Article by: Justin Amirkhani

The release of inFamous marked Sucker Punch Production’s first foray away from the Sly Cooper series with the launch of the Playstation 3. With the sequel coming out next week we were able to catch up with game designer Joe Ishikura to discuss how the studio handled creating post-superhuman narrative and gameplay for inFamous 2.

I think actually we’ve got a lot of things that have been improved on, but my favourite improvement is the presentation value. See, the presentation value improves a lot of things and covers a lot of big changes and little ones. One of the big changes of course being that we’ve added motion capture this time around which basically improved the cutscenes from the ground up, but it also affects little things like the fluidity of the melee system and how cool it looks. That’s important because it has as much to do with gameplay as it does with the presentation itself. We took a lot of the moments in the game like when you’re draining an electric source and tried to improve the quality of the animation and the overall presentation there. I think for me that’s probably the most important improvement. Of course, we try to improve everything but if I had to pick a favourite that’d probably be it.

Yeah, so one of the big things we talk about at the studio is the escalation rate. What we mean by escalation rate is how in the first game you start off with no powers, no abilities and by the end you become a super hero. For this game we didn’t want to bring Cole all the way back to square one because that’d feel kind of mean and we thought it would be more fun to add powers on top rather than take them away. So, from there we started to think about how – if Cole starts as a super hero – we could get him to grow from that point. That’s why we make him focus on The Beast, which is this big enemy that you have to fight who you’ll need stronger powers to beat. But if you’re gaining new powers you’ll need stronger and more varied enemies along the way too. This is why we have new powers like the Ionic abilities and the big street-clearing powers like the Ionic Vortex and the Ionic Drain.

We also have a slightly different way of improving the power of the enemies. This time around we focused more on creating super powered enemies. We have things like the Ice Gang, which are like regular soldiers but they have super powers too. There are bigger enemies like The Devourer, which is almost 10 ft. tall and has huge crushing moves that clear cars away. It’s fun to put in enormous enemies – we have one that’s 30 or 40 ft. tall – because they really make you feel like you need to amp up your powers.

Well, it’s interesting because when we talk about the plot the most important thing really is The Beast. The Beast’s a huge enemy and through the whole game you’re powering up and getting ready to fight this one guy. Right from the beginning we try and make it clear you’re not prepared to take him on, by letting you get your butt kicked and so you escape to New Maris where you encounter Dr. Wolfe and work with him to help prepare for the final showdown. There’s this ticking timer mentality because as you play the game, The Beast is getting closer and closer to New Maris and so getting prepared for his arrival and the subsequent battle is what inFamous 2 is all about.

You know, the interesting thing about Cole is that if you look at inFamous 1 and the current inFamous 2 design, they’re actually pretty different. There are smaller changes and bigger changes, but we actually had to go back and redesign him for a variety of reasons. For example, there had to be some changes because he carries The Amp [a tuning fork-like weapon] on his back and here were some more cosmetic changes like his new outfit because he’s in New Maris and it’s hotter there. But I think the thing most people are focused on is the face because it’s actually pretty different from the original inFamous because we decided to use motion capture. Because we have new actors to do the motion capture we had to match them better to a new model and that works better than the other way around.

What people saw at E3, the Cole with the hair, was us in the middle of our iteration process. Things like this are common, but it was lucky and really great because we got to show it to the world and hear the feedback. Ultimately though, it’s just part of our process and it’s not just the character, we iterate on pretty much everything. You weigh what fan reaction you agree with and disagree with and from there we try and make the best decisions for what should go in inFamous 2 when we ship it.