Home Tycoon Unleashed
by SealWyf, HSM Editor Emeritus
Where do we go from Home?
While there is not yet a clear Home successor, there are many options. These include new projects, such as Madmunki’s Neotopia, which is currently raising funds through Kickstarter. There are also venerable virtual communities, such as Second Life, and not-so-venerable startups, such as Lockwood’s Avakin Life. And there are the MMO games that have added significant social content, such as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which now has customizable housing for clubs and individuals. But so far there is no clear destination that fills the niche occupied by Home — a primarily social MMO with casual gaming content to keep players engaged, in the same way that a board game facilitates social interactions among a group of friends.
In a way, Home was always a collection of tiny MMO experiences, each appealing to a different segment of its audience. From the purely social spaces, such as the Hub, through the light social-gaming spaces such as Aurora, to the ambitious immersive gaming experiences such as No Man’s Land, Home was a virtual food court of attractions. Perhaps that was its fatal flaw — none of the Home spaces was complete enough to be a destination. We wandered in and out of worlds, chatting with friends and playing simple games. But few of us came to one world, dug in, and stayed.
As with all generalizations, there are exceptions. Home had a few attractions that built up dedicated fanbases, by providing enough creative scope to absorb our full attention. One of the best of these is Home Tycoon from Hellfire Games, which is also the creator of the iconic Novus Prime.
Home Tycoon was nearly unique in Home in allowing players to deeply customize their own city. The only other contender — nDreams’ Blueprint:Home — also allowed the owner to create a private space. But the cities that Home Tycoon users created were essentially public spaces — urban landscapes that could be visited by others without the owner being present.
Home Tycoon also provided a wide variety of gaming opportunities in its deceptively simple package. You could build the city of your dreams, guided by nothing but your own aesthetic sense. Or you could try to maximize various statistics — population, income, or happiness, or minimize pollution. Maximizing population earned you a slot on the public leaderboards and became an obsessive competition in its own right.
The other dimension of Home Tycoon was building a game within a game, by creating elaborate road systems and racing virtual cars around them. This quickly became one of the space’s most popular features. The cities with the best racetracks won the most kudos in the frequent popularity contests.
Given Home Tycoon’s popularity, many people will be sorry to lose their cities when Home closes in March, 2015. But perhaps by then they will not have to. Because Hellfire Games is working on a project for the PS4, which appears to be Home Tycoon matured, and enlarged to stand-alone game proportions. So far we have a technical demo video, linked below, and some brief public statements, the first of which was posted by Hellfire’s CEO, Jeff Posey, on my Facebook wall:
“Barbara, we are not planning an entire platform replacement such as with Neotopia, but we hope to bring a game to PlayStation platforms that includes the social elements that the Home community would use, such as customized avatars, chatting, and custom spaces.
We’re amping up “personal spaces” in a way, by taking your custom Tycoon style city and letting you go inside buildings, and furnish them, as you can see in the tech demo teaser video! However there would still be a Train Station that would act more like a traditional public space. Of course, you can go silly and “furnish” the outdoor areas of your custom city in fun sandbox ways. (yes imagine Home Tycoon but you can place furniture (with physics) in the city as well, and you can obtain superhero powers, and story and mission-based NPC interaction is done with 3D NPC avatars, and all those various things we would have liked to do with Home Tycoon in PSHome.”
So, it’s not going to be a full Home replacement. But it will be a game with significant social content, and also the kind of personal customization that Home users have found so attractive. Unencumbered by Home’s stringent technical requirements, the new game will let you go inside the buildings you create, and decorate them like Home’s apartments. Although Jeff does not say so, it’s likely that the public/private nature of these cities will continue. And the road-building component of the game will be expanded, probably with enhanced physics. Jump-ramps, here we come!
Home users who enjoyed Home Tycoon will have a place to go. And they will be joined by others with similar interests, many of whom never experienced the original game. In time, they will build their own virtual community. Will this be enough to make Home Tycoon’s successor a true Home replacement? Probably not. It’s just one piece of the grand jigsaw puzzle that is Home. But it’s an important piece, and a unique one. It will be nice to have it survive the great Home breakup.
Perhaps the true successor to Home will not be any single MMO game, but the sum of them that is spreading across all available platforms. The Home community will disperse, but it will seed new virtual communities as technology matures. The Home of the future may become indistinguishable from the internet itself, spanning the full technological range from text-based social media to fully immersive console-based MMORPG’s. Friends from one community will cross boundaries and show up in others, as many of my Home friends and contacts are now part of my Facebook circle, as the quote above demonstrates. And I predict that games of all kinds will continue to add and expand social interactions and user customization, allowing many of the activities we have loved on Home, and merging imperceptibly with the social MMO paradigm.
But in this grand constellation of the future, I expect one bright star will be the promised heir to Home Tycoon, matured and launched as its own platform, and building its own avid community. When it opens, I shall certainly be there to see what new fun Hellfire Games has created.
October 8th, 2014 by SealWyf_ | 3 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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I really like what they plan here. I always thought it would have been great to go inside the buildings I erected. I loved driving in the city and along the beach too.This sounds pretty cool!
Nice write up SealWyf!
Test drive unlimited 2 has some good features, and I know one of my friends was gutted when Sony closed the online part of white knight chronicles, where you could build a whole village etc
I’m defenitively not in a rush to get a PS4 but this look very interresting indeed. It’s not a secret that Gin and I have a soft spot for Hellfires. And we are looking for our next MMO…
The PsHome experiment might had lead to the growing number of MMO games we see. Our problem is they are game first. It’s hard to “socialize” when you defending yourself against hordes of aliens/mobs. So a more casual setting might be the right choice.