Homeworld 3 comes with fully 3D modeled cutscenes – That’s Gaming

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Developer Blackbird Interactive has revealed many details about some of the audiovisual aspects of the upcoming space-based strategy game Homeworld 3. In a post on Steam, the studio discusses the use of fully animated 3D intermediate scenes in the game’s campaign, as well as how the audio work.

While the original Homeworld and its sequel had interludes that consisted primarily of static graphics with narration and voice actors, the interludes in Homeworld 3 will instead feature fully modeled and animated characters. Intermediate scenes will feature key characters from the game’s story and will be pre-rendered.

As for the audio portion, Homeworld 3 is designed around a core idea: “Give the fleet a human character.” To support this idea, the game includes a speech system that aims to bring life to the gameplay from moment to moment. This includes a new approach to the traditional “bark sounds” that real-time strategy games have when units are commanded.

Each ship in Homeworld 3 will have two voices. One voice will be the primary “bark” that lets players know what the ship is doing. The second voice will be there for atmosphere and story, and will only be audible if the player zooms in extremely close to the ship in question. These conversations between ships will occur regardless of whether the player can hear them or not, and players may accidentally end up in conversations between ships.

Homeworld 3 will also use Unreal Engine 4’s Physically Based Rendering system, which allows the studio to realistically simulate how light would interact with different materials in space. This allows the game to have dynamic lighting and real-time surface reflections, as well as shadows and global lighting.

In terms of gameplay, the real-time strategy title will feature dynamically generated haze fields that can affect how a battle unfolds. For example, ships flying into a haze field can take advantage of the gas’s ability to hide them from enemy sensors. Homeworld 3 will include realistic simulated gas to generate these haze fields.