The video below features 10 minutes of gameplay from the upcoming Home for the Playstation 3. Although it’s been delayed this video reinvigorates my interest in the 3D social environment.
Graphically Home looks fantastic, both the environments and character models look to take full advantage of the platforms hardware, however these look fairly segmented each requiring users to endure decent loading times.
In the video we see options to interact with the environment like sitting down, playing pool or bowling, as well as the ability to enter stores and buy real estate, furniture and more. The images and videos posted on indoor and outdoor display boards are effectively a PS3 promotion-fest. It would be great if this was at least catered to your preferred interests (i.e. FPS genre).
The items for purchase are all listed as free, but are clearly setup to include costed items, providing an additional revenue stream for Sony.
One things for sure, is Home will be download-hungry. Although environments would only need to be downloaded once, they still look to be a decent size, add in-Home videos and items purchased, then you might want to increase that download limit.
Remembering it’s still in private beta currently, with a public beta due out later this year, so things may change between now and then.
The video does look remarkably light-on in people numbers, something that’s symptomatic of it’s in-development status. It is quite easy to imagine interacting and socializing with others online inside Home. I’m most interested in it’s ability to provide a discovery mechanism to find felow gamers with common interests.
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