Sucker Punch Leaves No Stone Unturned In Infamous 2

Sucker Punch co-founder and development director Chris Zimmerman talks about the major changes in the soon-to-be-released sequel, electric karate, Home Depot, Devil May Cry, epic battles, user-generated content, and more.

Improvements over the first Infamous

We took the things that were really important about Infamous, the pillars of the game, the things that make Infamous Infamous -- like karma, combat, parkour -- we took all of those things and looked hard at how we can make them better. Even though we were happy with Infamous 1 we felt like we could do better. So on each of those fronts we tore it apart and put it back together again.

We tried to take the things that didn’t work so well, that weren’t perfect in the first game, and tried to improve them. So with the parkour system, one of the things we didn’t like in Infamous 1 was there wasn’t great flow in horizontal areas. It worked okay as you were climbing buildings, we made some improvements there as well, but where you were just running through a park and you jumped on a fence – getting on and off fences was a little bit of a pain. It felt a little sticky, it didn’t always do what you wanted to. We worked hard on it. We went and made it much more smooth, much more automatic, more like you’re flowing through the environment is what we were going for as opposed to just jump-grab-jump-grab-jump-grab. And that was hard. It wasn’t obvious that we wanted to do that. It wasn’t obvious that we would take something that in the first game worked pretty well, that people were excited about, that people thought that was a step forward, and tear it apart and re-do it, but we did. We did that with everything.

It wasn’t obvious that we wanted to add the melee weapon, right? This is not something that most superheroes have. They don’t mostly carry around weapons, but we were like, “Well, we need to try. We need to see how that works. We need to put it in the game, put a good effort at it and see whether it makes the game better.” And it did. There was some things that didn’t make the game better, and we’re not showing those today, those don’t see the light of day, but you have to get to that, you have to keep working on everything. Improving the stuff that worked in the last game to make it better.

Getting new powers

Getting new powers is the main story arc of the game. The main story of Infamous 2 is Cole knows he needs to become more powerful to defeat the Beast. He tries at the beginning of the game and it doesn’t work out so well. There’s a personal arc that goes along with it, but the gameplay arc is gathering the Blast Cores. There’s a guy, Wolfe, who is one of the people who invented the Ray Sphere. They’re trying to track him down to help Cole figure out how to defeat the Beast. He invented this device, the Blast Core, a device that is able to store the Ray Sphere energy in stable form. He’s hid them in various places because he doesn’t want them to get into in the wrong hands so Cole has to track them all down and get them.

Whenever Cole gets a new Blast Core in the game, he gets a new family of powers. After that, the different variation on the power, those you get through experience points and performing stunts. We wanted it to feel like Cole was getting better at things by being a superhero, not just by going through and getting experience points. People really liked the stunts we had in the last game, so we took them and integrated them more deeply into the game by making those a way to unlock new variants on the powers.

Electric karate, discouraging melee, and Home Depot

We wanted to improve the combat experience. In the first game we had melee and it was sort of “electric karate” – punches and kicks. And it was fun, people liked doing it. In fact, being a little foolish, we spent a lot of time in Infamous 1 trying to discourage people from doing melee. We were like, “Oh no, stop, that’s not a melee game, this is a ranged combat game.” So we worked hard on the AI to discourage people from going in and mixing it up because we were idiots. The truth is people want to do melee. Why aren’t we doing a game that makes that spectacular? So this time around we came to our senses and we were like, “Ok, the melee experience is going to get better.” We want it to be visceral, we want it to feel weighty, we want it to feel you are damaging things, you are hurting things, but we also wanted to be grounded. It wasn’t like Cole was going to be carrying around some science fiction-y  thing. He’s just a regular guy, that’s the whole point of Infamous. At most he can go to Home Depot. It’s not like he’s going to go to the Superhero Store and buy a superhero weapon. He’s going to cobble something together.

We started off with pipes and things like that, then we wanted it to feel electric at the same time, so we started mixing in some of those elements. What we ended up with is the amp, something that’s got stuff on it that makes it feel kind of electrical and got Cole’s power playing through it, but still feels like it was put together out of pieces that Zeke just found. He cobbled it together. That makes it really thick in the story.

In Infamous 1 Zeke does some things he shouldn’t. Zeke does some things he really does regret. Building the amp is one of the ways he’s making it back up. It’s like your cat bringing you a dead bird. Zeke regrets some of his actions and building this for Cole is one of the ways he’s trying to make it up to his friend.

Devil May Cry as an influence

Not going to name any names, but there’s lots of games out there where the game’s great, but the melee combat -- not so much. There are other games like Devil May Cry 4, which I did play, where they’re looking at the same goals that we do, where you’ve got big things you’re fighting, you want it to feel spectacular, you want it to feel  over-the-top, you want it to feel visceral -- we’re trying to do the same things. Theirs is more of a melee game with some distance things that are more melee attacks with a gun, so it’s a little bit different, but if you had to choose one thing that was closest to what we’re trying to do, it would be DMC 4.

Cole switches hands

Your most basic power is the R1 power of the game – bolt – in the last game you fired them from the right hand, the hand that was closest to the reticle, and in this game you fire from the other hand. We did that because it made it more visceral, more tighter on Cole, more parallax on the shots, it just makes it look better. No stone left unturned. Even the most basic things. You’re not going to notice as the player on a conscious level. On the subconscious level, subliminally, we’re making the game more involving.

Epic battles

With the bosses, we didn’t want to do “boss battles” we wanted it to feel like the bosses were real, that they were in the city with you. We’re guilty of the same thing. We did a "boss battle" where we had a giant robot on the other side of the bridge and there’s a gap you can’t jump across, and you’re firing at him and he’s firing at you. Guilty. I’ve done that. I admit it. We didn’t want to do that again. We wanted to do things where it felt like the bosses were in the city with you. And the mini bosses, too, like the giant ice guy [pictured above]. We want it to feel like he’s in the city with you. He’s moving around just like you are. During our initial idea testing for the game in the first nine months or so that was one of the first things we did where we felt like, “Wow this is going to work.”

When we saw the giant [pictured above] running down the street and everything, he’s just tearing the hell out of that street. There’s just crap flying all over the place, balconies collapsing, particles, dust, it was just so much more over-the-top than anything we’ve done. We were like, “Great! That’s what we’re trying to do.” That’s what we showed to Sony when we were like, “This is what we’re trying to do with the game.” It’s easy to make it look spectacular, but harder to make it play well.

User-generated content

Sensibility is the thing we’re aiming for at the beginning because it really is new. We don’t know how people are going to react. We don’t know what sorts of missions people are going to build, and we don’t know what sorts of missions people are going to want to play. We’re keeping it pretty simple in the beginning with the expectation that once we see how the beta goes, see what people do, see how people use the game, we’ll start revising. We’re going to patch the game on the fly to give people more of what they want. If we discover people want to do more minigames with the UGC and that’s what people want to play, we’re going to put more features in that makes it easy to do that sort of thing.

On UGC going forward

The pieces that you use to put together missions are extensible. We’ll be doing new content packs continually over however long we can keep it up, until we run out of ideas. We’ll see what we need to do beyond there. We may need to patch the game to add more features -- author features and play features. We’re guessing at some point add ability to do different types of searches once we figure out what people want and we’ll go from there. React and see. This is really different for us. We’re used to doing a game, put it on a disk, and then it’s done. Now we’re going to have some things where we can keep improving the game after we’ve shipped it. That’s really exciting for us.

For more on user-generated content in Infamous 2, check out our preview and media gallery.