inFamous: Second Son – will you make Delsin a good guy or a bad guy?

GameCentral speaks to the director of the PS4’s most important exclusive so far, about open worlds and the perfect superhero game.

Although we are now happily playing through the final game (and so can’t talk about it because of embargoes) when we met Sucker Punch’s Nate Fox last week we hadn’t really seen inFamous: Second Son properly since Gamescom last August. Sony’s preview day clashed with the Titanfall review event, and so we only had time to pop by for an interview and to pick up a copy of the game.

We’re glad we did though because Fox proved to be an excellent evangelist, not just for the game and the PlayStation 4 but for superhero-themed games in general. Our discussion ranged over everything from unlikeable leads, to moral decisions in games, and the problems of making open worlds exciting.



Our review of the game will be live next Thursday but in the meantime hopefully this will pique your interest for what is the first major PlayStation 4 exclusive of 2014.


Formats: PlayStation 4

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Sucker Punch

Release Date: 21st March 2014

GC: I’m afraid I just got here, so I missed the presentation this morning.

NF: It was scintillating!

GC: I heard it was excellent.

NF: Do you love to love?

GC: Um… I’m okay with it. This is England you know.

NF: My apologies. [laughs] Are you interested in being interested?

GC: I’m moderately excited about being moderately excited.

NF: [laughs] Well said, old man.

GC: [awkward silence]

NF: So, err… did you see the trailer?

GC: Wait, wait. I’m just thinking through my questions and adjusting them according to what I now perceive of your personality. Which sounds good, except we haven’t got much time so it’s still going to be the same banal question at the end of it.

NF: [laughs]

GC: Right, now here we go: I think many people were probably surprised that there was going to be a new inFamous game. Especially as a launch title for the PlayStation 4. Were you surprised? How do these things happen? Did you pitch the idea yourself or did some grey-suited Sony guy come along and say it made financial sense to do so?

NF: We… like… superhero fiction. Sucker Punch is staffed by geeks.

GC: Really?

NF: Yeah.

GC: You get a lot of that in the games industry.

NF: We love it. When the opportunity came to work on a PS4 game it made perfect sense to work on an inFamous game because we understood what the DNA of the game was, and when you’re working on a new IP that can be pretty challenging. And we made an all-new engine with a lot of new technology to get Second Son going, and so having the fundamental concept of what an inFamous game is helps a lot in cutting down the variables.

However, we did move to having the new hero with the new origin story and all-new powers. And that was a lot of heavy-lifting creatively.



GC: You’re hinting there at why you don’t see more new IP right at the beginning of a generation. Or at least not as much as you used to. That it’s kind of one less problem when trying to get a game ready in time.

NF: Well, I didn’t mean to just hint: it’s absolutely safer to work on an existing IP. I’m not lying to you when I say Sony lets us chart our own course. What they’re most interested in is a studio that really wants to make a game. They want to follow people’s passion, because it’s passionate developers that make the good stuff.

If they’re dragging a team kicking and screaming into making something they don’t want to it’ll turn out horrible. So if they believe they have a market for whatever the game the team is interested in making is, they let the game be made.

inFamous: Second Son – the best-looking PS4 game so far

GC: So if you’d turned around and said you want to make a new game that’s some kid-friendly platformer or something really esoteric, they would’ve gone with that?

NF: Sure, if we were really passionate about it and it seemed like it had some chance at marketability then yeah, I totally believe that would be the case. Look at, like, Journey. To me Journey is a really beautiful game, that required a lot of trust on the part of the publisher, it was pretty abstract. But when you play it, you’re like, ‘Oh, masterful!’ It’s an art house classic. But in a pitch meeting?


GC: My second question was going to be whether this is a superhero game first and foremost or an open world game, or whatever. But it seems pretty obvious it’s the superhero aspect you started with.

NF: The core of inFamous is [affects vaguely trailer-esque voice] ‘an everyday person gets powers and decides to use them for good or evil…’

GC: You’re never going to get a job doing voiceovers like that.

