"Origin stories are always the best part of superhero fiction and it makes it easy for people who are new to the franchise to jump in," says Nate Fox, game director at Sucker Punch studio, creator of the inFamous games, and before that the Sly Cooper series.

InFamous © Sucker Punch

"But I was sad that Cole died," he tells Red Bull UK. We're sitting in a tiny fake government agency scanning station, in a fake industrially-distressed warehouse, in a real industrially-distressed part of town, chatting about the future of the inFamous franchise, which focuses heavily on the ramifications of your in-game choices.

Spoiler alert (bit late for that – Ed): Cole MacGrath, hero-slash-antihero of the first two inFamous games died at the end of the last game, inFamous 2 . Or at least, he did if you played it as a good guy. And that's what most people chose to do. "I actually wrote the evil ending of inFamous 2 to be the 'canon' ending," said Fox. "I thought it set the world up in a nice way for a sequel. Then I saw the PSN Trophy data that showed the vast majority of people sacrificed Cole.

"Because the franchise is about making choices with consequences, it makes sense to have the game storyline reflect that. So we said 'he really is dead'. I'm actually very pleased about it, because Delsin's cool. I love his new powers."

Delsin Rowe is the new superhero-villain in inFamous Second Son; a cocky Native American emo kid from outside Seattle, with a cop for a brother and a habit for tagging local political billboards. Rowe, when the game starts, doesn't know he's a "conduit", or "bioterrorist", depending on who's talking. Either way, his latent superpower, in a world where increasing numbers of people are finding out they're special, is an extra-special one – he can absorb the powers of others just by getting touchy-feely.

After a bus of conduits crashes outside town, Rowe gets his first power – smoke. And immediately lands his entire town in a world of trouble. The leader of the sinister Department of Unified Protection (DUP), herself a nasty conduit with "concrete" bone-shattering powers, spikes concrete bars through most of the local folk's bodies. Rowe escapes and heads to Seattle – the only option for healing most of the townsfolk is to absorb the wicked witch's power by touching her. And to do that, he needs to liberate a city on lockdown, climb the iconic Space Needle (natch) and take on the DUP by tooling up with a bunch of new powers from other conduits.

As you hit Seattle with smoke powers to hand, much of the gameplay will be familiar to fans of the last two games. You can get close-up and use a new smouldering chain whip to lash out at DUP goons, or you can zip through smoking vents to the rooftops, to shoot incapacitating bolts of smoke, as well as zipping forward in smoke form to pass into barred areas.

InFamous: Second Son © Sucker Punch

As you complete missions you start to power up earning new moves for your existing powers – smoke grenades, shockwaves that'll take out light structures and fast-moving multiple-enemy melee moves. Once you absorb the ‘neon’ power from the second conduit you meet, you'll also be able to run up vertical walls, snipe from long distance and flash from rooftop to rooftop. As before, you'll also need to recharge powers (smoke from chimney stacks and crashed cars, neon from signs, obviously).

Again, as with the last game, the DUP (rather than the gangs) control locked down areas of Seattle that you can free by completing mini missions dotted around the map, all while pushing the plot forward with Rowe inching towards the end goal of taking down the DUP and getting his mitts on those concrete powers.

Powers that seem to have been handed to key DUP officers already (but, handily for the game, you can't absorb them second-hand from them). So while the DUP grunts come across as generic gas-masked goons, officers covered in concrete shielding are able to lock down your legs for seconds at a time or leap from building to building to quickly up the ante.

So far, so expected. What is different about Second Son is how you tackle these DUP thugs: the missions now have a more immediate link to your good/evil status. If you go for nothing but headshots and chain whips, indulge in some sideline anti-bioterrorist protest bashing or smash up Seattle, then you'll quickly become a bad guy. If you subdue enemies with non-lethal takedowns, bust drug dealers and heal injured city-dwellers, you're a hero.

"The story changes because of your decisions not just at the end, but all of the way through the game," says Fox. "You get given tough choices that fundamentally change people's outcomes. Of course the character's powers change, the landscape, people's attitudes... But the thing that I'm most excited about is when you're in combat you have these opportunities to express yourself and you have the potential of staying in that mode and getting a payoff. The play styles between heroes and villains are very, very different."

inFamous Second Son doesn't use your character's morality as a complex route into character – it's a comic book superhero game after all, at its heart. It uses it more as a difficulty or play-style indicator. "If you're evil there's a pressure to keep doing monstrous things otherwise you lose your streak. If you're good you slowly build up your good acts, but if you slip at all you lose it all."

inFamous Seattle © Sucker Punch

Play as good guy and for every civilian you rescue, for every DUP guard you down without killing, a meter builds up. But take out one guard lethally and it zeroes again. Build it all the way up to earn a mega-damaging "Orbital Drop" that sees Rowe hurtling up into the air before diving back to land as a one-man mini-nuke, obliterating any nearby DUP forces.

"The game I reference is Cut The Rope – it's easy to get the candy into Om Nom's mouth, right, but it's hard to get all three stars," said Fox. "Gamers want to be the hero – so we're challenging them by asking 'can you be good enough'?"

The game follows this through now – once you've got your sniping neon powers, DUP forces' heads are lit up red for an evil headshot, they’re more mobile and obscured legs are lit up blue for a tougher, nobler shot. Missions also regularly ask you to make a blue or red choice – invariably the blue, good choice means more risk, and a tougher mission for you. Yup, being good is much tougher than being a bit evil in Second Son. "People really want to know when they make a choice what it means," said Fox. "So we let them know – we make it clearer."

What's also clear is Seattle – Sucker Punch's home town is lovingly detailed – you can go anywhere, climb anywhere, fight anywhere. And the PS4's power shines in the amazing lighting and particle effects the game shows off at every opportunity, as well as in the motion-captured faces of Rowe and the other key characters.

What's not so shiny or clear so far is the number of conduit powers in the game. "There is no user-generated content for Second Son," said Fox. "We were excited about making it for inFamous 2. But we felt this time we wanted to put the energy we'd used doing that and put it back into making more powers, a richer storyline, a more complex and interesting world." There's definitely more than smoke, neon and concrete though.

What's also not clear is how strong a contender inFamous Second Son is as a PS4 exclusive to take on the might of the Xbox One walking tank exclusive Titanfall . Now that's a fight I would pay to see – walking tanks versus superheroes on the streets of Seattle. Perhaps for inFamous Third Son?

inFamous Second Son is on sale for PlayStation 4 on 21 March.