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Gameplanet: Talk us through the implementation of User Generated Content. What's your goal here?

Ishikura: UGC in InFamous 2 is all about missions. Players can use the new UGC tools to create missions that they can share with the entire InFamous 2 community. Depending on what Filter you put on, these missions will appear right in your game world as green mission icons, accessible within seconds at a press of a button.

UGC is our way of empowering players to help create an “infinite InFamous”. The InFamous 2 experience will quite literally never end with awesome new fan-created missions appearing every day.

Gameplanet: Is there a rating system for UGC, how are you separating the diamonds from the rough?

Ishikura: Yup, there’s a rating system where any player who plays a mission can give a mission one to five stars.

But we actually have a more powerful Filtering system on top of that. Right at the get-go, the missions that the players will see by default are missions that we at Sucker Punch have personally played and thought were particularly good. The missions you’ll initially see have all been “blessed” by us. That’s if you leave the default Filter on.

But if you switch Filters, you can see the most recent missions or the top rated missions or lots of different configurations. You can even turn UGC off entirely if you just want to focus on the single player campaign. But even though you’ll absolutely get the full InFamous 2 experience if you never play UGC, I hope you don’t turn UGC off, because there’s a lot of really cool stuff in there!

Gameplanet: A superhero is meaningless without a supervillain. What can we expect in the way of enemies?

Ishikura: InFamous 2 is all about the Beast and your impending showdown with him. He’s enormous and he’s powerful and he’s really the driving reason behind everything you’re doing in New Marais.

But since you won’t be spending the entire game repeatedly fighting him, we really pushed for more enemy variety this time around. We of course have some gun toting humans (the Militia), but we have lots of super-powered enemies of all different shapes and sizes; from the Spikers (a dog sized enemy that shoots poison quills) to the Ravagers (a beast that’s twice Cole’s size who can burrow into the ground and can tackle Cole to the ground); from Ice Titans (a conduit that’s 10 times Cole’s size who can has a ton of ice-infused attacks) to the Behemoth (an enormous city block leveling enemy).

Gameplanet: What improvements have been made to the movement or parkour system?

Ishikura: Parkour’s a big deal to us, so we made sure to make sure we improved that too. This meant changing lots of little things and big things.

Of course, Cole has some new powers to help him get through the city. Two that we’ve shown off so far are the Car Jump, which turns every car in the city into a massive trampoline, and the vertical induction grind poles, which shoot you like a rocket up the side of a building, making scaling a building a breeze. But we’ve got a lot more in store for the player.

Beyond that, we also just tried to make the moment-to-moment stuff more fluid. A common complaint in InFamous 1 was that Cole “stuck” to things while climbing too often, so we made him less “sticky”. We made climbing more fluid by having Cole pull himself up onto just-of-reach ledges. Moving horizontally is a lot smoother now with our new gap jump assist system. .... the list goes on and on.

We hear a lot about cross-pollination and assistance by the likes of Naughty Dog and Media Molecule. Is there any danger of too many chefs on this title?

We’ve gotten a ton of help from a lot of really great people. Sony, Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, and countless others have all been awesome resources for us. But really, we’re the only chefs in the kitchen. Success or fail, it’s on us to make the big decisions and do all of the dirty work.

Gameplanet: Can we expect any 3D or Move compatibility?

Ishikura: Not this time. UGC’s our big new feature this time around.

Gameplanet: Is InFamous now a franchise? Is there a long-term roadmap?

Ishikura: [smiles] No comment on this one. We’ll have to see how InFamous 2 does first.

Gameplanet: Cole's appearance has been through several iterations. This was in response to fan feedback. But fans can be fickle. Where do you draw the line between trying to please the vocal aspects of your audience and believing in yourself as a professional game developer?

Ishikura: Right from the start, we knew we were going to have to change Cole’s appearance for a variety of reasons. Cole’s in a new, hotter city, so we knew he’d have to lose him thick motorcycle jacket. InFamous 2 has a brand new weapon-centric melee system, so Cole had to carry the new “Amp” around with him. InFamous 2 now has mocap cutscenes, so we had to change Cole’s facial structure to match the new actor.

All of these things meant big changes to Cole and the way that Sucker Punch handles big changes is to iterate. We like to think we’re not flying blind, but we never pretend we know all of the answers from the get-go. So we try things out. We iterate. The Cole that fans saw back in 2010 was just one of the early iterations. It didn’t work out, so we kept iterating.
The early fan response let us know that we didn’t change all of the right things the right way. But it didn’t tell us exactly what we should or shouldn’t do. That was up to us to figure out. It took a bunch more iterations, but we’re happy with the Cole we ended up with.

Gameplanet: Can you provide us with an example of this in the game?

Ishikura: We actually have hundreds of examples of player feedback has helped guide our development. At Sucker Punch, we’re big believers in doing frequent focus tests, where we bring in players to play the game early on in the process.

It’s an absolute heartache to see players get completely lost while playing a mission that we thought was totally brilliant and totally clear, but it’s an invaluable part of the process. Because we’re so close to the game, sometimes we forget what we don’t know and what the player’s experience will truly be like, so we make adjustments.

We want players to have an amazing time with InFamous 2. If it means we have to endure countless incredibly painful learning processes to deliver it, we’ll do it gladly.