Many have been wondering why inFAMOUS: Second Son doesn’t have a dynamic day/night cycle, that is pretty much standard for open world games, and why the demos we have seen seem to lack shadows, and during a livestream event on Destructoid Sucker Punch Productions Chris Zimmerman explained both elements of the game.

Because the game all takes place in Seattle, we wanted you to feel like you’re going to different places and the way we do that is by having all the parts of Seattle have difference feels, and you go from one neighborhood to the other and they feel pretty different.

But a lot of it is that we actually give you different weather conditions. Here you played that mission and it was night time and rainy, but you also get day time and the city feels really different when it’s lit a different way.

So the day/night cycle just kind of happens as you play through the game. It kind of tracks the story.

Again, if you think back to what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to really blow it out like a spectacular looking game, and that means hand tuning a lot of stuff. So for doing the day/night cycle, we really wanted to have the lighting be spectacular. And that means really tweaking and tuning things for that time of day to make sure the color balance is right, to make sure the lighting is spectacular, and trying to make that happen and also go through a day/night cycle is super hard to pull off.

It’s hard to make 6 AM look good. It’s hard to make noon look good. And to try to interpolate between those two… It’s kinda beyond what we’re comfortable trying to pull off right now.