Homeworld 3 is a little fishy, but that’s only because of the coral reefs

polygon.com:

A new trailer for Homeworld 3 arrived on Tuesday, showing spacecraft large and small duking it out over the wreckage of massive orbital structures. Polygon played the level shown in that video — remotely, mind you, and without the final bits of graphical flourish like ray tracing — but the experience was nonetheless stunning. This is Homeworld the way I remember it, with its signature three-dimensional space combat lighting up the darkness on my computer screen. But, to hear Blackbird Interactive’s chief creative officer Rory McGuire tell it, it’s actually more like Homeworld the way I imagined it.

“One of the things we were heavily inspired by,” McGuire said in an interview with Polygon, “was one of the ideas that they had originally for Homeworld 2 back in — this would have been like 2001.”

That 21-year-old demo reel, still available on YouTube in various places, shows an assault on a large orbital structure much like the one seen in this week’s trailer. The camera swings in close alongside fighters and bombers, detailing an almost Star Wars-style trench run on the final objective, turrets blazing away in defiance of the attacking waves of enemy ships.

“They showed this feature and they ended up cutting it later,” McGuire said. “This idea of space terrain and this idea of these massive large-scale megaliths that a player could interact with. They weren’t able to make it work technically, and when we started talking about Homeworld 3, we were inspired by that idea, but were also inspired by what we were doing on Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.”

Released in 2016, Deserts of Kharak has been a fixture on Polygon’s list of the best modern PC games, in large part because of its clever use of terrain. The game takes place in a