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

SPOnG: I assume the recent PlayStation Network downtime issues haven’t affected your plans at all in regards to the Beta?

Brian Fleming: It affected people’s ability to log in and share missions. As long as the system’s been dark, we haven’t been able to see new missions from players. Fortunately, the players who downloaded it and have it running before the outage are still making missions, and we’ve been supporting them on our web forums.

The fun thing is, everyone’s really excited for the PlayStation Network to come back on because they can’t wait to show each other what they’ve done during the blackout. As soon as it comes back, I’m sure we’ll get a core dump of a tonne of great missions.

And there’ll be a bunch of people who got invited to the Beta and didn’t have a chance to download it - a bunch of invitations went out right before the outage, so I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who’d love to actually redeem their invite.


SPOnG: Do you think the massive influx of new entries when PSN does come back would cause another outage? Server overload, perhaps?

Brian Fleming: (Laughs) No, we feel pretty good about the server - if you think about our server usage patterns, we do uploads, downloads and queries. That’s really all we do, as opposed to an online game where every single connected person in a match is constantly streaming data to one another from the server.

So ours is actually pretty lightweight in terms of its server requirements - which isn’t to tempt fate! I expect that we will have problems at launch, just like everybody else does. Hopefully we won’t, but you never know.


SPOnG: What are your expectations for inFAMOUS 2 when it comes out? It seems that the original game was very well received, but perhaps didn’t get the spotlight it deserved amongst other console exclusives. It’s still being called one of the great under-rated games of this generation. What are your thoughts?

Brian Fleming: You know, the truth is… I think everyone has their own metrics. We’ll be very curious to see how inFAMOUS 2 reviews and how the fans react. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished, I honestly think we’ve done a really good job of improving almost every part of the game, but you never know.

You put it out there and people will finally get a chance to react to the finished work, so we’ll be as curious as anyone to see, critically and consumer-wise, how people react to it. It’s scary, because you’ve put two years of your team’s life into this, and you want people to receive it well.

So we’ll certainly be having pins and needles over the next month or so. You’ll starts getting some reviews, and customers will get it and… it’s why we do it, but to say we won’t be on pins and needles would be a lie. We are nervous!


SPOnG: Do you see the reception of the original inFAMOUS akin to, say, the comic book industry against big Hollywood blockbusters when you compare your game to other console exclusives that may have gotten more airtime and mindshare?

Brian Fleming: Yeah. You know, I don’t think we did ourselves any favours on the first game. Launching a new game takes a lot of time, and a lot of people, especially when you think of a worldwide launch.

In that setting, I just don’t think inFAMOUS 1 was a great game a year before it shipped. It really wasn’t. And it wasn’t even really a great game six months before it shipped, so we didn’t do ourselves any favours because showcasing the game was hard. And it was hard because the game wasn’t ready enough to get people excited about what inFAMOUS could be.

It did turn out to be an okay game, we did a pretty good job on it, but because that curve was so steep at the end, I think it was a little surprising for a lot of people. We have to take the blame for that, we can’t sit around and say, ‘Oh, it didn’t get support.’ We have to say, ‘Yeah, it’s our fault it didn’t get support.’

I think we’ve done a better job this time of making the key improvements early enough in the development cycle that everyone at Sony clearly could see that we did a good job pushing the product forward. It allowed them to believe that we could further extend and even build on the success of the last game, and that it wasn’t just going to be more levels.

I think we understood that lesson more clearly on the last game than we ever have. We own that - we’re not blaming anyone, and we feel like that was our challenge that needed to be overcome and I think we did a better job this time just internally, in terms of the way we developed the product.

It’s a little easier on a sequel too, because you’re building on something that’s already effective and running, that also has a decent reputation. It’s an easier problem and I think we solved it better.