NF: [laughs] Sorry. Let me do that again [affects proper trailer voice that sounds like he’s been smoking 60-a-day since he was a baby] ‘An everyday person gets powers and decides whether to use them for good or evil’.

GC: That was better.

NF: Thanks. That basic concept that an everyday guy suddenly has this transformative ability bestowed on them and then the player gets to chart the path of the story towards becoming a hero or a villain, that’s really wide. That’s superhero fiction wide.

GC: So the obvious question is why don’t superhero games ever usually work? Everyone says Batman but that doesn’t count because he hasn’t got any powers. So why, after all these years, is Spider-Man 2 still the only half decent one?

NF: Oh that’s easy. The reason why is because…

GC: They only get cheap, rubbish developers to make them?

NF: [laughs] No… There’s a pantheon of badass, well-established heroes from comic books and the movies and all the power-sets are defined to work well in that medium and in video games the rules are different. So with inFamous we’ve been able to start first and foremost with powers we think are going to make great gameplay. Then we make a world around those powers to make the powers feel even better.


Imagine trying to translate a character from another medium into video games and it’s harder. The classic example is Wolverine being able to cut through everything but you’re stuck in the game and it doesn’t work anything like that. But Delsin’s [the main character from the game – GC] abilities are all tailor-made to this Seattle that we’ve created, so that they work hand-in-glove to make a good time for the player.

GC: One of the main criticisms of the previous inFamous games is that the moral choices were too obvious and binary. Has your approach to that changed over the years, especially given how many more games have moral decisions in them nowadays?

NF: We absolutely provide you with choices that frankly are pretty seriously signposted as good or evil, because we got feedback that people really want to know what their choices mean. And we never force the player to do anything, you can always flip-flop depending on what your personal morality tells you is right in the moment, and then we reward choices all along the way. We have very different narrative outcomes, and there are narrative breaks all along the way in characters you meet and decisions you make.

GC: But if the choices are black and white, doesn’t that lose the emotional impact? In a game like The Walking Dead you really agonise over the choices; why wouldn’t you want that in your game?

NF: I think because people are really into role-playing in a way. Like, for instance one of the new things in Second Son that I’m very proud of is you have this streak meter and what it does is say, ‘Okay you’ve taken down this guy and he’s still alive, you’ve taken another person down alive, you take down another’.

And it builds toward this really spectacular move. If you screw up and hurt someone, like a civilian, then you loose it all. So there’s this tension in play… have you ever played this game called Cut The Rope?

GC: Uh, yeah.

NF: It’s easy to get the candy in Om Nom’s mouth, but to really play well you have to get all the stars. So we’re challenging you not just to choose whether you’re good or bad, but to prove it over and over again inside of the difficult landscape of combat. And we reward you if you can really pull it off. So it’s not just like a binary choice, it’s like a, ‘Oh you made that choice? Now prove it!’

GC: So it’s more of gameplay decision than a story one?

NF: Well, I think gameplay is story. It’s always our goal to make the interactive experience as tied into the narrative as possible, so they don’t live in separate worlds.

GC: Another problem with the original inFamous games, and indeed most video games, is that the main characters is not someone that anyone other than an angry, 14-year-old boy could identify with. I’m assuming you also saw that as an issue because you’ve changed the main character, but I’m not sure I want to pretend I’m Delsin either.

Nate Fox – he has really good taste in cartoons

NF: Delsin, primarily, comes from a lot of different sources… not least of which is Troy Baker the actor. Delsin started with me watching how players acted in focus tests. They would pick up cars and throw them into rivers and then cackle. They would set gas stations on fire and they would cackle. They would then see wounded people in the street, that they might have hurt, and I would hear them say, ‘I’m sorry’.

And so I wanted to make the player’s and the hero’s attitude to what was going on in the game identical. Because nobody ever says, ‘Delsin died on level 2’. They say, ‘I died on level 2’. He’s a representation of freedom in the game, we explore this theme of freedom versus security – security is expressed through oppression – to have this debate about what’s the right amount of privacy that we should give away in our everyday society for the good of the masses. That’s kind of weird but that’s really the theme of the game.

