Heroes of Ruin Preview and Interview

There are a couple of articles for Square Enix and n-Space’s Heroes of Ruin to bring to your attention this evening, starting with a new hands-on preview at CVG that labels it as “a Nintendo 3DS title for Diablo fiends”:

A quick glance through the menu tells us we’re an Alchitect: a sort of steampunk alchemist who flings flasks and spells in equal measure. Other classes include the Vanquisher – a warrior with the head of a lion – and the Gunslinger, a bard with torso of a swan. Wait, no, it’s a class that specialises in firearms. The game can be played online in a team of up to four, but today our Alchitect was doing it all on her own.

Thankfully, she’s pretty capable in a fight. Combat’s slick, quick and robust, with melee attacks that connect satisfyingly, and ranged spells that explode in a glittering miasma of energy. It’s streamlined, but in a good way – all the features you want are there and easy to access. Health and mana potions require only a tap of the D-pad, while three different abilities can be mapped to the face buttons (the last is reserved for your standard attack, natch).

And then we proceed to NintendoGal or an interview with n-Space producer Tim Schwalk:

NintendoGal.com: It seems that this genre (Adventure RPG) is a new genre for n-Space; did this present any interesting challenges while developing Heroes of Ruin?

TS: Prior to Heroes of Ruin, we worked on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the Wii and DS, which featured a good blend of combat and RPG elements. It was a good initiation for us to this genre and we’ve been able to take what we learned and build on it when creating Heroes of Ruin.

Even with that experience, we have definitely overcome some interesting challenges, especially considering the combination of features we knew we wanted from the beginning. Just allowing four players of any level and any class to join an online game together makes both balancing and difficulty extremely challenging. Add other features to the mix like random dungeons and encounters, along with a huge number of enemies, elites, mini-bosses, and boss fights and you can see that we didn’t make it easy on ourselves! But we’re extremely pleased with how the game has come together and how the team has overcome the hurdles along the way. We’re all huge fans of action/adventure games and the opportunity to create something original for this genre is a dream come true for us.