Review of Sony's "Home"

Looks nice. Would be a nice thing if you're a PS3 owner. Graphically pleasing.

And just think!!! You thought minors on the SL Main Grid were bad!!

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6198464/index.html?tag=topslot;thumb;5

One of the driving reasons I'm on SL was because I got sick of waiting for Home to come out. Now, it's gonna be a battle between the community and content creation of SL and whatever Sony has to offer... Meethinks SL will win my time, even without the console grade graphics and free land. (^_^)y

As far as I understand it, PS3 Home won't have any user content creation. (Which is one of the reasons why LittleBigPlanet is what I'm much more interested in. )

However, most SL competitors so far have had a tighter focus on a particular purpose. Which seems to result in lower initial interest, but higher retention.

I think Home will have an inpact on SL. Although it's not appealing to most of us forum posters, I think the average SL user will find it very appealing. I mean the people who bascially log into SL to socialise and play house. These are the people who drive the SL economy because they don't create content themselves, they buy it. So they arent going to care about the lack of content creation and customisation in Home. As long as Sony provides plenty of content for them to buy I think they will be happy.

I think the one thing that may draw these people back to SL is the Sex industry. I cant see Sony providing anywhere near the level of sex related content as SL if any at all.

If the average SL user arrives in Home only to discover he is hung like an Action Man then I think it may be SL's saving grace.

You're right, but SL has had competitors in these fields before (IMVU, for example) and hasn't been affected too much.

Another driver of the economy is, I think, people trying to "earn" social roles by making things and/or spending money - not realising that, in most cases, you can't actually do that. On services such as PS3 home, these don't exist, because those services make it much more obvious what you can and cannot do.

Expect the avatars to be more 'cookie cutter' too. (>_<

No collars? That makes baby bondage Jesus* cry.

Not *that* Jesus.

Sony's home has the looks and the large userbase of Playstation 3....however...

You literally need to pay for EVERYTHING else but your house....and you dont pay content creatores, because there isnt any...you pay Sony cause they create all the content. Its one huge money/points sink for Sony. If they did roll out content creation even in some kind of limited way, then it might have a leg to stand on but right now its mostly for the PS3 fan's.

It's taking to bloody long to get released so I'll stick to SL.

And will it compel someone to run out and buy a PS3 just to use it?

this brings to mind when I left TSO long ago for SL.... I wont return

Can't return anyways, The Sims Online was shut down a long time ago.

Umm I was comparing to Sony Home as returning to

I think its appeal is very limited and only affects SL insofar as those people who are so overcome with ennui that they don't do ANYTHING new, and just talk to friends. The nice thing about SL is that there are always new things going on or out there to see.

I wish I could find them though!

Habbo Hotel with good graphics and voice chat. Without user content creation that's about what any of the new services can amount to. Which is fine for the people who just want to socialize. As with Lively, if this has any real effect on SL it will be drawing off some of that crowd.

Looks nice. However I didnt see a single building or environment in that Vid that I couldn't recreate in SL. Im sure skin and clothing creators feel the same. I guess the big difference is 2% of SL looks that good already and the other 98% is rubbish.

You forgot to mention that to get Home you need to buy a PS3 first. The PS3 has zero appeal to casual gamers. They want to bring in Companies to spam you with their branded products. I honestly don't see the two competing anyways.

Pretty but /me mostly shrugs, though I do wonder briefly about the benefits of having custom content run past the experts before getting released to the general public. Stuff like shrinking down or segmenting textures to reasonable sizes or going thru scripts to make them not totally insane or whatever prim tricks the masters have learned. Etc, etc.

Very obviously, there's far too much stuff in SL for this to ever be done but I can't help wonder what SL would be like if such a thing existed...

Lively's deathly now. Sic Transit Gloria Googley.

As for Sony Home, why do they have a logo that looks like an AIDS virus infecting a cell?

From the comments section it looks like it is going to be a teen grid phenom. Twelve year old gamers playing house.

Home is garbage.

Now that the private beta is over I can sate that from the beginning it was a bad concept. As one of the earliest people to get beta access over a year ago, I can say technologically the programmers at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe are even more incompetent than the developers at Linden Lab. Now that it is in the wild it remains both a bad concept and an insult to gamers because of Sony's over-promotion.

As this thread claimed to be a review but instead was a link to a feature set, let me give you a review.

Home is a social meeting application for the PlayStation 3. It is launched from the standard XrossMediaBar (XMB) interface of the PS3. It is constructed out of spaces, public ones from Sony, other public ones from third-parties, private "homes" for users and the promise of some nebulous user-group "club" facilities in the future.

Each space consists of a base "environment" which must be downloaded in one large chunk while watching a download screen as well as some custom content. Once downloaded you enter the space with your avatar.