And so Delsin can be good or bad, but no matter what he is an example to the people of Seattle and represents a side that says people shouldn’t be surrendering everyday information to the government.

And lastly, the game is called Second Son because he’s the younger brother of this guy called Reggie, who in their family was the most successful member. He was good at sports, good at athletics, has a job that is well respected… Delsin is this frustrated artist who can never seem to win respect or even respect himself, right? So he comes out from underneath his brother’s shadow when he gets these powers.

So you mix all those things together and you have the characterisation by Troy and that’s where he is. So the coming of age kind of story means that he’s going to be a little younger. But hopefully that experience of feeling like you’re inadequate next to someone else is a human experience that people can relate to. Do you have an older brother?

GC: No, but I do feel inadequate next to a lot of people.

NF: [laughs]

GC: One thing that always annoys me when talking about superheroes is a common assumption that Superman is a boring character because he’s a really nice, virtuous guy. But that’s not boring, that’s really unusual – especially in video games.

NF: It’s aberrant isn’t it?

GC: Can a game ever represent a character like that properly? Because nobody is doing it at the moment, even Mario kills his enemies.

NF: Oh absolutely. You don’t have to kill people in Second Son.

GC: Can you get through the whole game that way?

NF: [long pause and funny noises while he considers the question] Maybe. I mean, we didn’t design the game specifically with that in mind, but I know in some of the Metal Gear Solid games you can do that.

GC: I’m not saying you should have that option. I’m just curious if it’s in there.

NF: Sure. He has a lot of non-lethal takedowns and if you’re careful you don’t have to kill anyone. And I think that’s true, I can’t think of any moment right now where you have to kill someone to progress.

But we kind of have an issue going on where we want to present these two different kinds of play styles, of being this villain person or being this hero person, and so Delsin’s character has to ride the line between the two – so that both the selfish and the selfless option do make sense relative to his vantage point on the world. So he can’t be too hard one way or the other. Otherwise it seems like he’s schizophrenic.

GC: Open world games are also a very common thing nowadays, but there is a difficulty in creating set pieces and structured elements where the player actually feels the hand of the developer – in terms of setting up something exciting for you to do, instead of just hoping you happen upon a random group of bad guys. And although the latter is interesting in terms of the freedom it gives you it does mean there’s less to delineate each encounter. How do you address that, do you see that as a serious problem?

NF: You are extremely astute by the way. That is… I want you to work on my mission design team.

GC: I didn’t say I had the answer, I just understand the problem!

NF: [laughs] Well, it’s a challenge because we really feel we have to make an open world game if we’re going to give players these huge powers. So for example, if you play the demo some people say, ‘I can’t get up the Space Needle’. Well, yes because it’s a set piece. We do let you go up the Space Needle and we make it a moment. So we’re always looking for ways to use the open world but then have some areas be exclusive for the drama of getting there.

And you want your cake and to eat it, so we mix back and forth quite often between totally go-where-you-want-and-do-what-you-want and, ‘Okay, we’re going to go through this tunnel’ so you get a big ending. That kind of push and pull takes planning, both in mission planning and architectural planning, and it’s definitely not either one or the other. We have both.

GC: Again I’m not saying you should, but where you tempted with any of the games to make them not open world? A lot of people prefer Batman: Arkham Asylum to City, which was technically open world but not in the GTA or even inFamous sense.

NF: Certainly in inFamous 1 we did do that every now and then. We had you go into these subterranean areas to train your powers. So we would actually put you down in these kind of sewer areas and because of its linearity we could gate you and you would have to prove mastery over the ability to then get out.

inFamous: Second Son – those particle effects in action

GC: Presumably you hope there will be more inFamous games after this?

NF: I would love that.

GC: If you’re the only person making decent superhero games do you want to make them more comic-booky at any point? Like with more outrageous supervillians or plots for example? Which elements of comic books do you reject and which do you embrace? You certainly don’t seem to have any capes in the game, for example.

