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Infamous 2
Taking a page from its PlayStation 3 brethren LittleBigPlanet, Sucker Punch announced today that Infamous 2 will feature user-generated missions.
The surprising new feature will allow users to create missions for Infamous 2, drawing from a broad range of genres – defense, escort, search and destroy, survival, shooting gallery, platforming, obstacle courses, puzzles, and more.
The city of New Marais will be seamlessly populated with both officially developed missions and user-created missions, allowing you to continue experiencing fresh content even after you’ve completed the primary campaign. Unique colors will differentiate official and unofficial content, and filters will let you choose the type of games you want to play by genre, ranking, and so on.
Those interested in developing their own missions will have the ability to draw from the same pool of assets and behaviors used by Sucker Punch. Aspiring designers have the option of creating a missions from scratch or remixing an existing level by dragging and dropping items and determining the behaviors of NPCs.
Creating missions in Infamous 2 provides players a chance to become famous themselves. The higher quality the mission the better chance it will be showcased through a system of user rankings. The “Famous” tier is where most successful mission designers will land, with the elite being selected for the highest tier – Sucker Punch Featured Content. These are the missions that will default to everyone’s world by default.
In order to ensure a smooth release, a public beta is slated for early April. Details on how to participate will be provided March 14. The best missions from this beta will be chosen as Sucker Punch Featured Content and populate to the world when the game ships.
We’re about to get our hands on four missions designed to showcase the newly unveiled user-generated content, and will update accordingly with impressions.
Update: We’ve put four short missions through their paces to see what Infamous 2’s user-generated content has to offer. The first mission – Save The Cathedral – tasked Cole with escorting a group of allies through a slew of hostiles in order to disarm a bomb. The second mission felt similar to a tower defense game, with Cole perched on a bridge attempting to halt waves of enemies before they could break through defenses below.
The third mission harkened to a shooting gallery, with Cole picking up explosive barrels and tossing them at foes positioned throughout the environment. The last of the missions featured a race against time through a series of rings.
All of the missions were designed to showcase the newly announced feature in a short span of time, so none of them clocked in at more than two minutes. That being said, Sucker Punch representatives made clear that missions can be as long or as short as the designer desires, the only real consideration being to ensure the attention of the player is maintained in order to nab a high ranking.
There also appears to be some sort of XP system that stems from playing user-generated missions, but Sony wasn’t able to comment on specifics or how it would feed back into the core game.
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