something as terrifying and unstoppable as the Beast only has it's sights set on "the galaxy". The distance from one galaxy to the next is completely impossible even for eldritch horrors.
Interestingly the beast are from outside the galaxy, either from the space in between or extra-dimensional. The Naggarok accidently picked them up on a test flight of a new galaxy-to-galaxy hyperdrive. Presumably, if they got the Naggarok fully operational again, they could start invading other galaxies with ease.
The really scary thing? It *isn't*. The Naggarock's drive was litterally made for the express purpose of hopping between galaxies. If the Beast organism that it became had thought of things on a bit broader scale instead of just chasing down the first source of food it could find (the Whirlpool galaxy), the Naggarock could have just started hopping from galaxy to galaxy unleashing the Beast like a sci-fi Typhoid Mary and there is absolutely nothing anyone could have done to stop it.
The minute its' engines got fixed, the Naggarock genuinely became an existential threat to the *entire universe*. But nah m8, we need to bring Sajuuk to Bear. Bear really needs that over-glorified derelict.
Interesting! I had no idea the game featured intergalactic travel or that it was set in another galaxy. As a side note: While I do think it's highly possible that an alien civilization somewhere will accidentally unleash an unstoppable galaxy devouring bioweapon (or has already done so), I think intergalactic travel will forever be impossible. At least we can rest assured that these horrors will be forever confined to their galaxy of origin.
@@beebomcgroober9316 you see that if you look at the galactic map of Homeworld I. That is not our galaxy. It looks completely different from the Milky Way.
@@iguanamoat This is one of the reasons why the Captain of the Kun-Laan was able to convince the Bentuzi as to how they had to kill the Beast THEN and NOW. It wasn't just gonna stop in that galaxy, it would follow them eventually once it's done devouring anything mechanical and biological.
11:29 "Professionals under stress voice acting" is a fantastic descriptor of the Homeworld universe. From "The subject did not survive interrogation" to the damage reports given in Homeworld 2's final mission as the Planet Killer missiles eradicate Hiigara's population, the nuances of the voice acting always made it stand out to me as some of the best, enriching the experience so much as to make the graphical shortcomings of 90's tech seem to disappear.
"The subject did not survive interrogation" gave me chills.
It was not mentioned in the video, but the game also had some interesting explanation about why somtaaw capital class ships were immune against infection.
They were designed in a specific way, where if ship detected infection then that particular sector of the ship would be purged by plasma or something like that, effectively wiping beast cells and part of the crew.
Thats why infection beam was only doing some damage to those ships instead of capturing them.
Not quite. The description of the Deacon-class Destroyer mentions the Naar Directive. Named after Naar-Tel, the senior vessel of a destroyer duo left behind to fend off a Beast Heavy Cruiser and its escorts. The Beast fired its infection beam at the Naar-Tel, but the captain ordered that the affected decks be purged with plasma. He killed many of his crew and destroyed a quarter of the ship, but it remained combat effective long enough to destroy the Beast ships. His desperate decision became the standard protocol for infected capital ships. It even mentions how quick death by plasma is preferable to become a part of the Beast.
(It's possible that I got some detail wrong because my Cataclysm manual is written in Portuguese, but I consider it a very good translation)
I am so glad you mentioned the change in designation from mining vessel to warship at the end. That moment has stuck with me over these decades. Such a powerful game. I will always love Kiith Somtaaw and was super sad they barely existed in 2.
So the MINERS are now WARRIORS? You have come far, little kith somtaaw.
DOK seems to at least mention and recognize the Somtaaw as the salvager units and with some additional references in their "virtual manual". Hopefully that shows a bit of a warming from the folks at BBI to cata.
I love how the Captain at first is all meek and "Hey maybe we shouldn't be the ones doing this...," to by the end "We're gonna do this, because no one else can!"
26:13 what great delivery. Literally so angry that he would rather be devoured by a malicious space monster versus a race just as afraid as they are but too horrified to fight.
Literally one of my favourite voice acting performances in gaming. An absolute standout performance.
The best part is if you keep the last few lines in mind he goes, "I'd rather crash my ship into you than let you leave. No, even still I'd rather have the Beast take me because at least _it didn't LIE to me._ "
@@TychoHoward The hilarious thing is that the Beast will not hesitate in lying if it's something that serves it means. The Tiedani Empire was lied on when The Beast offered half the Galaxy for it's cooperation. It also tries to lie later about reconstituting its victims from it's biomass in exchange for being spared.
