I have been incredibly excited for the Remastered release of Homeworld and Homeworld 2, I played HW1 and Cataclysm for uncountable hours and they are amazing games. Gearbox hasn't had the best track record recently but I was willing to put that all aside because I fucking love these games, and my god did they do a bang up job for most of it.

First it looks FANTASTIC my god, the DOF, the high res models, the backgrounds, the shadows aren't perfect but damn good enough overall it is a visual extravaganza and it sounds even better the redone music and sounds are top notch and if it wasn't for some missing sounds and misplaced sounds (Weapon sounds in particular are a little all over the place) it would be a damn near perfect soundscape.

So with all this being so strong whats wrong? They literally released this game with one of the most core aspects of HW1 completely broken, Formations, this is where you tell you strike groups what shape to take at all times, while it doesn't sound that important it is critical to battle because otherwise your fighters just fan out in a really haphazard way. Right now what happens is that when you assign a formation they will do so only to completely break apart the moment they get into battle flying around willy nilly and barely keeping individual ships in their sights long enough to attack. You used to be able to tell your ships to get into a Sphere formation and Guard a capital or support ship and they would literally form a 3D sphere around the ship and try to keep that shape at all cost, now they clump up "near" the ship in a useless ball of bullshit.

There are other bugs but nothing comes close to this it breaks such basic fundamentals of the combat, I really hope this gets patched and I will halt my playthrough of the HW1 campaign until this is addressed...if it is addressed.

Damn it Gearbox I wanna love you for remaking this game but COME ON!

That sucks, but I can't imagine that they'll leave it unaddressed.

I really hope not, they are so close to dispelling all the bad feelings about Colonial Marines with this release.

That sounds like an unfortunate bug that slipped through the crack. By your title I thought this was another Gearbox Alien cerfuffle.

Jesus Christ no, there is way more good than bad but this is an insane bug that some others in the community have implied could be tied to this version of HW1 being built entirely in the HW2 engine which further implies it may not be fixable... I hope that isn't that case.

This bug is the epitome of being a patch job at anytime and considering this day and age were games are broken for months on end. This one bug is tiny! Look at Rome Total War 2 that thing has been overhauled so much its not operational and none of the utterly game breaking bugs or moronic AI for your army and theirs THAT is a moment to lament and give up until a patch. This little bug however will only harm a purest your self that know the in and outs of HW.

Which is an huge overreaction, also....have you considered since HW1 in the remaster is literal smashed with HW2 (the skirmish allows all races and ships fight each other no matter about game mechanics changes between 1 or 2) that the formations and other things aside from UI is uniform and the same for both games. Meaning the formations are working as intended right now?

Just because we have gotten used to everything being a broken mess doesn't mean we should be okay with it.

There are many other bugs but those I can look past for a such a ambitious remake, this is not a tiny bug it is malfunctioning in every way. You don't need to be a "purest" (Which I am not or I could have written about 4-5 more paragraphs) to notice how broken it is telling your ships to form up around another ship and have a few of them just drift away to nowhere is not okay in the midst of battle.

I wouldn't call anything I said a huge overreaction considering I commended Gearbox for doing so well in many other aspects but this bug is just shocking since it absolutely effects combat in crazy important ways and is worth pointing out to others picking this up to play HW1.

There is no way this is intended and if it is they need to change it soon.

Seriously? I could not give the game more praise if I tried, it's just a really fundamental thing that isn't there and its just surprising? I'm not saying anything unfair but thanks for your input.

I loved being able to call formations in HW1, its a shame it didn't make it in, even if HW1 is using HW2 rulesets...

It is a shame, but hopefully it will get corrected, it was still worth it for me just to get the originals working correctly on a newer OS but I look forward to at the least a community mod to fix it.

This seems like a kind of integral thing to be missing? Weird

@evilsbane: You make it sound way more broken than it really is my point. Not "Broken games are ok" a tiny bit of patience and WAY less melodrama, the way you put made it seem as disastrous as Colonial Marine and should never have been released. This is something that could have and probably did happen with 1.00 of Homeworld when it was first released guess what happened? 1.01 probably fixed it and far more hanouse bugs than the ones you encountered in the Remastered. Then if that didn't work they patched it again all the way up to 1.05 as it was last updated.

This has always happened and will always happen since patching after release was allowed, this situation is no different from when Homeworld 1 was released.

Patches ARE NORMAL. If you were coming to this 4 years from now and its the exact same THEN you can have your melodramatic post, as it is it has been 2 days being so defeatist is just being whiney , you need things in perspective.

You seem to be the only one overreacting here. It's a big oversight I am hopeful of a fix, but that doesn't mean I can't be surprised that a core tenant of the combat is basically nonfunctional on release. Homeworld had plenty of bugs on release that were never corrected, there is a chance this may not get fixed as I mentioned so expressing my woes over it doesn't exactly seem melodramatic Gearbox made a great product and I hope they take it all the way. It doesn't matter that they can patch it I know they can and I hope they will but it's just a big question mark of how that got left like that.

This made me laugh really hard. You have to admit that it can set up some really comical situations.

@evilsbane: I'm kind of glad that I never played homeworld up until now. I'm having a blast with the campaign and because I never played the original I'm not missing the formations working the way they used to. It is indeed a breathtaking game to watch. Seeing a couple destroyers take out the other ships with their cannons and beam guns is awesome,and the way they implemented three dimensional unit control just feels great.

