PlayStation Home v1.3 Coming This September

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As announced at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, PlayStation Home’s core client will be getting a serious upgrade this fall. And when we say serious, dear readers, we’re talking excessive and impressive in quality, extent, and degree. This is the for real deal upgrade!

I got three words to start us off: Universal. Game. Launching. That’s right – you can now launch into any PlayStation 3 game directly from Home. Titles that fully support game launching (like Street Fighter IV, Resistance 2, MotorStorm, and Far Cry 2) will be identified by separate icons that appear over an avatar’s head and will have varying degrees of additional multiplayer functionality built in. Simplified game launching will take you from Home to the start menu of your favorite games with ease. Never again will you have to sign out of Home to play with (or against) your friends. Simply insert the disc of your choice while in Home and follow the on screen directions and you’ll be good to go.

Shop-a-holics will be stoked to see that an in-store item previewing option will be rolled out. This feature will allow you to preview items of clothing on your character in 3D (including the ability to check out multiple items simultaneously to see what combinations best suit your taste). You’ll be able to preview all furniture in 3D as well, complete with zoom and rotate options so you can check your potential purchases from all angles, right down to the nitty gritty. We’ll also offer you the ability to rent certain items and purchase “consumables” (limited use items) when available – such as the new Shrink Potion that lets you shrink your avatar to a tiny size. All in all, we think you’ll find that these new features allow for greater control over the use of your personal items. We’ve even added a new section to the Menu Pad under Personal > My Purchases to help you keep it all organized.

Home Shrink Potion

PlayStation Home v1.3 will also see additional portable objects (like the Bubble Machine) made available to the community. To start, we’ll be giving everyone free cameras that you can use to snap pictures from either a 1st or 3rd person view. These photos will automatically be saved to the Photo section of the XMB, from which you can then upload to the picture frames you have hanging in your personal spaces. We’ll be announcing more portable objects very soon, so be sure to check in on this blog often to stay abreast of the latest PlayStation Home item releases. Or just use the Latest Updates tab in your Menu Pad > Community. We here over at the PlayStation Home Community team keep an updated list of all new content releases in this area.

Home Camera

On the subject of portable objects, rest assured that we’ve listened to your suggestions and made some changes to help you better customize your in-world experience. You’ll be able to manually hide any portable object that you encounter, and objects placed by anyone on your Ignore or Block list will also be hidden. We think you all will find that accessing certain mini-games and watching videos will be much easier thanks to these additional options.

There are tons of little updates that you’ll notice when PlayStation Home v1.3 launches. To start, you’ll see that your avatar has additional emotes – including two new action emotes (you can flip a coin with your friends or play the old “pick a number between 1 and 100” game). You will also be able to pose your avatar in a variety of ways (photo op anyone?). We’ve also added some new categories of clothing (composite and outfits) that will allow you to customize your avatar with greater ease. In addition, we’ve optimized the targeting system, added a new queuing system, fixed quite a few pesky bugs, and are giving you the option to determine your cache size (you can choose from 3, 5, 8, and 12 GB) so as to make navigating Home a much smoother experience. As we get closer to launch, we’ll post complete patch notes for the v1.3 client on the PlayStation Home General forum at www.us.playstation.com. So if you haven’t yet signed up for our forums, please take a moment to do so now – and check in often for more details regarding what’s going on in PlayStation Home.

Last but certainly not least, we’ll be launching a SingStar space right around the time that PlayStation Home v1.3 hits your PlayStation 3s. This swanky night club-esque SingStar-themed game space is sure to be the hot new hub for all of you party goers. Whether you want to get down with your friends on the reactive dance floor, vote for your favorite music videos on the Video Jukebox, or test your knowledge at the SingStar Music Quiz, this space promises to have something for every SingStar fanatic.

See you all in Home!

Comments are closed.

347 Comments

  • first!!!yaaaaaaay!!!

  • Yes. Very yes. I am looking forward to this!

  • More great additions to Home

  • universal game launching seems good.

  • hey is the shrinking potion reusable???i dont want to pay $1 every time after I use up all of my shrinking potion

  • Simply put:

    AWESOME!!!!

  • BTW when will this update go live??

  • SONY!!! Keepe it coming!!

  • Universal Game Launching? Sweet!

  • Wow, great job guys! Does universal game launching mean launching into a game (Or game start menu) synced with friends, or just launching solo?

  • How about a serious firmware update, instead of the eye candy that will be in 3.0. Like in\ out game voice chat. I think focusing on home is a waste of resources.

    (you can now delete me)

  • Sounds good.

  • W0w

  • Will HOME ever come out of BETA? It is getting annoying every time there is an update, I have to redownload all the game space and area.

