We got to talk a bit with game director Nate Fox of Sucker Punch about the development of Infamous, and while we didn't straight out ask what's it like to go from a furry platformer to a real game, we did learn some interesting details, like what influence a real-world riot has over a superhero game and just where the heck did the idea for mind-reading electricity come from.
1UP: General question: What do you feel's required to make a superhero game work and succeed? As a follow-up, what do you guys think modern -- or future -- superhero games need to move the genre forward, and how will Infamous address those points?
Nate Fox: I believe the most important thing to making a good superhero game is marrying the hero's powers into the game world. Sometimes that's really tough. For instance, if my hero has razor-sharp claws, yet the game won't let me cut down a wooden fence, then it sort of breaks the suspension of disbelief.
Our hero, Cole, has powers that are designed from the ground up to work well in the context of a videogame. For instance, he can shoot lighting bolts out of his hands -- why? Because shooting in videogames works really freaking well. Same with being able to climb everywhere in the world and jump between buildings -- it's fun to do! This is our core strategy in crafting our superhero -- we're building the world around his powers and his powers around what's fun to do in the world.
1UP: Quick refresher: What's the basic structure of Infamous? Is it a series of missions set against an open-world backdrop, or do players go out into the world to find things to do? Does Cole have a safe house, like Sly did?
NF: Infamous is an open-world game filled with stuff to discover as you poke around Empire City. People are getting mugged and attacked all around you -- whether you decide to do anything about it or not. We call this "the crime ecosystem." However, story missions are tailored to deliver a cinematic superhero experience. And yeah, Cole has a bit of a safe house, but not like Sly, nope, there's no place safe for Cole in Empire City.
1UP: You've shown some Reapers (the main gang that Cole goes up against); some with traditional weapons and others with superpowers of their own. Tell us about what goes into the enemy design? How do you decide what superpowers the enemies have or deal with balancing enemies who just use guns against a player who can call down lightning from the sky?
NF: Creating enemies for Cole has been one of the real joys in making Infamous. Since it's a realistic game, we started by creating bad guys with a full suite of conventional weapons (guns, grenades, etc). Once that groundwork was done, we moved up to enemies with superpowers, which as you might imagine is fantastically fun to design. Enemy powers let us create some new experiences in the third-person shooter genre. For instance, the Fire Reaper we've demoed is designed to force dynamic rolls and pressures the player to seek higher ground in the heat of combat.
1UP: Are there any specific influences on the feel and design of Infamous? We'd like our readers to get a sense of which superhero stories share DNA with Infamous or where ideas like the postcognition ability came from.
NF: As you might imagine, we're all big superhero fans here at Sucker Punch. The film
Batman Begins and the graphic novel series
DMZ are two of [Infamous'] many influences that did it right. I also got a lot out of participating in the Seattle WTO riots. Spending time in a lawless place is interesting, particularly as a superhero with the power to do great good and evil.
As for postcognition, it was born out of our constant desire to create cool gameplay. One of the big problems in an open-world game is creating interesting setups for combat. But what if a superhero had the ability to track the psychic echo of a killer through a crowded urban environment? Well, that's a pretty cool superpower because it creates fun gameplay scenarios. Not all of Cole's powers are about blasting people's faces in, just most of them.
1UP: What's been the biggest development challenge in producing Infamous?
NF: The biggest challenge was getting Cole's climb ability to work just right. We'd promised ourselves that the whole city was going to be scalable. This is, as you might imagine, a hard promise to live up to, but now that it all works, it was clearly worth all the effort. Being able to smoothly skulk along the rooftops and then jump down onto the heads of a bunch of bad guys is great. You really feel like a superhero.
1UP: Describe the coolest event you've most recently seen -- a particular battle, a sequence in a mission, whatever -- you've seen in Infamous.
NF: As you might imagine, given that Infamous is an open-world game with a lot of systemic interactions, you'll see unexpected stuff all over the place. Just this afternoon while playing the game, I pissed off a bunch of people, and they banded together into a mob and tried to stone me to death. Ultimately it didn't end well for them, but I admired their courage. Did I mention you can play as a good or evil character?
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