Editorial - What's Wrong With Home? Almost Everything
An editorial by
Richard Brownell published on 12.19.2008
I haven’t had the best experience with
Sony’s social gaming PlayStation 3 application, PlayStation Home. In fact, it’s the worst thing I’ve played on a game console in years. When I received my invite to the Home closed beta, the opportunity to test Home before its official release had me mildly excited. Now that the open beta is out, I’m free to talk about how bad my experience was. Sure, it’s a beta. It’s not finished. But betas are highly representative of the quality of the final product. Downloader beware.
Initialization
After the lengthy download of Home and setting aside a few gigs on my hard drive for Home locations and purchases to be stored, I was finally able to boot it. The Home experience starts off on the wrong foot. Instead of immediately being thrust into a virtual world of PS3 gamers, you are given a title screen. Then upon choosing to enter Home (your only option), you’re given terms of service and news of the day. Aside from the TOS which you only need to accept each time there are changes to Home, you must follow several steps every time you enter home: boot up PS3, click over to Home icon and start it, click through Home title screen, click through news of the day, wait for the last space you were in to load up. This is all to enter an experience that is supposed to represent something you might enter each time you use your PS3.
Character Creation
You start your Home set-up by creating your avatar. Sony specifically wanted to create the most realistic avatars of the three game systems and in this regard they have succeeded. Almost any combination of options you choose will result in an avatar that looks very much like a human staring into the depths of your soul with its dead eyes. The customization options are more like
Oblivion’s than Wii or Xbox 360, but a little bit more intuitive. Still, it can be difficult to make something truly resembling you. You may find since you are dealing with realistic avatars that you’d do a better job with an actual picture as reference.
The character creation has a definite learning curve if you want realism. With Miis especially and Xbox avatars to a lesser extent, you make your character by choosing features that highlight what makes you look different than others. It’s easier to make what is essentially a caricature of yourself than to make a realistic interpretation. With time and skill, the PS3 community of avatars could end up looking like the people playing them.
Clothing selection is a bit slim in the beta (and so is the beard selection!). You are basically limited to looking like you bought your clothes at the Gap or a Gap Outlet store. Take your pick. Although the clothes aren’t all that bad, they are only available in a single color. It’s worse after two realizations: that color might not be the one you want, and it’s also going to be the same color everybody else who chooses that clothing item will be wearing. In my travels around Home, there were very few people that looked different from everybody else.
I’m Home!
After making your avatar, you are dropped into your very own apartment...after you wait for it to download. It’s the Harbour Studio Apartment that everybody starts with. It’s a single room apartment modestly furnished with some white IKEA-ish furniture and a fantastic view. Actually, the view from the Harbour Studio Apartment is probably the nicest thing about Home. They did an excellent job showing me an ocean I’d like to sail on (but can’t), a dock I’d love to visit (but can’t), the rest of my apartment complex I can’t walk through, and some fantastic looking mountains (I can’t hike in).
But I can redecorate my apartment. I can add or remove furniture (at this point with only a selection of the items already in the apartment) and repaint the walls. I went with the nature wallpaper. At this point, you also learn the controls of your character and how to emote, a variety of gestures your avatar can make.
To the Central Plaza
It’s now time for the social part. I leave my apartment and am magically whisked away to the Central Plaza, a gathering point between all locations in Home. It’s something akin to an outdoor courtyard in a giant mall. The walls are covered with advertising, both posters, and trailers. And there are several storefronts you have to choose from. Other avatars are skittering around all over, chatting or looking for things to do. They initially appear as ghosts until all their clothing has been loaded into your PS3’s memory. There’s a little bit of lag as this happens and as you wander around, but nothing too major. Oh, I almost forgot. Once again, we had to wait for this area to download.
Movie Sign
One of the storefronts is a theater. Upon entering, it’s identical to a real-life theater. There are many rows of seats you can actually sit in with people sitting and watching the screen. There are also many people griefing them by standing in their way in the front of the room chatting away.
The idea of this type of theater is an enigma to me. The viewing experience is less than ideal when compared to just downloading what you want to watch. You have no idea if you are watching the movie from the same point as anybody else so there’s not much to talk about and if you aren’t talking, then it isn’t a “social gaming” area. You don’t even have a choice of what to watch. I saw some kind of featurette about
Farcry 2, I think.
After exiting the movie theater, something I recommend doing immediately if you accidentally enter it, I found a kiosk called Listen@Home. It had three songs on it. I can’t say much about this yet as it doesn’t seem to even be anything yet. Maybe it’ll be cool later.
Time to go Shopping!
The Mall is obviously the heart of Home. I don’t mean from a consumer’s perspective. I mean from Sony’s perspective. It’s where, aside from the advertising, they will make the big bucks selling you worthless bits and bytes to dress up your characters and homes with. You will gladly take out your digital wallet to pay for these things because ... well, I’m not sure why, but Sony expects you to.
The Mall is made up of two floors. The exact same stores are on both levels. I assume this is because they ran out of store ideas, but still wanted to have multiple levels. When the beta started, all the stores were closed, but at the end they were open and had many free items that cost real world money on the open beta now. I, of course, bought them all.
The buying experience isn’t so bad. Some of the pictures of items didn’t load for me, but that was probably momentary network problems that will be fixed soon. I’m not sure how to judge the actual item selection though. On the one hand, everything seemed nice. I could get more clothing options, a new house, and decorations and furniture for my house. On the other hand, it all costs real world money and the only value I get is that I or my dwelling space looks different than it did before. Home is the realization of Oblivion Horse Armor on a grand scale.