NF: Right, well you’ve nailed it. We don’t go in for Golden Age hero conventions, people don’t show up and say, ‘I will fight you for justice!’ There’s none of that. We’re trying to say here’s this everyday guy who gets these crazy abilities and here’s what he thinks is the best application for them. And because he lives in the real world that’s why we try and make the city feel real. You can’t make a linear city that feels real, without a lot of excuses for why you’re hemmed in.

GC: Whenever comic books take superheroes seriously, things like Watchmen or Authority, they usually portray the characters as apathetic at best or often fascist or downright evil. But I don’t get the feeling you’re going that far with this game?

NF: Yeah, things like Red Son. Writing the evil content, I’ll tell you this is the real trick of it all, it’s difficult because when he makes these selfish decisions he’s not doing it to be evil he’s doing it because he thinks it’s for a higher purpose and that the negatives of it are justified in the outcome – and he has to believe that he’s in the right.

But the rest of us have to think that what he’s doing is really bad. And that trick of kind of making him justified in his own mind is the hard bit, because nobody just does things to be evil – that’s nonsense.

GC: Well, I dunno. People squash ants for fun. And that’s a common comparison made between powerful superheroes and ordinary people.

NF: Okay, let me put it another way: I really wanted it to be motivated. I didn’t want it to be that capricious, like ‘I’ll smash this human for the fun of it’. No, no way.

GC: I guess I should finish on a graphics question, because the game does look great, so umm…. let’s go with how much percentage of the PlayStation 4’s power do you think you’re using with Second Son?

NF: I went to art school, I don’t know!

GC: You’re the game director! The programmer must’ve told you or something. Are you at 50 per cent or have you maxed it out already?

NF: No way, no way!

GC: Which one no way? The 50 per cent or the maxed out?

NF: We’re definitely excited to work on the PlayStation 4, that’s not a joke… But the game’s a launch window release and games get better looking, they become more interactive as the console’s lifetime goes on.

GC: But you can’t quantify where you are right now with your game? I thought that was just an obvious question you’d have a prepared answer for. Did Sony ask you not to say anything like that?

NF: I honest to god don’t know.

GC: You don’t know if Sony asked you not to say anything?

NF: [laughs] No! I mean I don’t know how to answer the question! Nobody has ever coached me or anything on how to answer questions.

inFamous: Second Son – Delsin gets new powers as the game progresses

GC: Sometimes you read other people’s interviews or previews and there’s whole chunks where they’ve given the exact answer word by word – and it’s such marketing style speak it’s obvious they’ve been coached.

NF: We get told… I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but what they do is we get heavily indoctrinated in what not to talk about so we don’t ruin content reveals for the future. For example, I’m not going to tell anyone about the powers we haven’t shown yet – to protect those for the player. And that’s the stuff where we get it drummed into us. Because all we want to do is talk about the game. All we want to do is have a beer chat, you know?

GC: I prefer a G and T myself.

NF: [laughs]

GC: But that’s the way I always try and do it. The bad interviews are always the ones where you’ve just got questions written down and the guy isn’t interested in talking about the game, as many of them aren’t….

NF: Really?

GC: Oh, god yeah. Because they don’t want to be there or they’re working on a game they hate. I shouldn’t name names but I always remember Army Of Two: The Devil’s Cartel… what can you ask someone that’s working on a game like that? Other than how unhappy are you?

NF: [laughs]

GC: He was a big guy too, I didn’t want to upset him. And he just said at the start something like, ‘I forgot how European press always ask difficult questions’. But he was quite nice about it actually, and basically just admitted it was cheap rubbish they make to turn a profit – which they can then use to fund more interesting stuff. Which is fine really, I can appreciate that honesty.

NF: You know I can get you a better technical answer for that hardware question. You should talk to our lead programmer, he can give you a real numbers answer. [To PR guy] Is that okay?

[It is, as it turns out, with the following answering provided later by Sucker Punch co-founder, Chris Zimmerman. Although it was via email so he didn’t really get the gist of what we were asking:

CZ: The thing that surprised us most about the PS4 was how many particles we could jam through it every frame. We built a new particle system around the PS4 architecture, so we kind of expected it to work well, but we were excited to see just how well. We can have particle systems with tens of thousands of particles without any trouble, and have up to a hundred or two thousand particles on screen at once in effects-heavy shots. We wouldn’t have been able to do smoke and neon as powers without the sinuous curves that all those particles afford us.