Stunning. Truly one of the best dialogues.
@@StrikeWarlock think it also attempted to promise the Somtaaw something else they always wanted: a position of importance. And its didn't juwt try to be spared: the Beast tried to turn the somtaaw into allies, like it did with the taiidani. Its the most scary part about the beasy: it may have the simplest goal ever, but it is smart in how its tries to reach that goal.
Homeworld Cataclysm is one of the most interesting games every made to me, as it clearly shows the difference between Being something, and wearing the aesthetics of something. Horror can be about anything, but in games they're often categorized by camera angles, spooky monsters chasing you down dark hallways, hiding in closets, systems and mechanics that don't mean anything on their own but are supposed to matter to be "survival horror" or such. Homeworld:C is a space rts about micromanaging, and captures fear, tensions, limited resources, desperation, hope, and everything that matters for horror with repurposed systems not built for it in any way. It's wildly creative and a good reminder about how good games can be, and the power of using limited tools to create new experiences.
Agreed.
One of my favorite horror games is Irisu by wtetsu and its a puzzle game.
Like, a Tetris style falling block puzzle game.
Super good, if you try it play as far as you absolutely can before looking up anything about it, it's well worth stumbling in the dark.
It's a classic case of cargo cult in design. People see the thing that succeeded without understanding the why of it's success, and just copy as much as they can with only a surface level of understanding. Thats why something that actually understands something will stand out so much stronger vs something that just feels like generic or a bad sequel.
Even filtered through second-hand experience, I'm still feeling all those emotions the game wanted to convey. Fear of The Beast, desperation, pride at seeing the mining rig rise up and finally get respect...
I'd argue it's the New Vegas of the franchise - a side game that had main entry soul and magic. Soul and magic that upstages any mainline sequels, and that a remaster might never quite recapture.
"The more ass they kick, the bigger their foot gets" I'm using that
>come from Homeworld 3 video
>the comments are talking about Cataclysm and how fucking horrifying the comms are
>"surely it isn't that bad"
>proceed to absolutely shit bricks for the first time in years after 11:45
Holy actual fuck what the shit were these people on when they made this. If the sun hadn't JUST risen I think I might've fucking cried from how actually scary this is. You know I watch horror shit in the middle of the night for fun but that was actually soul-numbingly terrifying. I felt my heart stop from a fucking dialogue line.
i feel you bro
this video changed me
Yeah, the voice actors and directors did NOT fuck around on Cataclysm.
Play the game dude. Before I first played it I wasn't sure you could even do horror in an RTS, yet they knocked it out of the park so hard that it's probably one of the scariest bits of media ever made
First Mission: "This is the Kiith Somtaaw Mining Vessel, Kuun-Lan"
Final Mission: "This is the Kiith Somtaaw *Warship*, Kuun-Lan"
Also, the best line in the game: "You're worse than the beast! Atleast the beast doesn't pretend to be righteous!"
Also also, did you know that the beast came from INSIDE hyperspace?
oh man i forgot it came from hyperspace. I thought that the Bentussi meant it came from outside the galaxy but coming from outside our dimension is so much cooler.
Ayup. The Naggarok picked the infection up during an extreme range Hyperspace Jump from a neighboring galaxy as I recall. Not sure if that was from being in H-Space for too long or just one of the horrors of Dark Space or what. It's never fully explained, probably because well, *not* knowing is scarier.
Unrelated note. String. When you gonna do some HW inspired stuff now? You know you wanna. Doooooooo Eeeeeeeeeeeeet.
@@McDonaldWilliamT I think supposedly they jumped to deep into hyperspace, like another layer of the hyperspace dimension and that lower dimension is where the beast is from.
Well, best line in the game : "We liveeee" - after the science ship is taken.
@@SeriousBearGaming It's an oft-used phrase in horror, but damned if this game didn't earn it.
The beast was such an incredible villain in so many ways, to this day the only rts villain I have not only, ever been genuinely intimidated by, but put me through honest to God desperation
God, the part where you convince the Bentusi to join you. The "Shaming the Unbound" video I watch a lot cause the voice acting is just...so good. The Flagship's VA killed it, as did Campbell Lane as the Bentusi, may he rest in peace.
My favorite of all the Homeworld games, for sure.
He remains forever unbound.
don't mind me, just guilt tripping a demigod over here.
