Joystiq hands-on: PlayStation Home
From a technological standpoint, PlayStation 3's social MMO Home will differentiate the console from its competitors, but it's not a system seller. Nothing against the title, but its primary purpose is only to supplement and show off the hardware itself. We had a chance to run through the (here rather empty) areas of the game and try out what each offers.
We first started out in our apartment, which was pretty barren except for a few pieces of furniture and a picture frame. We first grabbed the highlighted the couch and moved it high up into the air, rotated a few times, and dropped it (none of this is actually done by your avatar, mind you). It didn't break, but it did bounce slightly and land on its side. We sat down on another couch, but there's nothing else you can really do with it. We can reportedly expand our apartment size later -- for a price, of course.
After we sifted through a library of images to put in the wall frame, we activated our in-game PSP and viewed the options. You can teleport to the popular locations -- lobby, game room, theater -- as well as any of your friend's apartments if they are home. Calling your friends is also available, as are invites to your place. At this point, the front door in the apartment was locked and unusable, so we instead teleported down to the lobby.
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As previously discussed, each instance of the lobby is limited at 64 people. A Sony representative said that there you will be able to teleport to wherever your friends are to locate them. Since we were the only person in the lobby, the area ran smoothly. This lobby is not like what you've previously seen and has yet to be rolled out to the masses, but it looks good. The area is brightly lit and wide open. There's a few chess boards in the middle, and each of the three other areas (lobby, game room, theater) are easily accessible. We were told that frisbees could be brought here and thrown with other people, but we weren't given any elaboration on how (or why we'd want to, for that matter).
The rep told us we won't be able to add or alter anything to the lobby ourselves due to it being a public placement. The public theater we feel also suffers from this issue, as we can enter the theater to watch a film but have no option to join a chat room and talk to others. Sure, most of it will be garbage, but what about riffing with a fellow stranger on a crappy trailer we stumbled in on? Sony reminded us at this point that, should we want to have a Rocky Horror Picture Show party with crowd participation, we could do so in our apartments. But we won't have many costume choices, of course.
On a positive note, we were told that in our apartments, we will be able to watch anything we want that's on our console's hard drive. Yes, anything, since it's a private location. Public theaters will serve their purpose to watch the latest trailers, and there is discussion about have premium content, such as feature-length movies, in the future. If that's the case, we hope there's an option to remove the aesthetic movie curtain that takes up 20% of our television screen while in the theater.
The game room is modeled after a bowling alley. There was a trailer for God of War II streaming, which was a nice touch. We saw bowling an arcade machines, and two other avatars actually in the room. Wow, (virtual) life! We tested out a few of the arcade games, nothing special, and headed back out to the lobby.
What's missing from our impressions is interaction with other people, which is key to Home's success. From a technological standpoint it looks good, but we're going to have to reserve final judgment until we see what the community can do. Home is still planned for a launch later this year.
