The “Break it Down” Blog

After our initial snag of getting into the Playstation Home Beta, we finally got in and wanted to give you guys a heads-up with regard to what you can expect, if it’s worth a PS3, and what we thought of it.

Introductory Thoughts

• Given how this service is designed (explained below) it looks like these worlds will be instanced… there just isn’t enough physical space to house even something like 1000 people in a single instance of Home (atleast the one I was in tonight).
• I have no idea how this will impact meeting up with friends — do you pull them into your instance or vista versa? What if you are chatting up a nice person you just met and your buddy comes online… do you get pulled into his instance or he into yours (and it gets even more confusing when you consider the state of HIS friends list as well).
• Potential for micropayments is everywhere. But what you get out of the gate is just fine to have a good time — you don’t feel blocked from doing anything. I don’t see an indication from Sony that they are going to be jerks about the micropayments, just that they will definitely try and entice you around every corner with little updates or improvements here or there.
• Graphics are nice, not amazing.
• Give a bit clearer picture to what Sony intends to do with Home in the long-term (10+ years) now that we can actually use this service and see the potential.
• Somewhat glitchy, but not quite as bad as we actually had anticipated.

Getting Started

When you first install the Home client, it asks you to claim roughly 3GB for itself of your harddrive. This isn’t for the client software (77 mb) but rather a content store for the content that you’ll be sucking down in the process of using Home:

After signing into Home, you are taken to the character creation screen. From here you have some pretty standard (and a few complex) methods of customizing your character in the Home world. Right now because this is a Beta, unless you want to spend all day customizing your character I might suggest just grabbing a preset and moving on… that’s what I did.

After finalizing your character you are dropped into your virtual apartment — your own personal space that you can customize how you like and invite friends back to you if you like. I really expected to get a crappy default apartment with like 1 window, but instead I had a sea-side appartment overlooking the bay… it was a pretty nice default apartment. That’s me in the above picture doing the running-man emote. (All emotes are accessed from the L1 menu in a pretty straight-forward nested list tree structure – no radial-emote menu like some other games have used in the past).

Experiencing Playstation Home – Scenes

So Home is broken up into what are called “scenes”, they are really just the big themed areas or “instances” if you are a big MMORPG fan. Upon first entry into those areas you are asked if you want to download that particular scene, they seem to range from about 15MB to 30MB in size for more detailed ones.

If you choose to not download a scene (e.g. the Theater) then you cannot enter that area. You are just invisible-wall-blocked into the area you are already in. If you do choose to download that scene you can either watch the download go, or send it to the background while you do something else. What’s nice about background-downloading is that Home prompts you when the download is done and instructs you to hit Start (>) to make a decision about the new download (e.g. Load it up) when done.

When you first pop into a new scene, everyone’s avatar looks like a transparent ghost (see in the screenshot of the Far Cry 2 scene above, in the left of the screenshot). As you hang out in the room people’s avatars start to pop-in as the textures and models for them are loaded/downloaded. There also seems to be some attempt at moving characters out of each other’s ways as they walk which I thought was odd in an environment like this.

Activities

One of the most popular things that people will be asking about are the activities in Home — the bowling, pool, darts, arcade games, etc. One odd thing Sony did was implement these activities very realistically… I don’t mean in the physics/graphics sense… I mean there are 4 pool tables in the Bowling Alley scene, if those 4 pool tables are occupied by people playing them, you apparently cannot play pool until someone gets done with one of the tables.

These activities are not instanced like a World of Warcraft raid, they are real-time, and seem to be static resources in the world. I happened to get lucky with a game of bowling, but not with a game of pool.

When you hop into an activity, depending on the activity you are presenting with a matching screen waiting for other players to join you. You usually initiate these “grouping” screens by going over to the activity you want to interact with and clicking (X) on it. If it’s a single-player activity you’ll jump right into it, otherwise it will try and pair you up into groups or give other players a chance to hop in.

Multiplayer & Game Launching

For the Xbox Live crowd and I think a lot of gamers in general, the real question for now is “does it help me get together with my friends and play games?” — well yes and no. Certainly matching up in the XMB and hopping into a game just like Xbox Live would be faster if you knew your friends were on and wanted to play a specific game right away. Home’s “game launching” aspects of multiplayer seem more socially-geared.

Any time you are in Home you can bring up the Start (>) menu and go down to Game Launching and take a look at who is playing what out of your friends. I also believe the idea moving forward is to help you match up with Club members as well as possibly people around you that you might want to team up with and jump into a game with.

Don’t forget, besides your friends that you already have on your friends list, the idea of the themed “scenes” for specific games suddenly open the doors to all sorts of new ways to find other people to play your favorite games with — I believe Home’s focus on multiplayer support for this crowd is just as important as support for your existing friends list — and it all seems to be there atleast in it’s 1.0 incarnation. I’m sure we’ll see revisions to this over the years.

A Few Hickups

We ran into our fair share of errors while playing around with Home. Scene download errors, sign-in errors and at the end a total session/server failure who’s only option was to quit out to the XMB.

This is all expected though — it’s a beta.

The few things we saw that we we liked were some pretty nice graphics (not amazing, this is not competition for MGS4), very robust controls and deep menus with a lot of integrated functionality that seemed to work fine, decent performance and besides the failures no noticable network lag.

We didn’t see as many rooms as we had hoped, but again, it’s a beta. And unfortunately for everyone that hates micropayments… Sony is going to make it super-appealing to micro-pay your way to a better avatar, gear, apartment, Club House, etc. all through Home.

You can see the hooks and potential for micropayments just about everywhere — in addition to all the existing advertising hooks. It wasn’t that distracting though, it actually felt more normal to have big banner ads for Sony movies and products around — atleast it felt more like real life than a completely natural/sterile environment.

Conclusion

You cannot really compare Playstation Home to Xbox Live — they are two separate services trying to accomplish different things and only overlap in a few small areas.

It’s a lot like saying “How would you compare Facebook to World of Warcraft?” — well you wouldn’t… yes they are both huge social networks in a way, but they set out to accomplish two totally different things. Playstation Home is like that.

Playstation Home is trying to establish a world that is compelling for you to dabble in — as compelling as Facebook’ing is during the day. They are going to do that by building out the social services, social games and social aspects of the world. I don’t know how they are going to get around the inherently social-killing “instanced” approach of the world, but I’m sure they’ve thought that one out.

That all being said, I think Home will be interesting in 1 year, compelling in 2, and a damn-kick-ass service in 3-4… and likely integrated in varying degrees into every Sony electronic within 6 years, but right now, this wouldn’t entice me into getting a PS3 at all. It’s just an interesting side-effect of having one right now, as opposed to a premier front-runner service that sells the console (like the perk of having a Blu-ray player sells the PS3).

So, if you have a PS3, download it and play around with Home. If you have an Xbox 360, keep enjoying Gears 2.

Playstation Home Screenshot Gallery

Update #1: Be sure to Join the BIDB Playstation Home Club!

Update #2: Doh, it just dawned on my why the in-world activities are physically limited like the bowling alley or pool tables — it ensures that you will buy them yourself for your own club house or apartment.

See? Micropayments!