7:00
A mining vessel, an ancient alien artifact, a biohazard breach that start to slaughter the crew...
Who poured this Dead Space sauce in my space-RTS game?
Would be reverse because this is an older title
@@aravindpallippara1577 I'm pretty sure he knows that, it's a reference joke about the theme of both games. A joke that wouldn't work the other way because Dead Space is a pop cultural name known by every horror fan out there while the other is a game barely anyone knows about.
Meanwhile on my plate, I see some sprinkles of Warframe, Space Station 13, Alien: Isolation.
@@starcraft2own Got it just wanted to set the record straight - the story is so compelling
@@aravindpallippara1577 It really is!
This game actually managed to all but traumatize me as a kid. I never managed to finish it because the Beast was absolutely TERRIFYING to me, and to this day it´s one of the few sci-fi entities I have an instinctual "BURN IT, BURN IT THE FUCK DOWN TO THE GROUND" reaction towards.
It terrified me on a deep level. Not because it was a scary beastie that I was afraid would shank me in the dark. But on a deep, conceptual level. It might be what gave me the fear of the loss of self.
Thats the biggest strenght of the Beast IMO, that concept of losing yourself. Thats whats so scary about it and your typical zombie/vampire/werewolf stuff, being infected by something and becoming something else. Its terrifying
I considered it the Thing is space. A true sci fi horror game.
Cosmic Horror is terrifying enough as an adult, it must be traumatizing as a kid.
@@Ar1AnX1x The funny thing is... I am not scared of cosmic horror. Existential horror does not particularly do anything to me, and never did. I am not afraid of my own, or our own overall insignificance in space and time.
The Beast, however... the Beast is fucking terrifying, not because it's an existential threat, but because it's a very, very PERSONAL threat, more personal than any monster from any other setting.
you sound like Bentusi
That exchange at 25:29…I think that’s legitimately one of the best, if not the best, voice acting/dialogue I’ve heard.
The white hot rage behind “…at least the BEAST DOESNT PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS!!” is something else.
Thanks Mandalore for another great review and bringing attention to another great game/story/experience that I likely would have never discovered myself.
My favorite line is the Bentusi "We... are... not... monsters..." They sound so heartbroken. In the lore during the Ancient Higgaran war a single Bentsui ship went to Hiigara to engage in peace talks, the Higgarans in their arrogance attacked the Bentusi ship so the Bentusi fought back and annihilated the entire Hiigaran navy. The Bentsui were fully in the right for fighting back as the Hiigarans were a pompous tyrannical race at the time but the Bentusi still felt such immense guilt that they left the council and demilitarized themselves. Imagine the guilt they must feel for attacking a small desperate group that was just as scared as them and literally BEGGING for help.
I remember being terrified of the Beast the first time hearing all those screams. It made me very attached to my rag tag fleet of "not soldiers" and when you get to the final mission being called a "Somtaaw Warship" I was absolutely giddy because it felt like something I earned and it was time for some payback
Good god, the screams coming from ships being taken then fading is terrifying.
Similar to what I said in your review for "No one lives under the lighthouse" I think why horror moments can be that much more intense in games not sold as horror is because horror games tease you with something scary, usually putting the scary thing up for display, you know what you are getting; however what you don't know, or expect is usually much more terrifying, especially when they leave it mostly up to your own imagination to fill in the blanks.
The screams remind me of The Event Horizon movie, where the rescue team finds a security footage of the previous crew with demonic screaming in the background.
@@JBrander Event Horizon was an excellent movie, and a nice WH40K Prequel.
Reminds me somewhat of when Halo CE suddenly became a horror game when the flood made their debut.
and even better is that Cataclysm leaves NO CLUE as to what you will face. You pass the first 3 missions of the game without a hint that the Beast even exists... and then, the SCREAMS. And yes its similar to halo CE's flood in that regard: and enemy that comes without warning and after the game's missions are already well on their way.
@@padmanabhanvaidyanathan7182 Event Horizon is apt a comparison since the Beast is implied to have latched on to the Naggarok on Hyperspace, basically the same as the Event Horizon.
Shaming The Unbound is still one of the greatest bits of video game writing I’ve ever seen. I was probably 9 or ten years old, playing this game right after it released because my father enjoyed the first one. I barely knew what was going on most of the time because I was a dumb child and even then that mission shook me up. It’s so good. The voice acting, the actual dialogue writing, the way you get to see the fleet you’ve spent hours building get wiped out so callously. And then you call the bastards out on their actions.
