Yeah, so for me, a game that I liked, but ended up loving less than I thought I would, was Homeworld 3. Because like the things I really like is that like Blackbird Interactive are really good at creating like beautifully choreographed like real time strategy game combat. their little animations and routines like engaging with each other and opening fire. And if there's cool stuff for them to do, if it looks really dynamic that stuff can be really cool to cool to look at. And home world deserts of Karak was really good at this stuff. And home world three was really, really good at it. Like when Kado and I streamed it, I showed off a set piece battle where it was like the enemy's trying to come through the wormhole and you just have to dig in it's basically a tower defense level where it's like wave after wave comes and hits you and you have to sort of hold the line and those moments especially when you can the tactically it's kind of simple so you can sort of kick back and just watch watch it play out you don't have to intervene uh you know quite so intensively it's really spectacular it has all those great homeworld vibes you really really want um and to an extent like that is that is kind of all i need right i'm just i'm always going to just be happy to be here playing a big space combat rts that kind of has like battlestar galactica vibes like i still remember uh my delight when kato like noticed the same thing i did which is that like the cannons track targets and so you will see like tracer fire chasing after targets and unable to basically keep up with what they're trying to shoot. That's sort of that level of like simulational, like ballistics detail, the sense that like it's not just a math problem playing out where this unit does this DPS to this class of enemy. It feels a little more like literally kinetic than that. Like shots are out there connecting to targets and a miss is a miss. That stuff is really fun and rewarding. And, you know, to an extent, like all I needed Homeworld 3 to be was, you know, present. I just needed it to show up and for it to deliver the big space battles. I was kind of surprised that it didn't stay higher in my estimation. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is they made some choices with the story that weren't well received by fans. And I think with good reason. I think it's also a really good example of a game that would be tricky to talk about the story. Because you can end up being adjacent to some real chuds. So basically the story of homeworld three, more than most homeworld games where they're sort of told at sort of a, a distance, uh, the story of a people and in homeworld two, do get more into this idea of like the Sajet family or character named like Karin Sajet, like being an important main character. But there's still this sense of Homeworld feels like a big story. Like, again, like the story of a race, you know, fleeing annihilation, being hunted through stars, you know, because of ancient myth and cursed legacy. Homeworld 3 makes the decision to focus in on a couple characters who mostly talk at each other, you know, from static environments. And one of them is basically a lady in a tank. She's like a not a not an armored tank but like a floating tank like she is she's like one with the she's one with the ship she's been she is she's been she's been plugged in to to the mothership and and she is it's sort of animated spirit and so the story becomes about like uh this this woman and her search for like her lost like maternal figure, her aunt, who's sort of the hero of the second game. And then the great enemy is someone who had a similar cursed destiny to be sort of a navigator. And, you know, the experience drove her mad and turned her into a living god who was going to use her power to strike down planets and wipe out entire races. And I think you could find parts of the reaction that were definitely you definitely could find people who it was clear that some of the objection was like. I don't know why the story is about abroad being all like powerfully important in the story. There's like people in those communities. There are people who are just going to be like, put a woman to the center of the story. It's going to be like, well, that's bullshit. Wow. Oh my God. Forcing, just jamming your ideology down our throats. But I do think there was a lot of reaction that was just like, this is not a particularly good story because it really narrows down. It becomes claustrophobic. And it really takes a story that was sort of like epic scale, galactic scale, and narrows it down to a character whose struggles, whose challenges are not super compelling. And you could just because of how the story ends up playing out. A lot of it turns into like mommy issues, narratives, and then like trauma narratives. And you can, you can, you can stick that landing in sci-fi. You can make stories that, hinge on that. They just didn't here, right? It doesn't quite square. The focus on the individual and the fact that the only people in this world are like these three characters who all talk to each other means that when the camera tries to zoom out and it's like, here's the amazing stuff that's happening. This is entire systems have been destroyed. Fleets are going into battle against each other none of that carries any weight because all of that shit's going to be discarded come the next cut scene when it's going to be about like you know the people around you just want to exploit you for your powers you don't know what a what a way the fate that awaits a navigator but you'll learn little girl no i'm not like you. It's that kind of narrative. And it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the story, a story that like all the other Homeworld games tend to really walk this line. interactive's last home world game. I don't know how much of the writing team is the same, but like they also walked this line, which was a, did a great job of, it is a story about a woman on a search to sort of find the secret to her race's history. And it works there and it doesn't work here. And I think a large measure of that is really