by Phoenix, HSM team writer

Let’s get this out of the way: yes, Lockwood’s Nightmare Yacht is a reskinned Arctic Voyage Dream Yacht. And yes, they should be ashamed — but not for re-skinning a personal space. They should be ashamed for not making it a clubhouse as well.

At the very least, this should have been a bundle. Priced at $5.99, this is the perfect party venue to celebrate Halloween, but it can only hold up to a dozen people as a personal space. Club owners all over Home would have snapped this one up if they had even the slightest interest in a Halloween-themed venue.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s have a look at the space.

The space is already decorated for the coming holiday: glowing Jack-o-lanterns, cobwebs hanging thick as you please. Creeping, swirling mist eerily invades every abandoned corridor and deck; disembodied skulls floating throughout the derelict yacht devoid of its past splendor meet you at random places. There are coffined planter boxes, with spare (and possibly dead) tree limbs jutting from them; once elegant and sparkling chandeliers hang from the rusty and moldy ceiling, a shadow of their former selves. A howling wind rages throughout the space, and faint moans and creaks can be heard as you move through the empty hull.  The landscape, dark and forbiddingly threatening, is dotted with craggy peaks and mist. The black water surrounding the yacht is possibly choked with the lives of the lost souls that once sailed on this vessel.

Okay, I got carried away there. But this estate fires the imagination.

I have never purchased any of Lockwood’s Dream Yacht variations. It wasn’t because I didn’t like them. It wasn’t because they weren’t a great design and idea. To the contrary, I thought they were both great. I even gave one to my sister for her birthday last year. I wanted all the furnishings that came with the yachts for the owners (included here) but I thought they were so big that I couldn’t see myself in them often. And to have guests in them? Well, they were still going to look empty because of their size. I’ve always thought these should have been clubhouse skins.

Having said all that: when I saw the Nightmare Yacht, I had one hesitation. I didn’t have a PSN card at that moment, but once rectified I purchased the Nightmare Yacht. Why I did so, when it is still not a clubhouse as it should be? Because it looks great as an empty space! The size is perfect for an abandoned and haunted environment. This is a place where you would expect to get lost, adding to the eeriness factor. This is a space were the less you place here, the better it will look and feel. It should feel wrong.

This is a space begging to be enjoyed by friends. It logically should perform well this season. However, I still think Lockwood has missed a great opportunity by not offering what I believe to be Home’s first yacht clubhouse.

I for one will probably not use this space again after Halloween — not until next year, anyway, unless I create a machinima or two with it. That’s fine, however, because with the Jack-o-lanterns it would be hard to use this estate for anything other than a Halloween-themed space. Had these not been burned in, it would be different. Little things like that make it hard to see a space as anything else than what it was made for. With a clubhouse skin it can be put away as you would not want to just have another neglected space in your list. So no I don’t mind that it is the old yacht, merely reskinned. If you think about it, why change it? When you find something that works, you keep coming up with minor variations on it. If it works for AAA games, it works for Home, too.

Just look at other spaces in Home that are that way: the Podium is now the David Guetta space. The Hunter Yeti space has remnants of the old Central Plaza buried beneath its mounds of snow, and they are both doing fine. I think if it’s okay to do it for public spaces, then why not apply the same to private estates? If you can make it into something new, then do it. Look at all the cruise lines out there: basically the same ship, something old, and something new. In this case it had to be the Dream Yacht in a nightmare situation. Finally, look at your own house: is it really that different from your neighbor’s?

The knee-jerk “thou shalt not” reaction against reskinned estates is ridiculous. The market will bear out whether or not it’s ultimately a successful idea for each attempt made, and there’s clearly an appetite for it with Home’s consumer base. Given the tremendous costs and time involved in developing a personal estate for Home, I can hardly fault a developer for not wanting to reinvent the wheel if they manage to land a successful estate with Home’s increasingly fickle consumers.

Still, though…it should’ve been offered as a clubhouse, too.

Share

3 Responses to “A Dream Turned Dark: Lockwood’s Nightmare Yacht”

1. Susan says:

   October 9, 2013 at 4:18 am

   *Agrees with Phoenix. Should have been available as a clubhouse too!! maybe someday #SOON

   Reply
2. Gary160974 says:

   October 9, 2013 at 6:29 pm

   I’ve not brought much on home recently, not because I’m afraid that home is going to disappear, I just bought gta5 that I can’t use on ps4 so I can’t be that bothered. There is nothing really ground breaking, different or exciting being released. In its own rights the nightmare boat is good but I’ve got several Halloween based spaces that are better like cutteridge manor. It’s the same with the rest of the new releases recently ive got equivalent items or spaces that are equal or better already in my inventory.

   Reply