Hello fellow "I'm a Homeworld fan because I watched my father play it"! To this day the only real series of games my dad played.
I'm so happy that guys like Mandalore exist, shining a light onto the mostly forgotten works of teams who put blood, tears and soul into the art they created. Their recognition might come late, but at the very least they now get the recognition they deserved.
I think a nice hidden benefit of your ships looking like everything under the kitchen sink is that you don't get comfortable with what you have and that you want to try anything new to get an advantage. It feels like a nice decision, and it directly leads into you becoming the KUUN-LAN Beast Slayers, the ones who will use any means to become the big guys.
If anything, the Kiith Somtaaw are the perfect foil to the Beast because they both get stronger by evolving, but the Beast does it by forcefully assimilating everything into itself unchanged while the Somtaaw scavenge and salvage and take inspiration from old ideas while putting their own spin on it.
Their dreadnoughts, fighters and corvettes are modified designs inspired by pirates, Taiidan and Bentusi, their carriers and ramming frigates are just their old mining equipment remade into combat worthy designs and their strongest weapon is literally just a salvaged siege cannon duct taped to their ship then fixed up by the Bentusi. It's amazing.
Bit of a random thing, but I kinda love how the Kuun Laan is essentially in two pieces.
The manual (I think it was in the manual) mentioned how Kith Somtaaw basically had very limited access to the mothership to get a couple ships built, and the modular nature kind of emphasizes "we squeezed everything we could out of that shipyard and actually just finished the ships later.
Obviously, though, the more direct narrative use is that by the lower decks effectively being a full ship with propulsion, hangar and resourcing, it allows for the beast mothership to grow from it.
It's canon that they built the Faal-Corum, Kuun-Lan and Clee-San in just 60 days, because they only had a two-month slot to use the Mothership fabricators
I always really liked the more natural tone of the Cataclysm dialoque. Especially during the middle of the game, the captain of the Kuun-Lan sounds so tired and desperate, just as he should be.
Yeah, I've never considered Homeworld's voice acting the high point. It works but the fact that people actually emote in Cataclysm elevates everything. Staggering difference in quality.
Games like these remind me of how amazing games can be when the people working on them actually give a damn.
Now more than ever, we need people like you bringing attention to these gems.
I never noticed it before, but seeing multiple Bentusi ships together made me realize how much they look like Trilobites. Perhaps a design inspiration, owing to their ancient status?
They look like horseshoe crabs to me.
"units now have veterancy - the more ass they kick the bigger their foot gets" is such a good quote
"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of ass." - veteran fleet (probably)
I just went and bought emergence because the simple fact this game hits me like a truck on how the plot is this absolutely compelling and how desperately I've wanted my "space is fucking terrifying" vibe for so incredibly long now, and the simple fact it's not on steam is just criminal so first game on GOG I have that going for me. I can't think of the reason why no one wanted to go and make this game more canon compared to Homeworld 2 because yes Homeworld 2 looks pretty as could be but the plot is, meh, and the plot for this hits both like a truck and it's a horror filled organic hell truck that hates all life.
Have fun, I played it for the first time last year and good god it didn't age badly at all and still feels great to play.
I mean it's about as canon as any of the other titles until BBI/Gearbox says otherwise.
the Homeworld Revelations RPG even includes its events according to the summary as well lol
"the plot for this hits both like a truck and it's a horror filled organic hell truck that hates all life."
I'm going to remember to use that, because lord above that's accurate.
"Try to hold on, Republican fleet. This is the Kiith Somtaaw warship Kuun-Lan"
I actually cried a little first time I heard that
Someone get Joseph Campbell on the line because I got him a hell of a journey...
Cataclysm was the real Homeworld 2. HW2 felt like it was written by a marketing committee and I'm getting that vibe from what I've seen from 3. It's worth noting that the same guy that came up with the lore for the original also wrote for this one. If you are interested in the development process for Cataclysm, a couple of Barking Dog employees did a fantastic interview here: ruclips.net/video/XXmfcXz-dZM/видео.html
Blackbird, makers of HW3, has some major old-school relic blood. I wouldn't count HW3 out just yet.
Its trailers reek of 2s writing.
@@egoalter1276 While not at the level of HW1/HWC Blackbird's previous projects (HW:DoK, Shipbreaker) has had writing that far surpasses HW2.
