PlayStation Home 2.0
by deuce_for2, HSM special guest contributor
After several days of no sleep, plus use of several non-prescription, mind altering drugs and a case of Yoo-hoo Double Fudge, I was able to see something that must have been on the XMB the whole time: the icon for PS Home 2.0. “Scrubs” was coming on, but I decided instead to see what Home would be like if they started designing it now. So I pressed ‘X’.
Zoom, I went down a rabbit hole. Not good after all that Yoo-hoo, but down I went. As everything was loading, they were advertising all the cool stuff from the developers. Lockwood was advertising their new virtual reality headset space – virtual reality within virtual reality. My mind was blown. Is that even possible?
Heavy Water had cut loose and made a banging biker club. In it you can scan your actual tattoos and have them burned into your avatar. Finally my Home avatar could share my “Strawberry Shortcake” ankle tattoo.
nDreams…well, everything looked the same. Although in their defense, they pretty much have that “down the rabbit hole” feel already, so no real surprises there.
LOOT had gotten Home to run on their EOD TVs. So now you could sign onto Home and sign into Home. Trust me, it’s a lot cooler than it sounds. Home in Home was designed to compete with Lockwood’s virtual reality within virtual reality. Are you with me?
Where am I?
As it turns out, in Home 2.0, when you arrive they drop you in a big pile of cash. You can choose to appear wherever you want. Most people choose a club or their apartment, but I love the pile of cash. I signed out and back in like twenty times just because it was so cool. Suddenly the gold suit made so much more sense. I think I’ve still got a fiver stuck in my undies.
When I stepped up to The Gate to the Kingdom, the first cool thing I noticed was the Troll Eliminator. It somehow detected that some person was trying to harass me. Maybe it counted the number of times he said the word “gay” and automatically asked me if I wanted him eliminated. I said “yes” and he disappeared. Now others could still see him, but I couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see me. Simple but effective.
As someone from my friend’s list approached, voice chat was automatically enabled. We talked about Home 2.0, weapons-grade pharmaceuticals, Yoo-hoo…you know, the usual. As they walked away I realized that the best part about that talk was that it was easy. I didn’t have to select a sequence of button and joystick presses like I was in the middle of a game of “Mortal Kombat”. It was all automatic.
Also the avatars did move their mouths to the words well enough that it really felt like the words were coming out of their mouth. This was a great step forward in terms of feeling like I was really there.
The Happiest Place on Earth
I walked through the Gate, and revealed to me was the Kingdom. It was magical. While there were shops around similar to the Hub and Mall, they were decorated in a style that was so much more inviting. And when I went inside the store, I went inside the store. Each store had all the items that were for sale laid out in front of me so I knew exactly what I was getting. Plus there was a place to try on clothes. It was the same as the wardrobe, but on top of all my clothing items, it also had the items available for sale. As I tried things on I could easily just add them to my cart.
After spending my total allowance on a really cool pair of neon green hi-tops, I wandered over to the train. It seems in Home 2.0 there is no Navigator. To get from place to place, you get on the train. But this is not any ordinary train. This is the “Willy Wonka’s Glass Elevator” of trains. It comes with a thousand buttons from which you can choose where to go. The nice thing is that instead of blurring out while the new space is loading, you ride along in the countryside. There is a private jet that uses disk caching to get you there faster, but it is only available to PlayStation Plus Members. The nice thing about the private jet is that your friends can come along even if they are not PS Plus Members. It’s good to be the King.
Bingo!
I went to my Bingo club, which I originally found with the new club board. Clubs in Home 2.0 have a board where they can post for new members based on the theme of the club. So people are able to find others who are interested in similar things much easier. My bowling club meets Friday at eight, but the Bingo’ers meet every night. They really love the Bingo.
A great new 2.0 club feature is the Announcer ability. When someone is designated as the Announcer, all other voice chat in the club is suspended. When they text chat, it goes to everyone in the space regardless of how far away they are.
Another nice feature of Home 2.0 was the ability to add animations to the items to interact with them. So I could pick up and put down my Bingo chips and place them on the card. This really made playing the game feel real.
“I have a Mansion and a Yacht!”
After Bingo I went back to my Mansion with a bunch of friends for a nightcap. You guessed it – Yoo-hoos all around. The Mansion was carried over from the old version of Home with one new feature – when you leave the apartment, your friends in it can either choose to go with you or stay where they are. We were on the second floor having drinks at the bar. A couple friends were playing Darts. Everyone else wanted to go to the backyard pool. I left the second floor, went down to the first floor and out to the pool. The friends who wanted to could follow me automatically. Others stayed behind to finish their game of Darts and joined us after.
Strange. Home 2.0 still does not support the Move controller. Not even in a hallucination. That doesn’t bode well for it.
While I was swimming the backstroke with my new Home 2.0 custom animations I purchased, I started to feel myself being pulled back to reality. So I sucked down another case of Yoo-hoos, but to no avail. I woke to find myself slumped down on my couch with two half-eaten potato chips on my shirt (which I ate of course).
I Can See Clearly Now
What I realized later that was really nice about my sleep deprived, sugar overdosed, drug induced hallucinations were that in them, the Core Home Development Team had stepped back and looked at the limitations of the first version of Home and made sure to support the biggest limitations that interfered with immersion. They focused on getting the controller out of the way and making everything work the way you would expect it to. They made it more fun. People want to feel like they are really there. The more it feels real and easy, the more people will want to spend time there.
Can they do all the things I hallucinated were possible? I think so. Do we need a Home 2.0? Absolutely not. But if you look at the things we are getting with each new release from the Core Home Development Team, it is not hard to imagine that we could get all these things some day — and likely more.
In the meantime, I am off to the store for more Yoo-hoos.
August 27th, 2012 by John C. Ardussi | 5 comments
John C. Ardussi (deuce_for2) is a developer for PS Home and other platforms. He recently started a new company, Game Mechanics who is now making items and games. Be sure and tell him what you think of what he is doing. He truly listens and adjusts based on input from the community.
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Hilarious Deuce!!I wish some of those could come true. The translation in the mansion being one of them so they could keep the change for other large estates like Avalon Keep has. I truly hope they add the new animation choices and some new avatar motions and resets at least. This was a fun read.
I laughed all the way through the article… what fun! At the same time, I wanted all of these changes. What can I say… Homers are greedy.
Heh, heh. Good article Deuce but I have one question; WHAT THE HELL ARE YOO-HOOS!?
Basically flavored milk. They have been around since the 1920s. There is a picture of one there at the bottom.
Fun article, I’d like to see some of those changes too