Ruin (working title)

Ruin (working title) was last seen on the E3 2011 PlayStation stage, when the presenter wirelessly transferred his PS Vita game session to a PS3 without missing a frame of the action. As technically impressive as Ruin’s cross-platform compatibility is, I’ve learned that it’s only the beginning of what co-developers Idol Minds and SCE San Diego Studios are planning for this ambitious multiplayer action-RPG.

Ruin’s developers are quietly building a wide, deep social network designed to keep you interacting whether you’re on the couch, on the bus, or someplace in-between. Travis Williams, Ruin’s energetic senior producer, walked me through the game’s social ambitions several weeks ago at a media showing in New York City. From the earliest days of Ruin’s development process, Williams told me, the development team was motivated to find a way to make its multiplayer competitive mode accessible and socially sticky — important considerations given PS Vita‘s always-on wireless connectivity and the game’s Vita-to-PS3 cross-platform support. “We were obsessing over find a better way to do PvP, a better mechanism for getting items that you wanted from other players,” Williams said.

Enter the Lair. The Lair is your inner sanctum, your pride and joy, your seat of power.  The significance of your Lair is twofold: it adds to your offense when you’re playing, and it acts as your defense when you’re not. You don't attack players, you attack their lairs.

Your Lair is deeply customizable, enabling you to tweak everything from its physical layout and visual style to the types of monsters and bosses that protect it while you’re off conquering the world. As you earn enchanted relics, you’ll be able to place them in your Lair to grant synergistic bonuses that enhance your character’s defensive and offensive options. You’ll be able to swap these items in and out of your Lair’s sockets at will, and where you place them in your Lair can radically change their effects.

As you encounter other players over PSN, your Lair also becomes a vehicle for advertising your social status. Case in point: If you meet another player who is adorned with spiked armor, it’s a visual clue that his Lair is equipped with a powerful relic called Heart of Titan.

You can challenge them for that item and if they agree the items are in escrow while the players battle it out on each other's lairs.

Ruin will include a co-op element of some kind,

Ruin’s sturdy social backbone also gives the developers an opportunity to correct a host of longstanding gripes with social gaming, beginning with public enemy number one: the meaningless social game updates that clutter so many Facebook and Twitter news feeds worldwide