Homeworld 3 Devs Reveal What Is Being Changed Thanks To Player Feedback

Last month, Homeworld 3 developer Blackbird Interactive announced it was pushing the game’s release date to May, in order to implement player feedback from February’s open demo. Now, the devs have revealed what exactly they’re working on to get the long-awaited sequel ready for release in May.

In a new update on the game’s Steam page, Blackbird has outlined five major changes they’re implementing in response to player feedback, including tweaks that bring the new title closer in line with classic Homeworld games.

First up, the controls are getting reworked in response to player feedback that said the Modern control scheme was unintuitive and the Classic controls didn’t feel enough like those classic games. First and foremost, Blackbird is making every keyboard input rebindable, meaning players can customize the controls to their liking if the defaults still don’t hit the mark.

The default hotkeys are also getting some sweeping changes, to make the overall experience better for players who don’t want to spend a lot of time customizing their input. There are two defaults for hotkeys, one of them the revamped Modern layout, and one replicating the Homeworld 2 Remastered hotkeys. The camera movement has also seen some tweaks, with the devs saying it handles more like you may remember from Homeworld 2 Remastered now.

The second point of business for the developers is to make combat more exciting, by tweaking some of the more tedious aspects of combat. The changes will make formations feel more organic, as well as making them more strategically useful. Support Frigates now also have more autonomy to heal friendly ships without directly being instructed to. All ships will now have 30% more hitpoints, and the developers have also increased both the duration and cooldown on abilities to make their use more strategic and less spammy.

In terms of bringing back more of that classic Homeworld feel, Blackbird has also fixed the classic Attack Move, where ships can attack in one direction while moving in a different one. The studio explains that Attack Move wasn’t performing as expected in the demo due to needing more time to properly implement it, as well as a bug that impacted certain larger ships.

A number of quality-of-life updates are also in line for Homeworld 3 before its release, including a slider to adjust the scale of the HUD. Blackbird has also fixed an issue impacting the scaling of ships, which in the demo resulted in some ships looking far larger or smaller than they should.

Finally, Blackbird is also making some balance tweaks to War Games, including adding extra objectives to improve the variety between runs. Resources Controllers have also been made free to rebuild if destroyed during a game, however they will now take significantly longer to build.

The full blog post goes into more detail on the pre-launch changes, with the developers explaining the process of finding balance between modern gaming standards and that classic Homeworld feel. Check out everything we know about Homeworld 3 ahead of its release on PC on May 13, with advanced access from May 10.