There's No Place Like Home

Written by Adam Dodd

Wednesday, 07 January 2009 20:35

It’s been awhile since Sony launched its much hyped (and utterly terrible) Second Life clone, Home, and after a fairly craptastic introduction to the service, it now works mildly well. I never thought I would hear myself recommend Second Life over... anything really, but if you’re looking for an interesting social experience, I definitely recommend it over Home. But since Home hasn’t been out for very long, Sony still has time to make it a worthwhile feature on the PS3; here are some features I think Sony should change, add, or remove from Home to make it a place I actually want to visit:

First, add the much anticipated trophy support, and make it great. I love my gamertag (because I’m a total nerd) so I want to be able to have my trophies scattered all around my apartment. Forget furniture. I want my guests to sit and eat off my trophy collection.

Furthermore, I've always been very impatient, so stop making me wait. I don’t want to wait in line to go bowling, or to use the arcade, or to play pool. More than one person should be able to play the arcades at a time.

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Also, get rid of the load times, or at least shorten them. I’m very impatient and I really don’t want to wait for each new area to load. I have 80 GB of free space on my PS3 that I will never use, so why not put that space to good use?

I've also noticed the only feature you really seemed to put time and effort into was the monetization of items in Home. Maybe more development time should have been spent on making Home a fun and interesting place to spend time in… just a thought.

Oh, and the theater sucks. This was the only area I got (somewhat) excited for and it was a total letdown for me when I watched the looped trailer and music video for Twilight after waiting five minutes for the video to load. I mean, Twilight? Sony, why do you hate me so?

Even MORE fun in Home

And finally (and most importantly), stop making promises you can’t keep. I love getting excited for your products, and God knows I eat up almost everything you put out, but I will no longer blindly fall in love with every promise you make me. I will be strong.

Now there are a dozen other things that need to be changed/added/removed in order for Home to be an even slightly amusing experience, but these were the things that really bothered me. So please Sony, you still have time to make good on some of your promises and even though I have a great view from my apartment's balcony, I won't let you get away with this mediocre online service. And if for some reason you can’t give us the Home we deserve, then I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say, give us God of War III!

Comments (5) Add Comment

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written by Ryan Hewson, January 08, 2009

Could it be in serious trouble? Of course. But not for the reasons you list, I disagree.

First off, I wouldn't characterize a beta launch 4 weeks ago as "out a while". It's been available a relatively short time, and to be fair most of the free world was celebrating a few stat holidays in there.

The issues you list are indeed glaring, but this is the way I look at it: everything you mentioned is either already announced or an easy fix. We know trophy support is mandatory as of Jan.1 for PS3 devs. We can see products that have prominent Home logos on them for game launching (strangely absent from your complaints!), like Resistance 2, BioShock, Killzone 2, etc.

Stuff like instanced arcade cabinets, which utterly offends our sensibilities, was obviously just a blinkered design decision. But come on, how hard do you think it is for them to simply change the interface in this respect? It's not a crippling, fundamental flaw; it's just a dumb oversight. IMO.

The theatre does suck, but you also missed a 10 minute preview for the Resident Evil cg movie. At least that's a little more interesting/exclusive. The Japanese theatre is more interesting but I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole space go away at some point.

I could go on for a lot longer about the things I'd change/rearrange/do over in Home, and I know I'm alone on this one, but I still don't think the core idea is completely worthless. Sony's doing a great job of making me look stupid on that one lately. Despite all that I can't get away from the core logic of it, which is that as long as its free and available, they can basically fuck around with it and people will keep checking back. If that PR quote from last week was to be believed, Home items already make more money than the video store. The fucking video store! IF that continues to be true, even in the sorry state Home is in, we basically know fuck-all about how the economic dynamics of this virtual social thing works. I never would have guessed that.

And I don't even think the Home team is particularly large. I don't think we've "given up" another AAA game to have Sony work on Home. Doesn't work like that.

If they clean up the interface some (follow the same update trajectory as the Store and the XMB), get some content in there (Red Bull space went in today BTW), and get game launching support working then it'll be actually worthwhile to use. You can moan about the polish and rightly so, and yes the "beta" tag should not be a get-out-of-criticism free card, but while they are making basically no promises as to how the whole thing will shake out while still offering me the (core, un-Dieseled) thing for free.... why should I get worked up about it? My PS3 games didn't go anywhere and it's all hidden behind an icon in the XMB.

Where I think they may have problems is with external advertisers cutting exotic projects like, say, advertising in kooky experimental virtual worlds. But hey, if games have more recession-resilience than other industries, that may well be where the eyeballs are in the next few years.

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written by Mark Peachey, January 08, 2009

I've always really enjoyed the IDEA of Home. I haven't experienced it, don't own a PS3, but I think the concept is a fascinating one. Everything, however, is in the execution. Should Sony continue to mold Home into something better, I think it could potentially set the standard for game systems into the future.

Then again, maybe not.