Home’s High-Water Mark
by ted2112, HSM team writer
For me, the high-water mark of Home was December, 2012.
Home was riding a four-year wave at that point, and its momentum carried it well past anything its designers and critics alike could have ever foreseen. That December, Xi: Continuum debuted, and the game drew a parallel to its host, Home itself. The water that flowed across a new timeline of a very current and relevant console generation, and in my opinion climbed to the highest level its collective architects could have ever built it. And it has been slowly retreating ever since.
Virtual space is precious, and exploration and discovery could be turned inward to a world known and also not created yet. Virtual space was also dangerous and could take as much as it could give. Xi: Continuum in this way mirrored Home with its society, problems, busy streets and massive landscape. The game was a gutsy move by nDreams, and even the Home detractors had to give credit where credit was due. The game, like its earlier version Xi, reached outside of Home itself and spilled us into the real streets of Quebec and funneled users to Chinese telecom websites to sift for clues.
The alternate reality game was a critical success, and even the complaints of the game being pay-to-play seem silly now, but perhaps the most profound thing about Xi: Continuum was that it will never be duplicated. Home will never see that height of quality and promise again. That rising wave seemed so full of momentum; nothing could seem to stop it.
The receding wave of today’s Home is a very different place. We have lost half of our once mighty game. Home’s Japan and Asia regions have sadly come to an end, and Europe and North America will be gone in a mere six months These events have shown us all too well that virtual space is precious indeed. Home today is much weaker than when Xi:Continuum launched, to the point of Sony’s decision to close the game world down.
I don’t know why I do it, but sometimes I just can’t stop myself — and I stroll through the deserted streets of the Continuum and wonder why.
Why did the water roll back? Why did the Asia and Japan regions fail so early? Why didn’t Home get a first-class ticket to the PS4? Why did the developers slowly fade away from making content? Why is the Continuum empty, and why didn’t we see the end coming?
Home is still open in North America and Europe, albeit for a short time. The door is still open for anyone to enter and take a last look at a once great virtual community. We have developers still making new content here for a month, but I’m sure most of it won’t ring very true. As much as the doors have been open for many years for anyone to walk through, not as many have — and one has to only look at the empty streets of the Continuum, a once jam-packed virtual city within a thriving virtual world, within the real world, to understand what I am talking about.
For me, Xi: Continuum is a measuring stick that sadly still records the receding waters; a canary in the coal mine that shows us failure. The surreal city still holds a mirror to us, but now it seems more likely to reflect places like the real city of Detroit. The Continuum stands as a reminder of things passing, and it can be heartbreaking. I have often joked that I will be the last one out of Home when the door finally shuts, and I’ll turn off the lights before I go, but I never thought I would see the waters recede so far, or the end come so soon.
All our collective momentum and determination to sustain this great game has failed us, and that once powerful feeling of being in the right place at the right time has sadly passed us by. The only question now is: what do we do with the time we have left? Home is still a wonderful experience, even with little time ahead of it. Home, even as it is today, is still a far better MMO than many current games in my opinion, yet how do we balance the past with the future? How do we make peace with few of the resources afforded to us in the past?
I’m sorry I don’t have a definitive answer. I, like you, feel the push and pull of living in the past console generation and watching the new and powerful waters of the next-gen console rise. While I don’t have an answer to soothe us, I still feel good about the time I have had here and look forward to more, but perhaps different times to come in this wonderful community. As far as the future, who amongst us really knows what will come to pass? The one constant of Home has always been a changing landscape, and maybe we are simply witnessing yet another reinvention of not a game, but a community.
The waters have receded far, and are just about gone. The streets of the Continuum are still open for now, and perhaps one last stroll through them will clear my head before the tide goes out completely.
October 1st, 2014 by ted2112 | 3 comments
ted2112 is a writer and a Bass player that has been both inspired and takes to heart Kurt Vonnegut words...."we are here on planet Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."
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I believe the point that Home headed over the peak and came crashing down was after they took the plaza away. When the new Home debuted, I had almost 90 PSN friends, all of whom I met through Home (I don’t play games online). Most all of them were long time Homers. Within about six months, I saw only about half of them logging onto the network at least once a month. Not many more going into Home on a regular basis. Everyone was either playing a game or going onto video services, like Netflix or YouTube. In the past year or more, I have only seen about a half dozen of them in Home at all. Unfortunately, Sony did to Home what Microsoft did to the XBOX.
I was thinking the same thing about the introduction of the Hub as the turning point in Home. I don’t really think that the retirement of Central Plaza was the major factor either.
The baffling aspect is that the supposedly “new and improved” Home had so much promise. I remember visiting the new spaces during the Hub beta. Not so much the Hub itself but the Sportswalk, Pier Park, Adventure/Action districts, Indie Park, revamped mall and the quests really gave the impression that Sony was taking Home seriously and positioning the platform for future success. It seems that not long after that point Sony essentially abandoned Home to the third-party developers. Whilst those companies did a lot for Home, the platform was really doomed because Sony lost interest.
I certainly don’t know what prompted Sony’s disconnect but Home faltered at the point when it should have soared.
I think Home “jumped the shark” with the breaking up of the hub creating a empty feeling. Before the big update Home always seemed busy and vibrant, after it was a bunch of empty spaces and gltchy games. Bootleggers was terrible and so out of place in the action district. Sports walk and the adventure district was always empty.the mall seemed useless after you could buy things without going there.
Pier park was the lone stand out for me. It brought people together instead of separating them.