Oh no, Homeworld: The Master Chief Collection.

It's not that bad.

@rollingzeppelin: I'm in the same space boat as you, playing it for the first time. It'd be neat to see what the formation fuss is about (though I suppose I could just boot up the Classic versions) but so far the game is awesome. Also it's fun to trail a small ship flying around a big furball while things explode around it.

Also x2: Fuck Junkyard Dog. That asshole.

Huh. I haven't tried doing that yet in the campaign, but I do remember being able to do a wall formation with ion frigates in the asteroid field mission and having that be a damn meat grinder, when in Remastered it took a lot of micro to get past it without losing a lot of ships.

I'm guessing there's a bunch of weird approximation going on here, since they made a new "Homeworld 2.5" engine for this and then reverse engineered HW1 into it. Hence things like no fuel for fighters and quick docking/auto resource collection at the end of missions.

I've definitely noted a few places around HW1 where things that used to work now don't or behave differently. I don't remember collectors being quite so picky about when they stopped harvesting resources and in the mission where you use dust to shield against radiation I swear I can't see the dust trails at all. I've also hit a couple of bugs where I had to restart a mission, but they were all related to skipping cutscenes and doing weird stuff as you beam in, so no biggie there.

I'm playing this in order and I wonder if HW2 is a bit smoother, since the engine seems built with HW2 mechanics in mind. Either way, this all seems patchable and nothing is gamebreaking. I'm enjoying this a lot. But you have a point, the visuals seem to have gotten more polish than the AI and logic before release.

EDIT: To the arguments about patching above... am I the only one that remembers the original HW1 and Cataclysm actually shipping a bit broken, too? HW1 and 2 definitely got a lot of post-release patching, and finding those was a big part of how annoying it was to reinstall them from my original discs. At this point you just had to go to mod sites and download whatever they told you to.

Yeah that is great, focusing the camera on a bomber while it strafes a gigantic ship and seeing the dozens of other ones coming in at all angles doing the same.

I don't think I'm quite as far as you in the campaign, I haven't met Junkyard Dog yet ha ha. Did you find the asteroid level super difficult? I had to redo it like 10 times until I figured out that I should have my frigates move to the side and shoot at them as the asteroids moved perpendicularly to them. My assault frigates kept wanting to get up point blank to the targets which caused them to crash into the asteroids when they stopped shooting.

Yea absolutely not, as a "proud" owner of MCC it is certainly not even in the same ballpark, MCC is...just busted I have played a ton of MCC but that is because Halo is a great series but everything about that package has issues, this is not that bad but it's just one of those huge oversights that I just can't fathom how it got overlooked

I own HW1 on disc and there are certainly bugs but nothing that prevents anything so central to the game from working, scripting errors and crashes are what I remember happening the most (Arguably worse but that happens in Remastered just to a very acceptable degree) its still playable its just makes an already tough game harder when you can't employ these basic tactics, they make a difference. But man it looks pretty.

You may just have a playstyle that relies on those a lot. I am halfway through the campaign and doing just fine. I think I would rather have better salvage corvette behaviours than more stable formations, if we're going to talk about things that make me ineffective in this game.

I do play these games frequently, but I'd have to go back to HW1 (which I may do at some point) and play them side by side to see how much of a difference this makes in how I play the game. So far I haven't felt it was broken or preventing me from doing well, to be honest.

And, hey, no, HW1 had balance issues and AI issues, too. I seem to remember the patch notes being full of tweaks on that, and fan patches took them even further.

I managed to get through that mission somewhat easily with a bundle of Ion Frigates, along with some captured...I think they're called Ion Arrays? And 2 Destroyers for as much long-range rock sniping as possible. Stealing ships is real fun, by the way.

Anything closer ranged seems to just love faceplanting asteroids which, while I admire their drive to help the cause, it's a bit much guys, calm down. Also I put the camera behind and above (just kinda moving up and down) the Mothership and Control-Selected the asteroids roughly in-line with it, constantly, so my guys never stopped shooting.

Also I shoved all the small ships into the Mothership after I watched the first like, 5-10~ corvettes hug a rock.

The next mission was fun with all those Ion ships.

Oh, while we're speaking of annoying bugs in HWR... I changed my bindings to make B the toggle for the build order menu because why would you ever want it to stick open by default? Well, the game loses that binding every time I boot it, although it has successfully forgotten the default binding for the togle (shift+B). Anybody else having weirdness with custom keyboard shortcuts?

Yeah I have this same problem, have to change that bind everytime I open the game. Also another weird bug occurs when I alt tab and go back into the game, it makes my cursor position reset to the middle of the screen every time I hold the right mouse button to move the camera.

Also, here's some video of my 2 biggest problems with this game right now, I'd be more than willing to accept the changes they made to the core balance if they address these issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVQi49ACc24 - Support Frigates have really nerfed range, and the AI freaks out when you tell them to heal each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx0uxR2kZy8 - Formations don't work, as stated in the topic. I don't know about making strike craft as good at strafing and aiming as they are in HW1, but at least make them keep formation, and allow sphere formation for a high risk high damage method of making targets dead.