Avatars are created using a number of body and facial sliders as well as stock clothing, with fewer than a couple hundred possibly clothing variations. You can adjust your avatar's apparance and save it as an outfit for later recall. Hair options are quite limited as they aren't adjusted but rather selected from a limited list. Height and weight options are also constrained to achieve a sameness amongst the avatars. The actual avatar mesh is much more sophisticated than Second Life offers including distinct fingers and an apparent bone structure that allows much more sophisticated animations, though they too are limited.

Avatars can walk, dance and perform a dozen or so basic gestures. Text chat appears in bubbles above each user. Voice chat is available through an optional headset.

Many actions are performed through the "in-world" PSP, a replica of Sony's portable gaming device which itself contains a tiny version of the XMB. Teleporting to locations, reading news, seeing friends and the like are performed through this interface. In general the interface to Home tries to stay hidden most of the time with no floating windows or other conventional PC acoutraments.

You are given an apartment which is disconnected from the rest of the "world". It only exists when you are online and only then can people visit, and only then when invited. A very limited selection of furniure can be placed in your room, and there is a crude method to place custom images stored on your PS3 in picture frames. Promised shared music and video are not to be found, with the video sharing option already announced as cancelled.

Sony's public spaces include the general area where people generally roam around and connect to the other spaces with a smattering of streaming video displays, a gaming space with pool, bowling and some simplistic arcade games, a mall and a theater. Each of these spaces are instanced like most MMO, meaning no more than 40 or so people will be in the same area and no easy way to shift between the different instances to look for others. The video is not synced but instanced for each user meaning sitting in the theater and watching and commenting like a real movie house isn't possible.

Each space is a different size and has one or more exits which require some time to transition to another space (and possibly wait for a large download). The malls for instance are quite large yet barren of stores. The gaming areas are much smaller and "recreate" the gaming experience in your standing around waiting for a turn at a particular game depending on the number of people there.

There are third-party spaces custom designed for certain games or real-world product companies. Some of these sell items using microtransactions. The "highlight" is supposed to be the custom gaming spots as not only would you theorhetically meet people who like the same game but that bonus content would be added to that game's experience.

Home's graphics are well designed and have improved dramatically since the early beta. Furniture selections remain limited and their placement problematic. I'm not even sure if they have finally gotten a "sit" procedure to work. Animations are fluid but their options limited.

As an add-on to the gaming experience Home is moronic. The concept of meeting people and launching a game from Home is counter-intuitive to merely launching the game and meeting people there. As a replacement for Xbox Live's game invitation and party experiences Home is an utter failure.

As a simplistic avatar-based chat experience Home is adequate. Once again the instanced spaces limit the number and variety of people you can meet. The games are boring. Someone unfamiliar with avatar chat systems might find a modicum of entertainment for a few minutes, but will quickly tire of it and either go play a game or go to the computer where more dynamic offerings are available.

And that brings us to the Second Life issue. Comparing Home to Second Life is a great insult to Second life. Home has no large contiguous explorable space of content. It doesn't support user-generated content. The only "building" that occurs is in the small private apartments using a puny selection of pre-made furniture. There is no terraforming. Currently there are fewer than a dozen different environments to see and they are limited in the number of people that can enter before a new cloned instance of the same space is created for the next batch of users. There is no day-night cycle. The only things that Second Life and Home have in common are human-based avatars that can walk around and chat with each other. That's it.

As a gamer Home adds nothing. As a social environment it is exceedingly limited and defeats the purpose of the system it is on which is primarily a game machine (or a Blu-ray player).

Someone earlier mentioned the "huge installed base". At less than 20 million consoles sold worldwide in two years it has not even 1/10th the installed base of personal computers.

I may pop into Home on occasion just to see what has changed, but as a gamer I will be in the games I want to play and meet people there. For social chat I'll be in Second Life where I can also build and explore.

Sounds VERY similar to Lively and Twinity.

The Lively avatar mesh is deliberately cartoon-like, and instead of having a lot of similar avatars, there's a few dozen individual avatars you can pick... with less customization possible.

The Twinity avatar mesh is more sophisticated, with many sliders, but again there's a limited amount of variation. Customization is limited to buying options with "Globals"... Twinity's virtual currency... of which you get a supply when you join up.

Again, similar to Lively and Twinity. How anyone is supposed to follow a conversation with bubble chat is beyond me.

In Lively you can create as many rooms as you want, and they're non-volatile, but customization is limited to placing furniture from their collection around the place. There's nothing that isn't in a room someone created.

In Twinity the world is contiguous and based on real places (eg, Berlin). You have to buy private spaces with real money and place them in-world... I haven't investigated what you can do with that.

Clubside, you can start a space downloading and then continue to explore and chat in the current space. It's a really cool feature and by the time you've told another kid "no, I don't want sexy time." the download has finished.

From a socialising point of view Home is greatl. I have a powerful machine and when in the SL Welcome Area I often find myself staring at a wall in order to keep the lag under control. Yet in Home you can be in an area with 40 realistic avatars and not have any problems at all.

So Home could be awesome for the Welcome Area gang provided they can find an adult to talk to.