GC: I mean I’m sure I won’t understand the question when it comes back, because I’m not technical either, but it seems like something I should ask. Especially when everyone’s still saying it’s not much of a leap from last gen to now.

NF: Oh, it is. I mean launch games are usually the worst looking games in a console’s lifetime, right? And if you think Second Son looks good just imagine what’s going to be around at the end of the PlayStation 4’s lifetime.

GC: But I play a lot of video games and even though I’m not technical I can see the difference. But a test I often do is to show a casual gamer a game and ask them to guess which platform it is. I’ve just come from Titanfall and nobody is going to guess that’s not Xbox 360, just to look at it.

NF: There will certainly be a point of diminishing returns, when we’re in the era of PlayStation 9 it won’t be about graphics because everything will be completely photo-real. It’ll be about things like conversational AI…

GC: But one thing I often think of for the future, is when we get to that stage will we still have things that aren’t photo-real?

NF: Oh sure. I mean for a long time the benchmark of quality is how well it represents reality.

GC: Sure, but when we have the PlayStation 9 will we still have cel-shaded games, for example?

NF: God I hope so.

GC: I see things like the new Batman game and it looks good, but I wish it was more interesting artistically. Like, if only they could get away from their current dudebro version of Batman and do something that looked like The Animated Series or one of the actual comics or something…

NF: Thank you! That is… why don’t… The Animated Series is the greatest representation of Batman ever.

GC: 100 per cent, absolutely. God, don’t get me started on The Animated Series. I don’t really read comic books any more but I love the DC animated stuff.

NF: It’s so good!

GC: What depresses me is you know for a fact that the live action films aren’t going to be a tenth as good as even the worst of the cartoons.

NF: I completely agree with you.

GC: The characterisation, the action, the relative depth of the storylines…

NF: The aesthetics that they can put into… kind of the subtle representation of characters just through very simple designs and animation. It really is potent stuff.

GC: And before Arkham Knight was announced I was really hoping Rocksteady’s next game was going to be something left field, like a Wonder Woman game or something. Before I watched the cartoons I just thought she was a sexist joke but she’s a really interesting, complicated character. And Superman’s really interesting in the cartoon and all the D-list ones like The Question or Hawkgirl… just really interesting, three-dimensional characters.

NF: Clayface is the one that got me, I thought the animation was really well done. Just how creepy it was to have your body like that…

GC: Yeah, that was a great episode. But can you imagine that in live action? You just couldn’t do it. Cartoons are close enough to the medium of comic books that you can suspend your disbelief, but when everyone’s dressed up in live action it just looks like bad cosplay. Which is presumably why your character doesn’t have a cape, but if it was cel-shaded maybe…

NF: We try and make it believable so that you can believe in the powers. Our target is very different… I mean when you see a great movie like Avengers I bought it. That worked for me.

GC: That’s true, but then that had a very light tone. Lighter than even the cartoons really. But that’s certainly not how DC are handling their live action movies.

NF: A better example would be the movie Chronicle, did you see that?

GC: I haven’t, no. I keep meaning to.

NF: I think it’s an excellent film. And in a lot of ways it’s the best representation of what we try to do in our games, right? You totally know these kids… did you see the trailer where they’re messing around in a toy store scaring kids?

GC: No… I saw a clip where they’re in the back of a car and one guy gets annoyed with the car behind beeping them and just throws it off the road.

NF: I think that’s killer, it’s the real nub of the fantasy. It’s ‘What would I do if I got these powers?’ You wouldn’t stop a bank robbery, you’d scare kids by moving teddy bears.

NF: Have we got to go? Sorry. Hey man, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate the time and… where where you from again?

GC: The Metro newspaper.

NF: Wow, so you’re not even specialist press or anything? Well, that was real good talking to you.

GC: Definitely, thanks very much.

inFamous: Second Son – the best superhero game ever?

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