Sony Fleshes Out PlayStation Vita's Array Of Social Features

In an interview with Eurogamer, Sony Europe's R&D gaffer, Phil Rogers, has offered a little more insight into what each of the features offers and hopes to achieve.

According to Rogers, Near is a little like Nintendo 3DS' spot-pass — "a location-based gifting system".

"What Near does is it allows users to discover each other, leave gifts for each other and essentially find out more about games. You can see where people are in relation to your location, their five most recently played games and also gifts that they've registered. This is fairly cool because it exposes users to games they might not have heard of and you can see how popular those games are and how people are rating them," said Rogers at last week's Develop Conference 2011.

Unlike other platforms, Near's gifts follow you as you "go about your daily life". Near allows 100kb gift box per game, with boxes able to hold more than one gift so long as they don't exceed the size limit.

"Imagine user A visits locations one to ten through that day, and they get home and sync with the server and it uploads to the Near server your ten locations that you've been to.

"User B comes along, does the same thing, but at some point in User B's day they passed User A's location five, which means they're now able to collect gifts that that user's dropped. That comes into the Near application and then in-game they pick up those gifts."

It's essentially a "collectibles" system grounded in the real world, but we still think Sony's got some work on its hands explaining the value of the Near system. Gifts can range from challenges to in-game items. It's a cool idea, but we have to wonder how many people will bother with the system.

Party is a less obnoxious and more functional feature. This is essentially a platform-wide option that allows you to connect with three other friends and communicate regardless of what you're doing on Vita. "You can chat across games through text and voice," Rogers explained. It's cross-game chat essentially.

"You can have different Party groups for different games or genres. Maybe you've got a first-person shooter group that you can all chat and go into.

"The voice chat part you can override," Rogers added, "So if in-game you've got your own teams for audio then you can override the Party chat and turn that off."

Finally, LiveArea is the hub of all your activities within the PlayStation Vita. There are three modes: Live, Index and Game. It's essentially a social network, allowing you to observe your friend's activities in games and comment on their progress.

"Activity is a way for players to discuss progress. The system automatically puts a few activities in there," Rogers explained, such as trophies and ratings. "That encourages people to then comment similar to Facebook style."

LiveArea can also be accessed by developers, allowing them to promote DLC and in-game events.

"When you ship the game it's got the standard LiveArea that you bake into the game card," said Rogers. But updates will allow developers to customise the experience for the user. "It's a good way to push DLC," added Rogers. "So there's new levels out, click, go to the Store." Rogers warned that publishers will need to use the feature responsibly in order to get the most out of it.

We wouldn't be surprised if LiveArea made its way onto the PlayStation 3 around the same time as Vita, and it's certainly something we'd welcome. Tuning into a personal PlayStation social network sounds like a really compelling idea, and it's something we can't wait to put into practice when the Vita launches — hopefully this year.