That probably doesn’t help you much – if you have any specific questions I can help with, let me know, I’ll do what I can. I’m not sure about removing or spoofing the Securom DRM – I’m sure if the pirates can work around it, Gearbox could work around it, without having to find the source assets. It’s possible that stuff still exists on back-ups that went to another Rockstar office, but honestly I doubt it.Īll music and sound assets (VO, dialogue, etc.) are still archived at Studio X Labs, last I checked, at best quality – theoretically the base Cataclysm, using just a retail copy, could have it’s sound up-scaled, since it’s no longer constrained to a CD. Relic was pretty dismissive of Cataclysm, so I don’t know what they would or would not have saved. Cataclysm existed in a weird space where Sierra wanted an expansion to the series, but Relic wanted it separated from the main line, hence the “standalone expansion” marketing oxymoron. Sierra’s would be long gone, and I don’t know what the archive situation at Relic was in regards to Cataclysm, but Barking Dog’s are certainly gone as well – where to, I don’t know, we haven’t been involved with Barking Dog / Rockstar in over a decade, and at least two different offices. There should have been code copies at Barking Dog, Relic, and Sierra. I hope they don’t think it’s not of interest to gamers! Technically, it’s part of the same IP, but assets and code are less directly available, so I don’t know if they’re keeping mum on it until they know what they can and can’t make available, or if they think because it was made by another company, the rights are distinct from 1 & 2 – though with all third-parties involved basically dissolved, I doubt that’s the case. Thus far Gearbox hasn’t talked much about Cataclysm. After writing a polite email about the issue, I got this reply from Chris Stewart, a producer at Kerberos. In that podcast, Paul said how he knew the folks at Kerberos, and how they used to be Barking Dog Studios, the folks behind Cataclysm. I therefore contacted Paul, and he put me in touch with some of his friends at Kerberos. You may remember Paul from the podcast we did on Sword of the Stars.

Regardless, I wanted to find out what happened to this entry in the series, so I first contact friend of the site Paul “Rorschach” Tobia. Original: With all the talk of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 getting an HD makeover from the folks at Gearbox, I had to wonder…what happened to Cataclysm? I’ve not played Cataclysm, but I’ve been told many a time it’s the best in the series, but it seems to be something of a black sheep, as a lot of folks seemed to skip it since it wasn’t from Relic directly.

Update 2/23/15: Following up on this article, we’ve recently had two of the folks who worked on Cataclysm on our podcast, including Chris from the article below and Martin Cirulis, who also worked on the original Homeworld.

Homeworld cataclysm crashes