Sucker Punch: Morality is Central to InFamous Second Son

Sucker Punch's creative director on InFamous Second Son, Nate Fox, has explained how morality works in the game.

In the first two games Cole was presented with numerous moral decisions and Fox says these choices will be just as important this time round. Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine UK he commented: 

“Delsin is an all new character, part of an all-new story and the player gets in at ground zero. Second Son is Delsin’s origin story and because our game lets you choose if you want to be good or evil, you get to decide how he grows as a person and how the people around him are changed by his choices”.

As a result of this, the player's ability to make Delsin “a hero or an antihero” remains central to the game. Fox says this means that, “you have to start at kind of a neutral place and let the player’s choices dictate where Delsin goes”.

The choices you make in Second Son means, "the player gets to determine how the story changes and how Delsin’s powers grow by making choices along the way."

Fox said the previous system or black and white/yes or no decisions has been overhauled and Sucker Punch wants to focus on allowing “the player make small choices”.

As with Cole, Delsin's powers will be shaped by the choices players make: 

“When he gets powers, he becomes suddenly very high profile. People are horrified by him. He’s a bioterrorist, he’s out in the city where everybody wants to put him in a cage. But that means that his every action is noticed by people in the city, and even the world”.

He says that rarely stop to think about the minute decisions made by superheroes like the Dark Knight, “people always think about the overarching macro but they rarely think about the second-to-second experience of what it’s like to be Batman”, which Fox believes is a“big deal”.

One of the "little things" players are given control over is when “Somebody might try to surrender to you in the middle of a fight and put their arms up. You could violently execute them or take them down alive. Do you know how hard it is to take down everyone alive?”

Fox continues, “And when you do it, you feel like a superhero because you actually did the work.”

It seems that in Second Son, there's less focus on making decisions and more on actually seeing the implications of those decisions in the game world. 

“Choosing to be a good guy or a bad guy, that’s the simple choice. The harder thing to do is, are you capable of walking the walk? And that’s where the game comes alive in terms of karma in my mind”.

Second Son is based on the good ending of InFamous 2 which saw Cole sacrifice himself. While Sucker Punch had originally intended to create a game based on the evil ending, 80 per cent of players opted for Cole to be a hero according to trophy data and so they changed the story of Second Son. 

The game is set to be released on PlayStation 4 in 2014. You can check out the latest screenshots here.