Infamous 2: Sucker Punch Responds!

A few weeks ago, we put a call out for Infamous 2 questions. Given an audience with Sucker Punch, what would you most want to ask? Unsurprisingly – a lot. We sorted through all the submissions and picked the best of the bunch, then reeled off as many as possible when we caught up with Ken Schramm (Communications Director) and Joe Ishikura (Game Designer) from Sucker Punch late last week. Here are your questions and their responses.

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Cesar Jose Andrade: One of the great aspects from Infamous 1 that truly made it fun were the parkour and obstacle climbing parts of the game. My question is: what improvements did you make from the first game that we expect to see in Infamous 2 in terms of maneuvering and movement through the new city?

Joe Ishikura: We have this approach of doing big things and little things to improve. We have some really big things, that are brand new, like vertical kickers. We found that sometimes you just don't want to spend the time going all the way up a building, so we have these – the way to think about them, is as vertical grind poles. They go straight up and shoot you really high up. We've got brand new powers where you get to – we call it the car jump – where if you jump on a car it'll actually springboard you up to get you faster and higher.

We did a lot of little things too, where we improved the static thrusters ability that you have. We've even done smaller things, where we've made it less sticky, we made it so you can go up the side of buildings a little bit faster with kind of a 'get up' move. It's a lot of things that – I'm not sure that people will notice, but I think when you start to play you'll really really feel the difference.

Ken Schramm: And the variety of neighbourhoods lend [themselves] to different rooftop heights and stuff like that. We've put the grind rails in between a lot of buildings now so there's a lot of that 'Tony Hawk feel' if you will, on top of the rooftops. Let's put it this way, by the end of Infamous 1, I don't think there was a need to get into a car, and there's certainly no need to get in a car in Infamous 2. [laughs]


SirServesAlot: Will the story progression be similar to Infamous in that you fight one group on one part of the city, fight its boss, and then move to the next area and the next group?

Ken Schramm: Well, that's tough to say… I know what that question is trying to get to. In Infamous 1 you went through a Reaper town, right? Then you moved on to some other guys and you progressed that way. Well, the main factions in this one are going to be the Militia, the Corrupted, and we've shown bits and pieces of the ice gang – Vermac 88, so they're going to be appearing together. So you've seen many videos of ours already where you've seen the Corrupted and Militia acting together, so there's no real part that's just the Corrupted area, or the Militia. The bottom line is the Militia are all over New Marais, and they're purists. They don't want anything to do with any Conduits or anyone that carries a superpower gene or whatever. And then the Corrupted, well, they hate everybody. They just want everybody out of New Marais, so it isn't so much a segregation of action.

[Structurally,] in Infamous 1, you progressed and cleared out neighbourhoods – that's the same style as what we're doing here, with the side missions where you go in and do a side-mission and clear out that part of the neighbourhood. I think that was a lot of fun. We did the same thing for Infamous 2 as far as that's concerned. So, yes on one side, no on the other side! [laughs]

samaPig: How large is New Marais in comparison to Empire City? And are there new ways to travel?

Ken Schramm: There are new ways to travel. Trust me, we have some surprises that we aren't going to reveal. There are some big powers actually, some big parkour powers that we haven't revealed yet. [In terms of size], it's relatively the same size. If anything New Marais is bigger. The difference there is that Infamous 1 was three islands whereas Infamous 2 is two islands, and sort of like this swamp blockade area that we have. The main storyline does develop on two islands though.

Joe Ishikura: I think one of the cooler parts about it is that there's a lot more variety out there in the districts themselves.

Ken Schramm: Let's put it this way. Outside of story missions, if you just parkour around our city, you'll have just as much fun, if not more fun, in New Marais than you did in Empire City. It's not about the size, it's about the fun factor for us.


sammy47: Will the old powers from infamous 1 be fully upgraded?!.I know that they are present but do we have to upgrade them?!

Ken Schramm: Well, the functionality is a little bit different in [your] powers this time around. What he's referring to is that in Infamous 1 there were a lot of RPG elements. There's still some of that – some of the upgrades, but more importantly, it's not about upgrading the grenades, say, three stages of good and three stages of bad, like we did, right? We just have six to eight options, of different grenades. You choose now, which ones you want to go into a battle scenario with, allowing you a directional left to make those quick switches. You can go from one to another - just like that. [clicks fingers] It's more about the variety and variances of the powers rather than the upgrading of powers. Now don't get me wrong – there are some powers that you can still upgrade, but [it's about choice]…

Coming back to the RPG aspect I was talking about, I want to make sure there's a distinction here. In Infamous 1, if you take grenades and you upgrade them three levels, it felt like we were keeping these powers [the three for the opposite karma] away from you. In the variances now, let's say you've got eight. There's still going to be two or three that are associated with karma, but you still get five or six more, you just don't get two or three.

RustyChamp: Hey Sucker Punch, will there be more evil/good choices you need to make throughout the game than the first infamous, and do these choices have an impact on how your game ends?

Joe Ishikura: You absolutely get to impact the way the game ends… Within the main storyline itself we have much bigger changes that go through it. We know that players loved playing the [original] game twice, so we decided about 20-25% of the game is actually going to be exclusive content for one side or the other. And so, [karma's] a really big choice. And of course, some of these choices have even cooler consequences, like the Kuo or Nix choice, where you either get the ice powers or the napalm/fire-based powers. So those are the big changes that we made – the big choices that players make, but we've got a lot of little stuff too.

We tried to make it so you have even more opportunities to both express your karmic state, but in addition to that, one of the funner things we do is that we try to entice you to go the opposite route. Our favourite [example] is the Blast Shard carrier. We've brought back Blast Shards from Infamous 1. They're these collectables that power you up, and to the average pedestrian they're just kinda cool looking things, so we decided that – you know what? – let's say some of the pedestrians picked up some of these Blast Shards. If you're playing good and you want that Blast Shard? The only way to get it is to knock 'em down. So it's a really tiny moment in the game, but we tried to pepper those all around the world.