fter spending several hours with the recently released PSN Home Open Beta, I have come to two conclusions about it. The first is that this never should have been put into a beta test given its many flaws, and the second is that there is some potential for the service.
Let's start by going over what Home does right. Home is intended as a social networking experience. In that capacity it works pretty well. It's an excellent way for PlayStation users to meet and interact with people that they have never played a game with. Sony came up with two ways of encouraging interaction to take place.
The first is in the Community Plaza which acts like a hub in some respects, linking to the player's personal place as well as the Mall and Bowling Alley. In the plaza, people are free to talk to each other. There is also Live@Home, which is an area of the plaza that, something like a dance club, allows people to vote on what song they want to hear next and, from my experience, always has someone dancing emotes there.
The experience, as of now, leaves much to be desired. The second way that Sony uses to promote friendly interaction is through various community games. Most of these are located in the Bowling Alley and include Bowling and Pool. The Mall is just what you would expect, with a few stores along with a video screen that shows a loop of advertisements for current and upcoming games.
Buildings and characters are very detailed and have a modern chic feel to them. Characters have a wide range of customization of the body and face. The intent here seems to be to allow a person to implant an accurate likeness into Home. Decorating your Personal Space in Home is simple and easy to do, though a zoom function while in decorating mode would have been nice. Menu navigation is done with a PDA, which looks very clean and is a fast alternative to walking around the hub Plaza.
What's in that store?
Right now: probably nothing.While this may look promising, the experience as of now leaves much to be desired. There are many odd design choices. For one, the Theater areas cannot be accessed from the Plaza, even though the Theater occupies a large area. Then there's the downloads — when entering an area for the first time you have to download it. While this makes a certain amount of sense in the areas for Far Cry 2 and Uncharted, as those are outside of the core Home experience, it doesn't make any sense at all why you have to download the Plaza area after you've just downloaded the entire Home program.
Character emotes look natural but character movements don't. They look wooden and unnatural. As for the social games, while they may be an interesting way of getting people to interact with each other, there is a set amount of room for each one so only a few people can play at a single time. This is particularly notable for the arcade games, which are for one person only. Sony made the decision to have most of the arcade machines unlock house items or clothing so these machines were constantly occupied at Home's launch. The killer is that these arcade games aren't very good to begin with: one's utterly forgettable, another's a Breakout clone and the third is essentially a demo for Echochrome .
Social games only allow so many people to play at a time.Even if you decide to forgo the social games you're still going to run into issues if you decide to focus on the social aspect. Words that shouldn't be censored currently are because they contain a root of a word that may be considered offensive. So for example, words like "Hello" and "Something" are currently censored because they contain "Hell" and "Meth" in them.
The Mall is expectedly full of microtransactions. The stores themselves are mostly empty, with one store having nothing in it and another space vacant for a store in the future. Getting all the items currently available will set you back about $25. Another big issue that I noticed is that the application had a difficult time remembering how I had decorated my Personal Space. There were several occasions where furniture had been removed completely; this despite the fact that everything was saved on the hard drive. This would only be an issue for people if they even bothered to visit their personal space. It can't be used as a meeting place as random people can't go there, and friends have to be invited inside of it, it's essentially useless.
Spared the censor: otherwise
she'd be looking for gl***es.As for the above-mentioned Far Cry and Uncharted areas, they are completely forgettable. There's little to do there beside run around looking at the space. It would be nice to see some developers, particularly those who publish multiplayer games, to put out rooms dedicated to their games. Then they would serve a purpose and I wouldn't have to see stray people wandering around looking for people to join for a game of Warhawk.
Of course you'd only have to deal with all this if you can connect to Home in the first place. There are rampant issues still unresolved, with people having a hard time connecting and staying connected to Home. Things seem to have died down a bit but there's always the chance that you'll get disconnected while trying to type something.
Keep in mind that Home is supposed to a social experience, so if people can remember that and treat it as such — and if its many faults can be cleared up — it has a bright future ahead of it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go see if my house has been deleted again.
