Why Hellfire Games Is So Important To Home
“The enemy’s gate is down.”
–Ender’s Game
I sometimes wonder how an early Home user — say, someone who left right after open beta began — would react to Home in its present form.
Sure, there’s still any number of issues. Trolling. Harassment. Bizarre error codes. Some things haven’t changed. But a lot has. An explosion of content, from personal estates to new gaming experiences to virtual items and apparel galore. Public chat. EOD. New clubhouse skins. The list goes on at length.
Home does have one significant challenge, though: how to appeal to the built-in audience of PlayStation Network console gamers. The ones who took a look at Home way back in the day and wrote it off as a boring chat room with nothing to do, and the ones who never bothered with Home as a result of the negative press.
The obvious answer: games.
Think about it. Home’s populated by console gamers. After more than three years of open beta, the pool of socially-inclined PSN users (who have keyboards, social skills and money to spend) has almost certainly been tapped. Now that the low-hanging fruit is gone, it’s time to go after everyone else. And, to be blunt, a lot of PSN gamers are younger, male, lacking keyboards, lacking social skills, and looking to play games. You can try to change them into civil, literate and polite adults who actually want to talk to each other (which ain’t gonna happen), or you can give them what they’re looking for.
Games.
Is it any wonder, then, that Home has seen such an emphasis on gaming experiences and games development over the last year or so? It makes perfect sense. But it does have one major Achilles Heel.
The games have to be…you know…interesting.
And I’m sorry to say this, but there just really aren’t that many games in Home, at present, which pass the acid test of making Home itself something worth signing into just to play that gaming experience. If you think of Home as a game console, it needs that killer app which everyone rushes to play. Most of the games in Home are, if I’m honest, rather quaint. Which is a nice way of saying that they don’t really hold a candle to their disc-based brethren.
Do they have to? No, not necessarily. But they have to have some sort of hook which keeps people coming back. And yes, I’m cognizant of the fact that Home games are put together with budgets that would barely cover a Naughty Dog wrap party, and the amount of available memory that Home’s developers have to work with is probably equivalent to an abacus. So they have their work cut out for them.
That said, a few games have risen to the top in the Home scene. SodiumOne. Sodium2. Novus Prime. Xi, of course. And aside from nDreams’ Xi, these are freemium games, from Lockwood and Hellfire respectively, which figured out how to keep people coming back for more, over and over again.
Now, yes, it’s common knowledge that I’m a Lockwood fanboy. Sodium2 is Home’s most impressive game, and SodiumOne is still my favorite game in Home. S1 is the yearbook photo of the really hot cheerleader with those perfect legs; it’s a sentimental favorite that you just can’t quite help but compare everything to for a long time afterwards.
(For our female readers, please keep in mind that guys can be cheerleaders too. I have no problem using equal-opportunity shallow metaphors. Manlove rules, okay?)
But we really must not forget Hellfire Games, and what they’ve done with Novus Prime.
No, I’m not talking about the game itself — which is actually quite fun, by the way. I’m talking about their introduction of antigravity to Home.
Hellfire Games has done a remarkable job of staying connected with the Home community and continuously improving and expanding their flagship Novus Prime title. First there was the game itself; then came Escalation, and most recently Vindication. I can only assume Vacation is next. And while the graphics look like something out of Ambrosia Software’s Escape Velocity series, the gameplay is quite addictive and it’s got a really catchy background score.
But it’s just a game. And games, like cheerleaders, must inevitably grow old. Really good games just have a knack for aging gracefully, and getting the occasional facelift doesn’t hurt either.
No, it’s the antigravity. That’s what the big deal is. Because it’s the first step towards what could be a truly significant social improvement in Home.
I’ll explain. Home is a virtual reality construct. And, as such, it doesn’t necessarily have to conform to real-world physics. In fact, it’s more fun if it doesn’t. In Second Life, for instance, the primary method of transportation is flying. And why not? Yes, I recognize that Sony needs to have a robust engine with as few bugs as possible if they’re going to entice major third-party developers into investing in the platform, but that doesn’t mean that everything has to behave as it would in real life.
