Sony Home - The official thread*

patsu said:
It's an adventure game that centers around Playstation Home. You can teleport to hidden places in Home. It's linked to the web for clues and videos. There is a weekly update on the game too within the hub itself. Sounds cool. I have not activated the teleporters yet.
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The teleporters are still inactive for everybody.

It's intriguing. One of the items available is a photo with an object in it (to avoid spoilering ;)), and when somebody located the actual object in London they found a USB stick with a further video. Now there are billboards appearing (this one opposite the IMAX on Waterloo Bridge). Presumably similar things are happening elsewhere although I only know about the London ones.

It's early days and the starter puzzles are somewhat simplistic, but there's at least another couple of months of content to come and the ARG elements could be interesting.
 
gameindustry.biz did a Home interview on Monday: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/home-world

The environment that was originally created was actually a pub where you could go and meet with your cohorts between RPG-style quests. In that pub were dart boards and pool tables and things. It rapidly became clear that the really interesting aspect of all this was what was going on inside this pub. The interaction between users - what they do and how they communicate with each other - rather than using it as a loading screen. That evolved into what was called HUB, and that evolved into Home.
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[I believe the initial idea started as a lobby/pub for one of Sony's shooters, the first Home space tested by the pre-alpha guys was called the "Hub"]

Q: You're running an alternate reality game in home to encourage stickiness and communication between gamers. Are you looking towards ARG design to build a lot of the content in Home?

Peter Edward: We're providing a little bit of everything. We're providing the platform. We're providing the tools. And we're providing some benchmark content to inspire and give ideas to other publishers about what's possible and what they could do. Xi is showing you that you can have something far-ranging and a bit outside the box, but ultimately achievable. We're not in the business of creating the content for the Home platform. We're creating that initial spark. Other developers and publishers take those examples and build on them.

Q: So are you expecting developers and publishers to not only build spaces but also gameplay experiences and content.

Peter Edward: Absolutely.

Jack Buser: You're already seeing that with Electronic Arts. They are doing a lot of work with the community. The producer of an EA sports game is basically there, answering questions from the community. That's not a full on ARG, but that is a type of engagement we did not predict.

Peter Edward: It's really interesting to see what other teams do with the environment and the platforms we put out there. It really is quite stunning. It's stuff we never expected. Home is a platform. It's a software platform opposed to a hardware platform. And as is the way with most platforms, the first round of development is pretty safe. It works. But people are getting the hang of how it works, and that's starting to come through in the content. We're just now seeing the next generation of content.

...

Q: From a third-party perspective, what percentage of publishers are interested in Home?

Jack Buser: Every major publisher is interested in Home. Here you can speak directly to the PlayStation audience on the platform that your product is on. It is unbelievably uneconomical. And there are commerce opportunities for partners. You have publishers and brands coming into Home looking to engage with an audience, but they also have the opportunity to generate revenue. It's a model that makes sense for everybody. It's kind of a perfect storm.

...

Q: What were some of the hard calls you had to make during the development process?

Peter Edward: The biggest choice was when to put it out there. It's not a new subject for debate: Why did this take so long? We announced it two years ago and it took until last December to actually get it out in beta. The most difficult aspect of development was making that call of when to put it out there, and more importantly making the decision not to put it out there until it was ready. We could have put it out there much, much earlier, and obviously that was the plan, but during development it became clear that this would be a long-term platform play rather than a flash in the pan. We needed to make sure it was robust, that it had sufficient feature set to be appealing, that the tool set allowed developers to make content for it. And all this meant we needed to give it enough space to actually be fully featured. It's still evolving and there is more we're adding to it.
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Heh, technically it's still under beta. But you're right, it's not sign up phase anymore. We should be getting pretty much weekly update now (3 out of 4 weeks for Home Spaces, plus additional and more frequent content because of Xi and other Home items).
 
... in the sense that it will see continual improvement.

As a concept, it is certainly evolving constantly, such as this ARG one today: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/04/01/xi-has-moved-into-the-real-world/

In the game, players have been finding dozens of clues to piece together the story. So far, the puzzles have all been in PlayStation Home or online in a series of websites. But now, clues are also appearing on billboards around the world.
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Home 1.2 scheduled for release next Thursday in Pal territories:

http://community.eu.playstation.com...ssage?board.id=b_EN_PS3_Home&thread.id=157206

As usual Home will be offline this thursday from 8am UK.

This is just a maintenance period, there is no new content scheduled for release tomorrow.