But hey, the mall also had chess. It’s currently the only possible place to play chess in Home and has a total of three boards. These are free to play, but don’t expect to ever play since they are always taken.
Bowling, Billiards and Arcade
Ah yes, the favorite past-time of any warm-blooded American: bowling. The bowling alley in Home is rather nice compared to the ones near me in real life. I didn’t have to pay for it and I didn’t have to deal with stinky shoes, misshapen balls or dented lanes. Thus ends the good aspects. The bowling itself is alright. I have a hard time appreciated video game bowling after playing Wii Bowling, but maybe that’s just me. It’s worse that you can overhear everything the nearby bowlers are saying while you try to converse with the people you are playing with.
And it’s even worse than that: there are only a few lanes available for all the millions of PS3 users. Just like with chess, you have to wait to play bowling. I imagine now that the open beta is out, you probably have to wait a long time. But while you are waiting, you can just go play in the arcade, right? Not really. There are a handful of games to choose from and they are more popular than bowling, which isn’t saying much: they aren’t very good, either. Why wouldn’t they have filled the arcade with hundreds of machines covering as many classic real arcade games as possible? If the arcade is busy, you may even be able to find an empty pool table. Good luck.
Themed Spaces
Now that the open beta is out, I am finally able to see the themed spaces that were shown off at various events in the past year. These are areas only available from the world map in the start menu that are created by publishers (or a third party) to complement a published game. In theory, there could be themed spaces for anything, but for now it's just games.
The two themed spaces available to visit right now are
FarCry 2 and
Uncharted. I haven't played the former, so I'm not sure how excited fans of the game are to visit. It's a rather large themed space made up of a train stop converted to a base of sorts in the desert. You can hang out, enjoy the scenery, and do the usual Home chatting with those also in the space. There's also an office to visit on the second level.
The
Uncharted space was much more interesting to me and also has more to do in it. It's Sully's Bar and once again functions as a place to hang out and chat. But it also has some activities to partake in. There are some arcade machines that I haven't been able to get a chance to play yet as they are extremely popular. Three rooms are only available by entering codes (found on the internet or I assume in the arcade games if you can play them). Inside them are more rooms as well as a video reel, concept art, etc. If you look around the themed space, you'll also find many artifacts that Drake found in the game.
The themed spaces are the best part of Home so far. If you've played the games they correspond to, they can provide some interest beyond simply standing around and chatting with friends. They are super crowded right now, but I'm sure as time goes by and more themed spaces open up they will be more manageable. The sky is the limit with the integration themed spaces can have with games. To me, these have a lot more potential than the rest of Home.
Clubhouse
If you have made it this far in your Home experience, congratulations. You’ve utilized every public aspect of Home. You have arrived. But there is a bit more on the private side to round out your awesome day in Home. Making a club is one of them.
I made a club for GamesAreFun.com. It was free in the closed beta. It’s a fairly bland empty room with a raised section of floor in the back and two bulletin boards to leave notes on. You can decorate it with the same furniture you use for your living spaces. I imagine clubs could turn out to be gathering spaces for people but there weren’t many GAF fans in the closed beta. Also, the GAF club disappeared in the switch from closed to open beta.
Of all the things in Home, it's Clubs that it seems Sony wants to make the least appealing. It costs $4.99 to set up a basic empty room club. You then have to pay a monthly fee to keep it up. Clubs can have a maximum of 31 members with you as the leader and up to four sub-leaders. Leadership cannot be transferred to any other member. Disbanded clubs can never be remade with the same name. You can only be a member of five clubs at any given time and can only be the leader of one. The extent of the constraints is puzzling at best. Home certainly isn't reacting to user behavior or exploitation but seems to be starting with far more restrictions than necessary, even limiting how many clubs you can make which is money in the bank for Sony.
My Summer Home
The only home available for purchase right now is a Summer Home. It’s $4.99 on the open beta. It’s more lavish and roomy than the Harbour Studio with two adjoining rooms, each with a fireplace. If you want to furnish it with appropriate furniture, you’ll need to shell out some more money for that. The Summer Home also has a balcony overlooking an area you can’t ever explore, but it is quite pretty.
That’s It
That’s the entirety of Home. Before items were added to the Mall for purchase, I exhausted everything you could dream of doing in under two hours. Much of that was spent downloading things. After they added the items, I bought them all, downloaded them all, changed my clothes and redecorated my living spaces which added another 15 minutes or so of Home. Had this been in the open beta, buying everything would have left me poor to top it all off.
Fail
I’m left with a sour taste in my mouth after giving Home an honest shot. There are things that can be improved to make the experience better. The furniture placement system could use some work. The avatar creation system could be made easier to use. Any time I am forced to wait to enjoy something or be stuffed in an overcrowded room should be instanced. But iterating on what is already in Home ignores a basic truth: it’s pointless. I already have the ability to be social with my friends outside of Home, both on the PS3 in a limited way and on my PC in an unlimited way. The added value of Home either costs money to use and is pointless (clothes, living spaces) or is scarce for no reason (bowling, arcade, pool tables, chess). Themed spaces are the exception, not the rule. I want to be generous. I want Home to be awesome as many other aspects of PS3 (Blu-Ray, games like
Uncharted and
Metal Gear Solid 4, Folding@Home) have proven to be. But it’s not. It’s a failure, one that I’m not sure Sony will be able to fix.
If you'd like another take on PlayStation Home, Chris Pioli is looking at Home's features one piece at a time. His first entry covers
character and personal space customization.