Stephen Hawking: glitcher.
This is, by the way, why HSM has a mildly pro-glitching position. While we dislike the self-entitlement attitude that some glitchers have — this ridiculous notion that glitching is somehow an inalienable right that must be preserved — that immaturity does not take away from the fact that it’s really, really fun to mess with the rules of physics. And, so far, it’s really only Hellfire Games which has caught on to this and monetized it.
Remember when the Novus Prime public space was first introduced to Home, and glitchers figured out how to zero-G float inside the dome? Hellfire could have simply patched this, but instead they patched it and sold a method of “legal” glitching: the jetpack clothing. Then they introduced zero-G floatation to their first personal estate, which was a masterstroke that helped differentiate it from any other estate in Home.
What this shows is that Home’s engine is capable of these things. Which leads me to wonder what else might, in time, be developed.
Anyone else remember that wonderful scene from Labyrinth when David Bowie is walking on walls, upside-down, and sideways? Why can’t we do this in Home? Why not a public space which works like a giant O’Neill cylinder, with gravity along the walls and weightlessness in the middle? Why not superjumps straight out of the Matrix? And why not spaces which are built to handle such things?
Why am I bringing all of this up right now? Because of Hellfire’s latest announcement, courtesy of Ben Lewis:
PlayStation Home users can Spacewalk in zerogravity for FREE inside the Novus Prime space station this week! Starting today, the HellfireGames team has enabled zero-G simulation for everyone in Novus Prime — just warp to the Novus Prime space, activate Spacewalk at the center of the station, and float around indoors (and in outer space!) for free through Sunday, Feb. 5th.
Visit Novus Prime in the Action District today and be sure to check out all the fresh content and free rewards in the new Novus Prime: Vindication expansion!
Now, yes, if you want to be cynical, it could be said that this is simply an easy, low-cost way to drive traffic numbers back into the Novus Prime public space. So what? God bless a developer who’s willing to do that! How many of you would go back and check out Dragon’s Green again, for instance, if it just came out with one new thing to enjoy?
Confession: I really, really want Hellfire’s next game to be a blatant rip-off of Ender’s Game. And so do you. Don’t lie. I mean, come on! Who else pictured Ender’s Game the first time you went on a zero-G spacewalk at Novus Prime and blasted critters off the hull with your raygun? This needs to happen. And it needs to happen for a very specific reason: because while Home can’t match disc-based games, disc-based games can’t match the uniquely social aspects of the Home experience. Home is a wonderfully asymmetric response to the current trend with console games: that more and more revenue is coming from a shrinking number of titles whose production costs are escalating through the roof.
Hellfire Games is easily one of the top four or five most important third-party developers for Home right now, because they’re actually messing around with Home’s physics and how we can manipulate them. This should be supported and encouraged. It may be an important key to making Home’s future gaming experiences, and the social interactivity that can go with them, more dynamic in the years to come.
January 31st, 2012 by NorseGamer | 3 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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I agree wholeheartedly. For me, what changed Home from a mere passtime to a full-blown addiction was first Sodium 1, and then Novus Prime. And it is through those games that I eventually got into the social aspects of Home; making friends and chatting with strangers.
Home for me is all about the social aspects as most who know me can attest. But I do like to have some new games and upgraded ones around to play. I loved Salt Shooter once I got it, though in reality I am not a shooter or racing game fan. I just wish that someone would get a true rpg put together, preferably one you can play with friends. It would be a huge hit even if it was freemium and you had to pay to play after a certain time frame.I certainly hope someone steps on that bandwagon someday and produces one for Home.
Great article as always Norse. I might have to check out the new stuff at Novus.
Flying!
Flying should be possible. I can’t help but to think that Hellfire Games were trying to making a point by installing anitgravity. It is a liberating experience! Thinking outside of the box is wise on HellFire Games part in their construct of the Novus Prime and the officers quaters. Developers should take note of this article. I think we are all asking! The machinima that could be created by this feature in any of the spaces would just be astonishing!