@@GepardenK DoK also played very fast and loose with the old lore, the badguys in that were originally a fanatical religious kiith that rejected all technology past the iron age and only showed up to occasionally raid minor outposts so it was a bit of a shock when in DoK they show up with way better tech than you.
@@GepardenK I'm not going to tell you to not get excited for anything, but the guys that are coming back didn't write for HW1 and did write for HW2.
Honestly, I'm with you 200% on Cataclysm being the better sequel. I love the arc from Dok, to OG, to Cataclysm. It feels like a virtually unbroken line of continuity.
DoK gives the Kushan a reason to leave Kharak. OG has the Kushan about to leave Kharak, only to be forced to do so when the Taiidan set the entire planet to the torch (Kiith Gaalsien did nothing wrong). Cataclysm has the Kushan-turned-Hiigarans fighting off threats from all sides as they try to establish themselves, only to end up fighting something far worse than anything that came before.
By comparison, Homeworld 2 has always felt rather disjointed and disconnected from the rest of the series. I still really like it, just nowhere near as much as the three that take place beforehand.
2 was dumb as hell. It was very pretty, and had very good atmosphear, but its story would have been better simply.not existing.
Came back here after the Homeworld 3 review. God this story was so much better. I wish they carried of from this point of view.
Man, hearing the dying screams of your doomed comrades as you jettison them out into the void of space STILL raises goosebumps up and down my arm.
That and, of course, The Beasts first words: "WEEEEEEE. LIIIIIIIIIVE."
"Oh, they're still alive. Everything's chill, dudes."
This plot screams Babylon 5 to me, so much so.
The miner captain sounds like Sheridan when he yells at the Shadows and Vorlons.
I LOVE THIS.
Also the whole re-using of a protagonist like Homeworld 1, 2 and Deserts of Kharak is emblematic of an issue in fiction that's not unlike sins of the father.
Take our favorite heroine, Ellen Ripley. Instead of using a different protagonist to Alien Resurrection, they took her. Instead of having a unique protagonist for Alien Isolation, they took her daughter. And in a non-canon old comic, it's Ellen Ripley's great great great grandfather that battles the Xenos on Earth. It's this issue of that once a character gets caught by destiny, they can never escape it and they have to come back, or their family have to keep fighting it. I do not like this trope very much.
They do attempt to have new leads in the "series" [Prometheus and Covenant are something], but they are weird bootleg Ripleys each time. Not sure if either of them really got a big following or not.
"Now, GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR GALAXY!" Glad I'm not the only one who sees the similiarity.
@Code Turtle I disagree. I loved Mandalorian as I am loving Book of Boba Fett, The Bad Batch, SW Rebels and Clone Wars.
But I thoroughly agree on the Terminator part, though it's not the same as I mentioned here since it's always the same protagonist in that case.
But in general, the whole, it has to be a predecessor or a descendant of the main character all the time time, that trope is vexing.
@@nematic529 Yes! \o/
Yeah yelling at the powerful ancient race gave me Babylon 5 vibes.
Campbell Lane(the narrator)'s voice acting seriously elevated the writing of every script he touched. Dude was a fucking legend.
So say we all.
The strength of the original Homeworld wasn't just the space combat but the story and atmosphere they managed to weave through the missions. Amazed I never heard of this 'sequel' until now, the story is awesome and the voice acting superb. Just like Starcraft, Homeworld creates a universe, ambience and characters which make you want to play and see what happens. I really hope they learn from this one with Homeworld 3.
When I joined Barking Dog I was a programmer on their next thing but it was all hands on deck as Cataclysm was wrapping up so I wound up doing quite a bit of playtesting on Cataclysm. I kinda wish I had slipped a CDROM of the source into a back pocket so I could now secretly mail it to Gearbox and they could make a proper remaster.
I haven't actually played through the campaign - typically it was playing mass multiplayer looking for crashes and sync errors. I def will now after watching your vid tho.
I still can't quite understand how the source was lost. It's not like they went bankrupt - they were absorbed into Rockstar. I don't know if it got lost when the Vancouver office was closed or what but someone dropped the ball there.
One small point - you said we developed Bully before being absorbed into Rockstar/Take Two - but I seem to remember us working on it in the Rockstar days, not before (tho it's possible we started it under contract to Take Two before the acquisition? - it's bit hazy now and I was on Global Operations and the follow-up not Bully).