The next content release date is the 9th of April. This will include two new 3rd party clothing stores in the shopping centre and their associated goodies. Additionally, a patch taking us to version 1.2 is tentatively scheduled for the 9th of April. Patch notes and confirmation of the release date for this will follow once its finalised.
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They should make a Home section for the PS store if not just to make the store more loaded with content + would sell maybe more when people are all out shopping to empty whats left in a card.

Jess is hot.
 
BadTB25 said:
Wasn't there a quote from Sony that Home would always be in Beta?
Maybe they meant development.
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They are deliberately retaining the beta tag to reinforce the fact that Home is changing rapidly over time:

Edwards: For me, it's not an issue. We're already at a stage where anyone with a PS3 can get on, we're at more than five million downloads of the client. Home is there, it's not going away.

Buser: I can tell you why we like the term open beta, and why we've been sticking with it. We really want to emphasize this idea of an evolving platform. What you see now is very different from what you'll see in a few months, and that's very different from what you'll see after that.
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Reposted some of my firmware 2.70 post here, as it's related to Home.

We were up to 9 people in the Beyond3D chat room (awesome) and that went great. Then we decided to try Home, so we all went to my summer house in Home (where not only did I have guests for the first time, but also managed now to test cross-region visiting, which worked great I have to say). I mentioned that I often prefer typing even in Home because when you use voice chat and typing together, or when you are with a lot of people, it gets very hard to track whose saying what, you can't hear each other properly when all people talk at once, etc. - and just ten seconds later four people voice-chatted at once and I couldn't understand a single one of them. :D

[snip]
Nice side result of the chat-room and the Home get together is that a few more of us are now on each other's friends list.

I took a few shots from our get-together in Home as well (I'll also link them in the Home thread). Home definitely needs a little bit more to do, but the basics work pretty well. Now if we can launch a lot of different games from Home and/or find some games to play together in the summer house (would be great if I could buy a pool table or two, for instance, a few arcade cabinets that keep an online score) and get some music going, and (especially requested by xbd ;) ) a picture frame option or something similar, and we've got something pretty useful in Home. :)

(Home can basically do 60 player voice chat, though I don't know how that would work out in practice. Certainly, everyone within range - it's proximity based, as we reaffirmed tonight when someone went out to the balcony and couldn't hear us - can hear when other people talk, so it works decent now)

BeyondHome.jpg


BeyondHome2.jpg


BeyondHome4.jpg
 
Jeebus, Arwin... I think you scared xbd, NavNucST3 and RenegadeRocks with that *beep* *beep* costumes :LOL:
(Note: not shown in pictures)

The word "Otaku" immediately lept into my mind. Fortunately, no one in my office or family saw your costumes. XD

I like xbd's cry, "Arwin !! W-h-a-t the h*ck are you wearing now ?!"
 
:D I just got those two watchmen costumes ... surprised you hadn't seen them before? They're free after all and not uncommon if you walk around in Home.
 
Oh I saw those costumes on the net alright. I just didn't think you'd wear it :) (because your voice is low and booming; you also sounded like a serious professional). It's like seeing Obama dress up as Robin out of the blue. I took a step backwards when I turned around on xbd's cue, and saw you in the costume. :LOL:

Ha ha, and you sounded like HSN (Home Shopping Network) when you modelled it in your Summer Home too. :p

But it's a funny experiment nonetheless.

I use a female avatar to experiment in Home too. I find that some of the gals are more rude than the guys as they test the boundaries. In general, if you know how to get around people, most of them are okay -- even though they may behave like a brat initially.

EDIT:
Arwin said:
I took a few shots from our get-together in Home as well (I'll also link them in the Home thread). Home definitely needs a little bit more to do, but the basics work pretty well. Now if we can launch a lot of different games from Home and/or find some games to play together in the summer house (would be great if I could buy a pool table or two, for instance, a few arcade cabinets that keep an online score) and get some music going, and (especially requested by xbd ;) ) a picture frame option or something similar, and we've got something pretty useful in Home. :)
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Yes, all the while I was screaming "Let's launch into a game now" inside my mind, but KZ2 and other major games are not integrated yet.
 
The previous Xi puzzle has been solved. Because some of the hints appeared in real life, gamers all over the world had to collaborate and visit the locations to get their clues.

Home (via the Xi hub) has also received some more updates:

* Last week's Hoverbike race (Maximum-Tilt ?):

Max2.jpg


* A text adventure game "Cavern of the Bandit King"

bandit2.jpg


bandit1.jpg


Should be about 30 minutes to 1 hour game time according to people who have tried it.
 
Will check out the new game. I spent a lot of time in Xi this past Saturday and I played the hover bike game. Xi is a great addition to Home. I don't think I have ever spent that much time in Home.
 
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