Home Isn’t Where the Heart Is…At Least Not Yet

Despite a year’s worth of delays, PlayStation Home has been eagerly anticipated by many gamers, and not without reason. Up until now, console gamers’ online socialization has been mostly limited to shouting insults from behind the barrels of their P90s. By finally opening Home up to the public, Sony has provided people with a new way to socialize by giving them an expansive online city where they can chat with friends, meet new people, shop, and play games. Ambitious indeed, and very tantalizing.

Unfortunately, while it does show a lot of potential, the open beta version of Home fails to impress. Thankfully, most of Home’s flaws are fixable, and if Sony were to correct them, Home would definitely give PS3 fans something to brag about.

First among Home’s problems is its flawed avatar creator, which you’ll be taken to on first loading the game. While it may seem at first that Sony is merely playing catch-up to the avatars found on the other systems, Home’s avatar creator is far more in-depth, with thousands of different permutations possible for facial and body types alone. Unlike the bare-bones options on the Wii and 360, you can customize everything from your character’s body shape to its brow height to the thickness of its neck by using a set of eight preset structures or by manipulating a ton of individual features.

Though Home’s system may be more in-depth than both the Wii and 360 avatar creators, it’s also vastly less intuitive. Each individual feature is controlled by a series of sliders. Though this may not seem too complicated, it’s hampered by the fact that you really won’t know what changes you’re making unless you actually make them. This is not so on the Wii and 360, where each option is given its own icon and clearly displayed on the screen. You’ll definitely wind up making many unwanted changes, and since there’s no “undo” option, you’re going to have to manually fix them. Because of the confusing interface, many will probably wind up randomly adjusting sliders rather than choosing exactly what they want. The myriad of options offered should definitely be kept in future builds, but Sony really needs update the creation menu so that it mirrors those found on the Wii and 360 more closely.

After creating your avatar, you’ll be taken to your apartment. It’s tiny and basic, but hey, it’s home. While slightly  disappointing at first, you can customize this space with furniture, wallpaper, and flooring purchased from Home’s mall. You can also purchase entirely different personal spaces, with the only option up right now being the summer cottage, available for a measely – if not poorly spent – $4.99. After a very brief tutorial, you’ll finally be able to explore Home’s world, which brings us to what is perhaps Home’s biggest flaw.

You’ll undoubtedly experience a sense of excitement upon leaving your apartment for the first time, which is understandable considering the hype surrounding Home. Unfortunately, this excitement will quickly fade. The world of Home is limited to four rather small bland spaces, including a mall full of useless items available for purchase via microtransaction, a movie theater where a trailer and music video for Twilight are endlessly looping right now, a bowling alley, and a central plaza. There are also a few spaces themed around specific games (which, at the time of writing, include Uncharted and Far Cry 2). While they are a step in the right direction, all of these spaces just aren’t very interesting. These public spaces are being advertised as a very important aspect of the Home experience, but they don’t offer much to do and they aren’t very detailed, aside from the occasional tree, pond, or video screen.

The dullness of the public spaces is somewhat remedied with the inclusion of a few minigames like chess, a slimmed-down arcade version of Echochrome, and a bubble-popping game called Saucer Pop. These games, though, are nothing special, and serve as minor distractions at best. That is, of course, when they’re actually playable. For some reason, certain games are playable literally by only one person at a time, with a line sometimes forming behind them. I suppose this is intended to mimic real-life arcades or perhaps lessen crowding, but it just doesn’t work in Home’s environment. And it particularly doesn’t make sense for what is supposed to be a massively social experience.

In its current build, Home is little more than a glorified chat room with the avatars, cities, and games acting as nothing more than window dressing. Right now, it seems to be less about substance and more about giving Sony something to talk about in its press releases. Yet, while it doesn’t quite deliver, Home certainly has a great deal of potential, and I hope that Sony will realize that potential in future updates.

Related posts:

1. Home: Only the Least Recognizable Can Join