The Direction of Personal Estate Design
by sadvaultboy, HSM guest contributor
We all started here, in Harbour Studio.
During its humble beginnings, PlayStation Home offered a very limited selection of apartments — enough that you could count them on your fingers. There were no embedded games, or any other functionality, and there was a fifty-item limit to all spaces until fairly recently. With Home’s proliferation came a slew of new apartments — over seventy — and they show no signs of slowing down.
Actually, it’s quite the contrary. It seems we’re getting a few new spaces roughly every other week. With all of these options, spanning all of this time, you would think we would see significant improvements in options and designs, especially as the baseline price of five dollars seems to be the new minimum instead of the average.
My gripe is certainly not with the unquestionable array of options. Whatever your flavor, Home has you covered, from relaxing Zen-like retreats, tropical beaches, and modern luxury, to the futuristic and sometimes downright silly.
My biggest question is one of quality. That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress, but I would like to demonstrate that it has been extremely limited, despite the clear capacity for drastic improvements across the board to be pretty easily implemented.
The way I see it, in the early days, Irem was unquestionably the best third-party developer in Home. They were by all odds the main reason people first began to region hop, and they developed the best content and most immersive spaces available at the time. With heavy influence from Irem, Home further flourished. When Irem sadly went the way of the dodo bird, somebody had to pick up that slack — fill those impressively large shoes — and who stepped up but Lockwood and Sony’s own LOOT.
With the extinction of Irem, these two developers stepped up big time, but in very different ways. Lockwood went into overdrive in creating new content for Home – clothes, furniture, companions, and extravagant spaces both public and private. LOOT, on the other hand, focused more on developing the multimedia aspects of home, their biggest and most significant contribution being the vastly improved EOD. I would venture to say that along with the core client update which brought us the furniture increase, the LOOT EOD is one of the best developments in Home over the past year.
That being said, the spaces with built-in EODs have a clear quality-to-price advantage. The five-dollar Amaterasu Yacht, despite being rather small and housing very few picture frames, more than compensates with hundreds of free movies and an excellent selection of internet radio stations. The Hollywood Hills house (currently my favorite personal space) does the same thing for the same price, with plenty of space, and picture frames to boot. I’m convinced both of these spaces are priced so low because the new EOD features were implemented long after their release. If the same exact spaces came out yesterday they would probably cost close to or as much as the ten-dollar Space Apartment.
So, I ask: why, with these impressive innovations, are spaces from the Stone Age of Home, with no functionality, still the order of the day?
As a baseline example of what I’m trying to convey: I will use the now ancient Loco Roco Island, which despite having no EOD, was revolutionary in that it constantly gave users something to do — an extended experience of unlocking and exploring. Loco featured one of Home’s first built-in radios, the first “lay down” ability, and arguably of most importance, a reason to come back. Loco Roco proved long, long ago what could be done and simply hasn’t been.
Not to pick on any one particular space, but why is stuff like, say, the French Chateau still coming out? It’s essentially one massive, empty room. Have you ever seen a house built that way? How are these new spaces in any way an improvement on, say, the Log Cabin, City Penthouse, or Summer House, all of which are among the oldest spaces in home?
You could argue being able to gift friends a single item is an improvement, and I’ll admit I’ve visited these spaces eager to receive a reward, but it’s a self-serving, expedient, and above all temporary proposition offering no depth beyond a single visit. This feature by no means puts these newer spaces head-over-shoulders above their early predecessors.
“But sadvaultboy!” says the voice in my head, “if you want to add functionality to a bland, unimpressive space, simply add active items!”
This is a dilemma. It forces users to choose between functionality and aesthetics (e.g. furniture). For example: picture a glorious future of personal spaces, where every man, woman, and child is afforded not just one-hundred item slots, but also a built-in EOD, and Gift Machine — where no one will have to choose between something to do and something to see.
Can I get an amen?
(Editor’s note: LOOT has announced a portable EOD coming to Home soon.)
By the same token, built-in furniture is also vexing to me. With most every great apartment, I can usually find a flaw which makes me think twice about buying it. The Tycoon Penthouse would be one of my favorite spaces, if that butt-ugly rug wasn’t melded squarely in to the middle of the floor.
The Hillside Apartment boasts what I consider to be one of the most exquisite landscapes in Home, yet the sleek kitchen counter tops are blocked, and items cannot be placed on them. The new (and otherwise impressive) Saloon personal space features built-in barstools, which face away from the bar — unchangeable and very irritating. And then you have spaces like the Plum Pavilion, which only unlock ponds filled with koi fish if you buy pieces of the Mansion Apartment — otherwise, you have empty, purposeless pools, one of which is directly in the middle of the space.
Simply put: if it’s built by Home, and it has a television, it should be an EOD. If there’s a bed or a reclining chair, like the ones in Desert Haven, you should be able to lay down on them — ALL of them. Simple. Not only should you be able to lay down on them, but you should be able to do it without sacrificing twenty-two item slots.
Why are these things being sparsely integrated in some places, but not everywhere?
A big thank you to Cobra9812 and Ms. kitchens_closed for allowing me to tour and take pictures in their beautifully decorated personal spaces.
March 25th, 2012 by Arthur Shkolnik | 6 comments
When he's not out wandering the wasteland, sadvaultboy can be found lounging in his Hollywood Hills home with a Nuka-Cola.
Amen. I so agree with almost everything you said. Sony, are you listening?
These kinds of regular built in functions should definitely be the norm in Home now. Hopefully the powers that be will learn from their mistakes and move forward from here. All seating, including that which is built in should have the laid back function, all beds should have you lay down like you do at the Desert clubhouse on the outside loungers, not like the “dead beds” that cost 22 items and make you look dead. And those are just the easy ones.
I love the new Saloon, even with the bar stools facing out because it is such a small thing compared to what you gain in function and useability. Though there is also room for improvement there, it is better than what has been coming out a lot lately. I won’t be buying new spaces much anymore, especially unless they do more than just look pretty.
PS. Good artlcle, welcome to HSM.
omg, i soooo agree. the new hillside apt frustrated me to no end that the kitchen wouldnt accept items on the counter. and what burbie said is true, the saloon. i LOVE IT!! it has so much crammed into such a small space. i find it funny as heck to put lilith there with her music off, dancing to a horrible piano piece. somehow she fits right in! lol. but yes, the apartments are incredibly lacking now. the best example is the goth manor. WHAT THE HECK!! the cutteridge estate was more goth!!! all i did was make it a banquet hall like lord of the rings. but i do like the idea of them available as both an apartment AND a clubhouse. its a great move in the right direction. WOO HOO!!
AMEN BROTHA
AMEN
i JUST WANT 2 ADD shouldn’t Sony want to give us better and more interactive estates so we won’t defect to SECOND LIFE or one of the other AVATAR sites?…not that I would but others might go that route,especially after reading the article in this magazine on the 4 other AVATAR sites tha tHome is competeing with for our dollars