One thing Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis didn’t have when the reboot launched in 2021 was player housing, a notable absence when its predecessor included Personal Quarters and a few related ways for players to make spaces their own in the MMO. Players asked for something similar, but Sega decided to give them something better: Creative Spaces.
The new zone is part of the beefy, free ver. 2 update set to launch in June 2023, and Sega showed GLHF around the new customizable islands and demonstrated how its remarkably deep features work.
Sega calling it Creative Spaces and not “player housing” isn’t just a marketing flourish, though you’d be forgiven for not realizing why at first. The tutorial funnels you through all the usual things – an introduction to the new zone, some short blurbs about how to use the features – before setting you loose on a massive island.
This island is your creative space, a blank canvas – blank, save for a utilitarian shelter in the middle – that you can do almost anything with. You can spend in-game currency, in the shop to get furnishing sets and individual items. There’s a robust set of landscaping tools for terraforming, though no water tool just yet, and the island itself is massive, both in its capacity for objects and hosting other players.
Sega spent the last two years adding new combat features and regions to the online game, many of which were based on community feedback. Series producer Yuya Kimura tells GLHF now was the time to pause for a moment and give the so-far overlooked communication and customization elements an unplanned refresh.
“In PSO2, as well as NGS, there are plenty of other important and popular elements besides battles and adventures,” Kimura tells GLHF via email. “Among those, the Character Creation and Symbol Art, one of the communications functions, have an extremely high degree of freedom for user-generated content. After two years, we were able to deliver the battle and adventure elements we had always planned for NGS – four regions and 10 classes. As the next step, I wanted to make a significant update that wasn’t in the initial plan to the communication functionality, which hadn’t seen a lot of changes yet!”
On the design front, it seems like Sega made everything in your toolkit with user-friendliness in mind. You can quickly scale walls, flooring, and even some items with a few button presses and, better still, apply the effect to more than one piece at a time. Creative Spaces lets you put furniture wherever you want. Think a rug would work great on the wall or suspended from the roof? Go for it. Hardly any limit exists to what you can do.
I saw a surprising mix of creative designs using pieces and ideas you wouldn’t normally think of, most of which I was told happened entirely by accident when the marketing team was just tinkering around to see what they could do. If you see a design you like, you can swipe it for yourself, assuming the creator uploads it for copying on the Creative Spaces terminal. You can’t actually edit copied creations yet, but it’s handy for getting inspiration and seeing how the creator pieced everything together.
You also don’t have to pay for them. The in-game currency used to purchase furnishings comes from just playing the free-to-play game, and Sega told me there are no special items or features locked behind the paid battle passes.
You can invite dozens of other friends and players to your island and give them editing permissions if you want to make it a community effort – though bear in mind they can do unspeakable things to your creations. This sense of togetherness is where Creative Spaces becomes more than just a player housing system. While you certainly can turn your island into an exquisitely designed haven for you alone, you can also make a club or dance hall for your friends, a rainforest retreat for others to marvel at, or a challenging obstacle course for people to test their skills on.
Sega also has a few showpiece spaces to highlight unique and seasonal items. I saw a Sonic the Hedgehog space that recreated Green Hill Zone to perfection, complete with rings, springs, floating loops, and more that did a lot to convince me of the system’s potential for creating more than just houses and social spaces. You’ll have a chance to earn unique pieces such as those used in these spaces and other seasonal decorations by completing in-game tasks, so make sure to check your events log often.
The other feature that sets Creative Spaces apart is Connect, a brilliant program that offers a staggering number of options for how your space works. A connect terminal is an item you can place that, well, connects with any other object in your space – and then lets you do whatever you want with it.
You can create systems of behavior where lights come on after you open a door, or a feature appears or disappears when you interact with a different object. Each terminal has over 90 function slots, which makes for a dizzying array of options if you have the knowledge and patience to make them all work as intended – and the time to figure them out. A more robust set of tutorials or experimental scenarios would be welcome for a feature such as this one, though figuring it out as you go along has its own appeal as well.
That’s the core of PSO New Genesis ver. 2, though the update also introduces a few other creative features. One is a set of holographic items – they look like normal items, despite the name – that you can use as props in photo shoots to help give your poses a bit more life and personality.
Finally, you can toggle the new cel-shading effect on to give your character a bit more anime flair. It looks fantastic, and I don’t see myself turning it off ever again.
While it might not add a new region or class, there’s a lot going on in Creative Spaces, and Kimura hopes it’ll give players another way to have fun in the MMO, perhaps even one they didn’t think of before.
“I believe that the Creative Space will allow players to enjoy the world of NGS for a long time to come,” Kimura says. “More than anything else though, I look forward to seeing the content that players will create and how it will far exceed our expectations and imaginations.”
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
