Interviews// inFAMOUS 2: Sucker Punch's Brian Fleming

SPOnG: You guys have also improved on the consequences that happen for anything Cole does, right? How intricate and key to the core experience will that actually be? Does it have a core impact this time around?

Brian Fleming: Yeah, it does. You know, I think that… measuring the impact of the choices in your life is hard if you don’t get to go back and replay those moments. Fortunately in video game land you do get to play through both pathways, so I think especially as reviewers you’ll get a chance to see how much certain decisions really affect the experience.

There are some ways that we did affect the experience in the first game, which is that your power progressions clearly changed - and that happens again in inFAMOUS 2. There’s other ways though in this game, so you’ll get to exchange powers with one - but only one - of the other lead players in the story. You’ll either end up with ice powers or oil powers, not both. So clearly, that affects things.

The third thing is that there’s a large amount of mission content which is on one or the other paths, and perhaps at the end of the first playthrough you may have missed about a quarter of the game content. It’s a challenge because we don’t want to punish players and say we want you to play it twice to get everything, but on the flipside if we don’t put a significant amount of content there, then the road not taken is meaningless.

So it’s a balance there. We’re really trying to be respectful of players who’ve paid us to entertain them and not hide content from them. But at the same time we do have to have some meaning to these choices.

We also have very different endings, which is an important focus area for us where it’s not just a different shade of the same cutscene, but in fact a very different ending entirely. And it matches the progression you’ve made - in fact the choices between the endings is kind of implicitly made for you by your playthrough. It’s not like you come to the end and it’s like ‘would you like ending A or B.’


SPOnG: Let’s talk about user generated content, because that’s a big feature you’re highlighting for inFAMOUS 2. I understand that you guys were inspired by LittleBigPlanet when designing this element of the game?

Brian Fleming: Yes, very inspired. I remember when we saw their GDC presentation and we were just blown away by how clever, insightful and forward-looking it was. So in the back of our minds we’ve been thinking about this feature since the day Media Molecule made their announcement of LittleBigPlanet. We finished inFAMOUS 1 and we felt it was essential to look at ways where we could give the players an unlimited experience.

Classically, multiplayer has been that solution. If you want to keep playing… I don’t know. Name the game, and it has multiplayer. You can always go back online and play deathmatch until you get that next rank, right? I think any AAA developer worth their salt has had this kind of conversation - about keeping that experience alive. We talked about multiplayer and co-op and all these things, but what we found most compelling was the idea of users putting their own missions into the city.

We were thinking about this from the customer side, and wondered how they would see the idea if we pitched it directly to them. So we made a fake Kevin Butler commercial using our internal staff. We sent it off to Sony and they said ‘if you don’t do this, you guys are totally blowing it. You really should run with it.’ So it was good to have them support us on that, because it felt like a big risk at the time.

We obviously had that conversation pretty explicitly with Sony, wondering if we were crazy thinking about this idea. But everyone was on board, from Shu(hei Yoshida, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios) all the way down the ladder. We were happy to have their support.