You should post a story of that dev testing cycle. HW:C multiplayer was some of the best multiplayer RTS of the era, and most of what got seared into my brain about that era of gaming for me.
Got to ask, What is the bug you remember most?
Listening to 31:00 about Homeworld 3, you have no idea how almost on point you were with that.
Slamming Sbarro as either cancer itself or as aligning with a sentient cancer (and perhaps by inference slamming all mall foodcourt fast-food chains), without missing a beat, using only a second-long image was priceless.
Was gonna ask if that was intentional.
I do totally agree, the only fastfood place that actually gave me food-poisoning...
The way the new writers decided to focus Homeworld 2 (and seemingly 3) around one single character is just the perfect example of bad writing that is killing a LOT of franchise, from starwars to world of warcraft.
It just reduce to world to a backdrop for a small set of protagonist rather than an actual vast and living place, where each story is just a spark, a brief moment in the vast universe.
A shame really, I wish more IP were under the direction of actual creative people and not talent-less hacks trying to reproduce again and again what the creative people that started everything did.
'hero games' are not all-applicable, but companies act like they are. can we not rely on ourselves? must we always put our faith in some unapproachable hero?
Recursive storytelling is what I call it - rather than making new stuff, you're just looping back again.
Yeah WoW is one of the worst cases of that
Used to have genuinely excellent and compelling world building until the writers decided to turn it into a bargain bin superhero story.
I've seen franchises get their lore and storytelling destroyed before, but WoW's case is the most thorough annihilation of any trace of quality in storytelling I've seen so far
FEAR as well. The criticisms and lamentations Mandy has for Cataclysm is 1:1 he had for what happened to the FEAR franchise. Each game could've been a brand new threat since FEAR was supposed to be a tactical response team against the supernatural and the paranormal but noo, we just doing Alma for 4 straight games.
@@StrikeWarlock Yup, you could have had FEAR 2 where point man faces a zombie apocalypse or even C'tulhu, and still not get out of the theme.
The venom in that one line.
"At least thr Beast doesn't pretend to be righteous!"
That guy had better have been paid for that because he cooked a whole meal.
Honestly, that phase could be used for A LOT of people in the real world (not limited to one group or any politic, just Bad People irl)
Never played these games before but hearing the change in the mission intros go from Mining Vessel to Warship is one of those emotional Hell Yeah moments. To hear what they've been through they definitely deserved it :)
After playing the other ones, in this one the story seems really good. I never even knew about this one.
You absolutely need to play all the Homeworld games including Deserts of Kharak. If I could forget them I would replay them all in story order.
In regards to the weird timeline of the games. One way to look at it is through the lense of Ibn Khaldun’s sociological interpretation of middle eastern progression known as Asabiyyah. Which is the concept of group unity and , key for homeworld,group consciousness.
The concept basically is that the more United a group is the stronger they are. They are strongest at the start of a civilization when everyone is still united , declines as the civilization becomes more concerned with maintaining their new power and lifestyle. Which dissolves the once unified group into factionalism and individualism, and then gets replaced by the conditions the ruling group themselves created where a new power can emerge at the periphery of their control, grow strong, and effect a change in leadership.
With the mothership being the literal and metaphorical consciousness of the Kushan it being put off to the side as the clans bicker is a great lead into them being defeated in 2, and then the Kushans valiant return after being unified and guided by said group consciousness once more.
Just a fun way to view it
@@RabbiHerschel Do you even understand what diversity is? What are you even trying to say about diversity?
@@RabbiHerschel Ibn actually discusses how diversity and accepting and incorporating of other beliefs helps stop stagnation.
“Blindly following ancient customs and traditions doesn’t mean that the dead are alive, but that the living are dead.”
Diversity is not incompatible with unity of purpose, idiot.
I’ve never played these games and yet every time I watch this video “AT LEAST THE BEAST DOESNT PRETEND TO BE RIGHTEOUS” gets me pumped, it’s such a powerful moment.
I remember Homeworld: Cataclysm coming out and seeing it in the shop. As a fan of the original Homeworld I bought it immediately, went straight home and played it through in a couple of days. I was not disappointed at all and loved every minute of it.
When you announce your arrival as "The Warship Kuun-Laan" in the final mission it felt great. You're right. You have fucking earned that title by the end. I also loved firing the big cannon and hearing the captain say things like "BURN!" as the shot was fired. He fucking meant it.
