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TVG sits down with Square Enix Producer, George Wright to talk about n-Space's Diablo-inspired actioner...
Heroes of Ruin is the first dungeon-crawler developed solely for the 3DS. Published by Square-Enix and developed by n-Space (of CoD DS fame), the game features randomly-generated levels and loot, alongside a host of promising connectivity features. TVG spoke with Square-Enix Producer, George Wright to learn more about Heroes, Ruin, and random terrain generation.
n-Space is a studio that's known for doing quite a lot of licensed properties. How did the impetus come about to do an original IP with them?
They've got a good pedigree basically, with Nintendo products. They've done Wii games, they've done DS games, but what's really important is that they've proven themselves on multiplayer on the DS with the Call of Duty games. Because multiplayer's so strong in this game – like 4-player drop-in and drop-out co-op – they were like a really good match. The design of the game is not strictly ours, it's both parties' sort of merging of ideas.
The level we played was fairly linear, do the layout generation algorithms differ substantially between levels?
Yes they do. There are rules applied to the random generation, but it needs to follow a certain set of rules to make each level different to the next level. So some will be longer, some will introduce what we call tiles – it's made up of tiles – some will have more tiles or differing tiles and special tiles, also those can then be rotated and placed. So yes, they will be quite different; they'll be different every time you play it – but if you play the first level through five times it'll always be the same sort of length, and if you play the third or fourth level it'll be longer, or more varied.
Tell us a bit about the Trader's Network and other connectivity features...
So the Trader's Network is Nexus, which is like the hub or the name of the city, and that's where you go to buy your potions or weapons, or sell stuff. Whenever you sell something - you can also do that in the level – it gets hidden away in a list of items which you've sold and when you pass someone who's got the game, that will get traded with them. So the benefit of that is - say you're level ten and you've got some good weapon for another character class and you sell it - it'll be available to somebody else who's that character class or maybe a bit lower – level eight or nine – so that's quite exciting to go into the Trader's Network and you see all the different people that you've passed and what items they have for sale. The other side – of pushing information to the console – we have daily and weekly challenges, so every day we get to have three challenges made available to everybody; you have to fill it on that day, so it might pop up in the morning, and if you don't do it by the end of the day that's it, it's gone. There's also one weekly challenge, and the way that that works, is you have a sort of XP bar – four challenges – and when you fulfill a challenge, it fills up a bit more, a bit more, bit more, and then when it gets full you get a special item for your character and it'll be in Nexus, and it'll be announced and you can go into the city, open a chest and there'll be a special item.
Can you give an example of what those challenges will be like?
Yeah, they're not complex - it's a sort of separate thing to the game, or another layer on top. So as simple as going into a certain environment and killing twenty of a certain enemy type. There also might be a time constraint on top of that. Just small things which you could fulfill just by playing through the game normally or you could choose to go back somewhere you've been before and run through in order to get that challenge.
So there'll be three of those every day, and an additional weekly challenge. How long will that run for, roughly?
That we're planning to support for a minimum of a year.
Obviously you can have different numbers of players with you as you're playing through – how have you balanced that?
So the way the balancing works is, it depends on what your character is and how many there are in your party. So you can be playing through the game yourself, and then somebody will just jump into it (if you've allowed people to jump into the game), and immediately, like, as you get to the next checkpoint it will balance the game for you. If there's more of you, obviously the enemies become harder to kill and they'll do some more damage. Also on top of that it will also scale in difficulty according to the levels of the people. So if I'm level five and you jump into my game and you're level ten, they'll do a percentage damage towards me so it's not like they're going to kill me in one shot; I'm still going to have a chance against them.
Do any of the puzzles in the game require multiple players at once?
No, no, because that would break the game, how we've designed it – drop-in and drop out.
How does the game differ in solo play compared to the multiplayer experience?
It's not different at all; it's exactly the same game - there's no differentiation between single-player and multiplayer. When you start up the game you're not going to have the option to go single-player game or multplayer game – you just start your game. And then you have an option to have private or public slots available to people to join your game.
So people can just jump in at any time...
Or you can choose to turn that off if you want to keep it a solo experience.
Tim Schwalk, Producer on the game, previously said that it's not an Action-RPG, it's an Action-Adventure. Can you expand on what that means a little bit?
It is kind of an Action-RPG, but it is a lot more of an adventure game with a strong story. It's not your typical, hardcore RPG game I think is what he's trying to get away from. So it has very strong RPG elements, but it's not strictly an RPG.
And of course you have the Gunslinger class, and comparisons have been drawn to the CoD games there...
Yeah it's difficult to explain, you know, it's just how peo
ple categorise games. You could categorise it as an Action-RPG, and I'm sure a lot of people are, but we are calling it an Action-Adventure.
Tell us a bit about where the inspiration for the art style came from...
We wanted to have something which would have quite a broad range of appeal, so we had different concepts drawn up, and presented them to focus groups and saw what people liked – that was the first step. Also secondly, because it's a smaller screen, you can't just have anything – you can't have a highly detailed, small character on-screen, because you're not going to see any of that detail. So we wanted sort of bigger-proportioned people, and through those two mechanisms, we sort of really iterated and got to where we are now, which we're pretty happy with.
TVG would like to thank George Wright for taking the time to speak with us about Heroes of Ruin, which is due out on the 3DS early next year.
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Game Information
Available On:
3DS
| Release Date: | Players: |
|---|---|
| TBA | 1-4 (Online) |
| Publisher: | Genre: |
| Square-Enix | RPG |
| Developer: | PEGi Rating: |
| n-Space |
Reviews & Ratings
12 Sep 2011
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