More on PS3 Home
I finally had a chance to checkout the PS Home virtual environment yesterday at a friend’s house. The service has gone through a few hiccups since launch, but appears to be stable now.
Initial impressions? It looks visually appealing. That’s the only positive thing I can really say about it after playing around for an hour.
I’m going to be a bit critical here, but these things really jumped out at me:
- Downloads. In order to ‘visit’ various locations in Home, you need to download them. Want to check out the mall? Must download it to your hard drive first. This really takes away from the feeling of being in a virtual world if you are required to stop whatever you’re doing and download different areas when you want to visit them. At least you only have to download once.
- The bowling alley and arcade. Ok, neat idea here with lots of mini-games, but they were ALL FULL. I hear this is usually the case. Sony, you know what’s cool about virtual worlds? They are virtual, so when things reach capacity, you can spawn more. When an area reaches capacity, why not spawn a mirror image of the area so others can also tryout the activities?
- There’s not much to do. Bowling alley is always full, theater just runs trailers for Sony games, you have to spend real money in the mall to get virtual stuff, and your virtual apartment doesn’t really have much of anything in it aside from furniture you can push around.
I still think Home offers HUGE potential, but so far this is rather unimpressive. It seems like a lot of Second Lifers have shown up in home, so all I see in the common area are people dancing. It was rather comical when I got my friend’s female avatar dancing and within seconds a bunch of male avatars came over and started whispering me if I wanted to chat. My friend said that’s the same thing she experienced when she created her account and spent a few hours exploring. It creeped her out.
Welcome to online, social virtual worlds. Le sigh…