Amazing game and I was shocked and couldn't understand why it wasn't truly considered part of the story.
Great review. You nailed it.
To be honest, this is what I'd imagine coming across the prethoryn scourge in Stellaris in the initial encounters is like: unknown contacts, biologically hazardous and consuming all form of bio material, unwilling or incapable to communicate, merely just something that feasts and feasts, taking the ships you send against it, destroying them, consuming them and making their own bastardized version of them to send against you. In the RTS style of stellaris it isn't as terrifying bar the fact of frustrating to how strong the scourge can get, but if it had aspects like this? Hell I'd be fuckin terrified as hell of the scourge.
@@RabbiHerschel Aye true, though it doesn't put too much into perspective considering we never really encounter these enemies their running from, I mean, sure it's a pretty scary thought to consider that something as odd, disastrous and biologically terrifying as the Scourge is could be scared of something, so much so that they become ever running nomads who only destroy to feed and move on. I would like some more information on the hunters, maybe even a degree of an event or maybe some technology during the crisis as a means to counter the scourge, I don't know exactly, but I'd like to see some proof of the thing the scourge fears so much. As for the psionic empires its kinda something I'm unsure I like? I imagine it in two ways really for psionics, one in the sense they communicate with the singular hivemind, one voice, very powerful and very ancient, or they listen and communicate to the hive as a whole, i.e millions of voices as one, some old, some new, but all with the same thoughts. But in my eyes, I see it similar to the tyranids in the sense that the sheer scale, size and amount of voices and the power behind them would either be incomprehensible to the psionics, or would just be too damn loud for them to even get a grasp at, or in a worse case, so eldritch that it backfires and hurts the psionic. Can't say which I prefer but those are my ideas at least.
And The Beast is outright worse than the Prethoryn Scourge. It consumes all the tech and memories while directly converting biology into tools. There is intelligence there, and it is _not_ scared, it's smugly assured of it's right to do that to you.
Is it not more like the Grey Tempest?
Imagine ship radio chatter....
@@xonxt7479 Shit that's something both I want and bare not thinking about at the same time cause of how traumatising that shit would be. Fleets of several hundreds of ship, presumably thousands if not millions of crew members. Gives me shudders just imagining it.
The developer of this, Barking Dog Studios, was also behind Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon. Which is another somewhat obscure game that Mandalore might find interesting video material.
Came here to say this. Now, I never heard of this "Bully" game. The Treasure Planet war game is way more important
Great call. It's also on Steam so no futzing around with trying to get it to work.
The fact that so many people are going to play this game thanks to you make me smile.
homeworld is hands down my favorite all time game, mainly because i was pretty deep in the modding and multiplayer community.
cataclysm is an absolute gem its weird buts its beautiful.
Just bought it
I like that the Bentusi ships look like horseshoe crabs, it makes them feel very ancient
2:10 hearing the voice of late Campbell Lane once again, gives me goosebumps. That man was always the perfect narrator and to think he was even in Battlestar Galactica: Razor movie, makes this narration even sweeter. Of course, he also did great work at Gundam Wing as well. Rest in Peace Mr. Campbell Lane, you'll be missed.
EDIT: 4:13 If you remember after the end of the first combat mission in Homeworld: Cataclysm, the aftermath of the battle, where Kiith Somtaaw Workers/Miners, are buzzing about, saving stragglers... Command bridge commends the crew about Kaalel frigate saying: "I'm sure they'll forget to thank us later". At the time it was hilarious to me two decades ago, but after finishing the game I realized how far Kiith Somtaaw got, from being an insignificant (As Kiith Naabal carrier in the next mission said: "Even a mining Kiith should be able to handle a few pirates"), to fully fledged-battle hardened warship and warrior clan.
"Ancient alien lifeform that cannibalizes everything into sentient biomass" is a surprisingly common trope in sci-fi.
Dead Space, Halo, Space Pirates and Zombies are just a few that quickly came to my mind. When I think about it, it's pretty cliche by now. Does your story need a nigh unstoppable threat that can possibly destroy universe? Just add some amorphous flesh! Too bad that many authors overdo it and include "regenerates from a single cell"/"one cell can infect you"-type bullshit (I'm looking at you, Flood spores).
