PlayStation Home: The good, the bad and the ugly

Sony finally made PlayStation Home available to the general gaming public late in 2008 to a fanfare of hype, but it’s safe to say that it hasn’t made quite the splash people expected it to. While it’s still classified as a beta and so can’t yet be judged as a final product (and it will evolve regularly over its lifespan), we’re still free to point out what we like and don’t like. So, following a plentiful vacation in Sony’s free virtual world, we bring you VideoGamer.com’s view on the service: The good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The first thing you notice about Home is how great it looks. For an MMO the quality of the graphics are quite surprising. The avatar models are detailed, the locations are colourful and well designed and, when things aren’t too laggy, it all runs pretty well. It’s a shame that there’s not a whole lot to see at the moment, and to be honest the newly added Red Bull zone isn’t very attractive, but we’re hopeful future Home spaces will raise a few eyebrows. We’ve already seen that EA will support the service with its EA Sports Complex, so hopefully others will follow suit – and we might finally see some of the game themed areas Sony has teased us with over the past six months.

As a social tool Home does its job quite well. From our experience people are friendly and willing to chat about pretty much anything. If you rushed out to buy one of Sony’s official wireless chat pads you’ll finally get a chance to put it through its paces here, although there are still a large amount of people who seem to communicate solely with single words, emotes and dances – we’re as up for a robot dance as the next virtual character, but running into the middle of a group and pulling a few shapes is only funny the first few times.

Perhaps the biggest thing Home has going for it right now is what lies ahead. There’s no doubt that there’s great potential here. If done well game launching while in a party will be great, the prospect of exclusive game demonstrations and developer interviews sounds brilliant, and we can see Home game tournaments working well too. The problem at the moment is that things seem to be taking a long time to progress, but it’s a free service so perhaps we shouldn’t have such high expectations.

Head to page 2 for the bad and the ugly of PlayStation Home.

The Bad

We really wanted to like the throwaway games that Home offers, but they’re pretty crude. The best examples are bowling and pool in the bowling alley area. These two games can be played with others and work well enough, but they’re incredibly basic. The chess and draughts boards scattered about offer some simple fun too, but the arcade games (located in the bowling alley) aren’t so great. The breakout clone on offer is completely free to play, so may well get a free pass as far as quality goes, but that doesn’t make it worth spending time on.

It’s also hard to understand just why much loading takes place between each area. The areas you’re in aren’t even that big, yet loading the next seems to take an age. We just want to be able to move from the shopping centre to the courtyard seamlessly. If the game has to load an area, that area shouldn’t seem as if it’s just a step away. It would be great if more of the world could be streamed in, rather than loaded from scratch. We can understand a loading screen if you want to jump from your apartment to the Red Bull zone, but stepping out of a shop and onto the courtyard should be seamless.

The Ugly

Now we get to the real issues we have with Home. The first is how Sony wants you to hand over real money for virtual items that do little more than look nice – and even charge for setting up a club. We found a table and a chair in a furniture store for no fee, but everything else will cost you, with a summer home topping the price chart at just under a fiver. This is compounded by the fact that there simply aren’t enough items available to dress your avatar in from the get go. If you want to stand out you need to pay for the privilege. Currently you’ll find a lot of clones wandering about in Home, presumably all as unimpressed with item pricing as we are.

When it comes down to it, though, the biggest problem with Home in its current state is that it’s boring. Plain and simple. We’ve spent a fair amount of time wandering around the virtual space, talking to people and playing games, but we can’t say it’s been enjoyable. We acknowledge that Home is free, and that for some people the ability to chat with others is all they want, but for us we expected more. Every time we boot up our PS3 we ask ourselves the same question: is it worth logging into Home? For the time being the answer will more often than not be a resounding no. We’re hoping Sony makes the most of its big titles due for release in 2009, with Killzone 2 first out of the gate in February, to push Home and give it a real purpose, otherwise it might just end up being a ghost town.

What do you think of PlayStation Home so far? Let us know in the comments section below.