  • uhh, when will we be getting media sharing? like watching videos in the apartment with friend. Thats all i want please

  • Thanks Locust and congrats with home so far i have one question though

    with the flip the coin game will lag affect this or will it be a choose the winning side before coin is flipped idea ?

  • cool glad to see you guys have been working on a lot of things behind the scene. keep up the good work

  • Some really good additions to home right there. Thanx for the info.

  • Universal Game Launching! yes what a great UPDATE! (= HOME will now be the REAL DEAL! thank you PS3 HOME TEAM!

  • interesting and promising, good job on keeping your mouths closed on this blog though, it’ll make it less disapointing (might actually like!) i havn’t tried the buzz space that everyone raves about, so it should be interesting.

  • Awesome! Home has really improved since the days of the closed beta and it’s great seeing it continuing to get new features and spaces, as well as core updates! Keep up the good work Sony!

  • Will u be able to watch the music videos in the new space?

  • They should ban people who post “first”. Honestly, if I was a moderator you would be gone.

    @Locust- You said the following “we’ve optimized the targeting system, added a new queuing system”

    Does targeting improves things like accessing the movie screen to make it full screen when there is an entire crowd of people? Or trying to access a game to activate it?

    As for queuing, is this in regards to games which are in use, you can now queue yourself to be the next person to play when available?

    Can’t wait for the update.

  • Dice roll 1-100 is cool.

    A simple little thing but it’s a good functionality to have in a MMO environment.

  • Awesome news indeed. Keep it up Sony!

  • Awesome list. Any chance of the camera extending into video in the future? (Like Noby Noby Boy or PixelJunk Monsters lets you record game video?). For the forum party and the ninja dance off and stuff it’d be useful. Thanks!

  • OMFG NERDGASM LMFAO ok screw FW 3.0 I want Home v1.3

  • wow awsome keep it up but YES SHOULD ADD OPEN CHAT all the time in home to make it more life like and just have a ignore button for anoying people

  • this leaves the question- what could possibly keep people from joining Home after this update?

  • WTH!!!! FW3.00 & a Home Update. All these new features come out right when my PS3 stops working.

    I get this yellow light whenever I try to turn on my PS3. Does anyone know what the problem is???

  • Is it still gonna suck?

  • Very niceeee.

  • Also Locust is tomorrow just regular maintanence ?

  • omg*faints* 2 much awesomeness keep it up sony and home developers XD

  • Great job! I put a ton of suggestions in the PlayStation Home August Suggestion Thread. Give us some laser tag duel and jumping abilities in Home! I’d like to see it more alive, example: I’m talking with a friend at the mall and in the background people are having laser tag duels and jumping. Or talk with Lucasarts and have some Star Wars costumes and items like lightsabers and allow for jedi/sith duels. Home could be so awesome I hope you guys have plans on adding things like I mentioned above.

  • HOME 3.00 FTW!!!

  • By choosing your cache size, will you be able to make home much more streaming rather than what it is now?

    I’m not sure how to word it, but will you be able to travel from location to location without having to download, then load each one?

  • Better XMB integration please. And streamline the loading of spaces, the whole client should load as one entity, like an MMORPG.

  • It’s certainly getting better, I just hope you can re-hook the first wave of naysayers that uninstalled a week after 1.0 and never looked back.

  • This is fine. Game launching is cool (No LBP like in the original trailer though? Please make this happen soon!)

    You know what I’d like to see my avatar do though?

    Jump!

    Call up Naughty Dog and ask them to loan you guys the Nathan code so our character’s can jump like he did in the online beta. I hate having to run around all the time. I want my guy to jump around sometimes. :D

    Thanks!

  • What I’m really waiting for is the ability to be able to stream our own media within out personal spaces..or at least full length movies in the home theater.

    Something of that sort. That’s a big deal in my world.

    Still will be satisfied till then because its always Sony FTW!!

  • Sounds like a great update to Home. Although what I really want is OCEANA servers. I hate going into Home when it lags and seeing adds that don’t implicate the Australian dollar.

  • Did they update the animations? They felt a bit stiff.

  • I keep finding myself going back into Home. Not sure why, but I do. If you keep adding stuff; I imagine I’ll keep finding reasons to go back.

    Really want a trophy room though…maybe one day.

  • Wow. Everything people have wanted except now we just need to be able to use our Home avatars as our PSN avatars.

  • @Thwip Yeah that’s a great idea. Trophy room for sure!

  • Holy crap this is awesome!

    Keep up the good work Sony. I had my doubts of Home at the start but now its certainly becoming awesome.

  • Can’t wait for the game launching. Please bring us the trophies that we want to show off in home.

  • now theres the home updates i’ve been waiting for

  • Oh yeah…can I please get a Goatee (aka Van Dyke)? The facial hair icon is a Van Dyke; yet there isn’t one to select.

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