40k has 2 of them, Chaos and Nids
@@Ikar660 I mean an amorphous sentient mass is one of the only few things that can threaten a futuristic space era galaxy after all space era tech (even the scientifically possible) is extremely overpowered just look at a.i. even non-sapient a.i. can klll millions and allow us to do many things we could only dream of in the past, I don't disagree that it is very cliche but it's cliche for a reason /: (this isn't trying to be agressive0
@@Ikar660 The Flood's 'evolution' over the course of that series is a perfect cautionary tale of why you need to resist the urge to 'one up' the threat of something every time. The originally presented threat of The Flood was more than enough. Everything beyond that just got more and more apathy inducingly stupid.
Speaking of 40K the studio that made Homeworld also made Dawn of War so insert Fan theory that the Galaxy of Homeworld is where remnants of the Humans in the Dark age of Mankind in 40k escaped to. (making Homeworld 40k's "lighter" brother.)
Atmospheric destruction is even a method of Exterminatus in 40K.
"They're an ancient bio-technological plague that merges organic material with inorganic technology to fuse into some wretched abomination of a Hive mind."
So basically the Infested from Warframe if they were actually done by talented writers.
I think my favorite thing about these voicelines is the audio compression. If this game were ever remastered, I feel like it would be a must-have. It really contributes to the horror elements of the game.
I had forgotten just how terrifying the audio in this game was.
Yeah, the screams. Jesus christ...
The research team getting massacred scared me to death back when I first played Cataclysm - and the refugees mission... Yeegh. They really got the atmosphere perfect.
Scouting out the research pod is more interesting if you pull back in time. It starts advancing towards you.
*massacred* is actually lucky, considering how I vaguely remember that it starts reconstituting people into nerve endings ALIVE.
Even the general overview of the story makes me feel hyped. It seems like a golden standard of how to portray an overwhelming force that the most helpless push through the best they can despite the lack of hope. Feels miles more impactful than any hollywood film that has tried the same theme.
On the topic of final mission speeches, I just realized: You did not say what happens at the beginning of the last mission of the original Homeworld. Yes, the burning of Kharak is heartbreaking, one of the greatest emotional moments in gaming, but realizing at the beginning of the finale that Mothership is silent, that the voice you had been hearing for the entire game, that helped you through the dark and uncertain times is gone, maybe even forever, is also, if not more, gut-wrenching.
Which HW2 immediately invalidates
Ahahah Awesome! I was an intern at Barking Dog when they were developing Bully and they had all those Cataclysm Posters Everywhere. Mostly in the bathroom though so it was not a good memory for them.
I'm picturing them directly above the urinals for some reason.
@@MandaloreGaming Something like that, next to the garbage can.
"so how do you piss?"
barking dog dev: "proudly with a cataclysm"
For some people, bathrooms are solace of refuge and safety. A place to relieve yourself of your wastes but also a place you can escape from social situations.
Maybe that's the case here? Then again, I see bathrooms as a battlefield and exorcism chambers rather than sanctuary
Did you happen to copy the source code of cataclysm into a usb stick, per chance?
I still recall the shudder I felt when you heard, spoiler prevention:
X
X
X
X
The Nagorath actually speak. In proper syntax, and everything. It even freakin' sounds SMUG.
Like, holy shit. That thing that ate half your ship, and you've floundered against? It doesn't sound like that because it's some alien goo. It sounds like that because it's an alien goo INFANT.
And now fools are about to unleash a fully mature specimen with an age measured in millions of years old. When the freakin' barely crawling around infant version is a genuine threat to the galaxy.
Like, WOW. There's multi million sci-fi movies out there that has failed spectacularly at raising the stakes half as well as that.
You know, I actually love the sound compression in both the voices and music. It gives a really great vibe. When I played the Remasters, albeit that they're great, it felt so jarring, being used to hearing everything with compression. My mind filled in the gaps as the compression being just an "effect" instead of "lack of details".
compression makes it sound like you're hearing everything over a 2-way radio and I like that
I have heard something similar about the Halo 3 and Reach Xbox 360 versions vs the Halo MCC versions on the PC. I'm surprised that we're steadily getting nostalgia for 2000s era sound tech, I didn't expect that at all.
It really fits in with the whole "lowly miners" theme with borrowed tech and jury rigged designs where everything gotta be lower quality stuff that is easy to maintain and repair.
This is a case where I feel like the compression on the voiced audio actually works in the favor of the game.
What gets me is that you can see it's influences on Mandy's works. He used the effect on 2 of Raycevick's videos.
It's a shame no one ever made another Homeworld game after Cataclysm, but it was a good note to end on.