almost like choices about how you tell the story where, because you're always reverting to just like detailed animations kind of or detailed portraits of characters speaking these really static environments. It feels like you keep going into a series of vlogs almost. And the previous game didn't have that issue. And then the other part that the community was on to very quickly and it took me a while to sort of cotton on to what some of the issues were. It can be hard to make like RTS games are hard to make, especially when you're going to have things happening in three dimensions and it's going to be this dynamic system. And even over the course of the campaign, you'd kind of feel that it was a game where you built a bigger and bigger fleet and then you just sort of flung it at the enemy fleet and watched it fight. the pace of combat was just fast enough. And the ships were just like slippery enough that there wasn't a lot of sense of like, ah, now I need to maneuver this battleship over here to open fire from, you know, this guy's left side and this guy will. There's not really a lot of space for that. Your time's always better spent in this game, at least in the, in the, in the release build, just harvest more minerals and like build more shit. Like, don't, don't worry. Like send that ship off to die. It'll go take out other ships and you know, you'll have its replacement, uh, you know, on station by the time it's gone. And that is not quite, that's less than what you're looking for from, from a home world. And so, you know, I, I stuck with it after, after release, I played through the campaign. I played a bit of like, like multiplayer, but yeah, I also had some of those issues where it was in so many ways, like in terms of the spectacle, exactly i want from from a home world game but narratively and then in terms of like how sticky or engaging it was to sort of stay in that combat um that's where it kind of that's where it kind of like let itself down a little bit still was a really good experience and still like you know example of a type of rts we don't get enough of a type of game i love but there's a version where like this is executed a little more cleanly and i'm sitting here and this is like my top three and i'm like guys this is this is just amazing sci-fi you got to play it's an amazing tactics game so don't be put off by what you think of the genre and instead it's kind of like oh no it's exactly what you think of the genre it exactly like, it's, it's exactly what, like what you might think of as an RTS and some of the things that keep you, keep you back from it. And so that's kind of, that's just the genre right

now though. Right? Like, would you argue, you know, obviously I'm way more of an outsider. My RTS time was in the nineties, but my outside looking in, can't you argue that is part of the, if you want to call it a problem, problem with RTSs in general is like they're catering to an audience and fell in love with like a very specific sort of interpretation of what these games were in the 90s and early 2000s. And it's not really targeting anyone beyond that. It's targeting those folks as they get a little older and they fall into different niches like well my bucket is homeworld my bucket is company of heroes my bucket is warcraft uh rts is in general isn't really a is starcraft 2 the last time it was like a truly mainstream isn't like isn't it couldn't you argue like dota took over with the oh yeah for sure

like the the the mobas uh sort of ate their lunch. And I think you'd argue that one of the things that was really long term bad for the health of the RTS was that it was kind of the Blizzard model and the Command and Conquer model that really that just defined the genre for a lot of folks. And a lot of other things the genre can support and does were sort of pushed to the wayside. So I can definitely make that case. But I think there's still. Like you're not wrong. The genre mostly appeals to people who have already sort of drunk the kool-aid who are in on the genre but that's true of a lot of different genres right and we don't necessarily do that as a as a as a bug not a feature i think it is more a lot of these games do a good job and and have developed their craft in terms of weaving together narrative mission design, having those two things reinforce each other in really fun ways, or just doing things with like campaign structure that make it like, you know, give you a sense of a consequence and momentum from one to the other. This one doesn't quite pull that off. And I think it's overall like combat design doesn't enable enough uh variance that even with good mission design the mission design is very good but once you're through sort of the the sort of conceits of these missions like the the various twists they put in there you're kind of back to the same kind of game and then you don't necessarily have that big operatic story carrying you along uh unlike some other recent rtss have have managed to do right like uh iron harvest is in many ways a knockoff uh company of heroes right that was the game where it was all diesel punk post-world war one mecha action in eastern Europe. It was based on that one, like Jakub Brzezalski's artwork. He did the, kind of the Scythe game, the Scythe board game is based off. It's in the same universe, if you've seen Scythe. And that actually ended up having a very good campaign, despite how traditional it was, just because they had a really distinctive range of characters who then their individual stories took place in this broader grand sweep of history, tapestry of a story. And that's kind of where Homeworld falls down. So yeah, like the genre has some of these problems, but for all that it can be kind of an inward looking genre, there's still, you know, every couple of years, like somebody pulls one out and does something interesting there or really worth spending time in. This one doesn't quite nail the formula and ends up being kind of an example of, you can see what they were going for. Just parts of it. They, they, they didn't land as well as they would have liked. Okay. Janet, don't have to spend a wheel.