Nate Fox, the creative director of inFamous Second Son, has told Official PlayStation Magazine UK that the studio is doing more than ever to make the game's representation of Seattle as real and vibrant as possible.
While many games offer large cities for players to explore it's often hard to imagine NPCs as having any life beyond a very narrowly defined role.
"We have a term inside the studio called The Reality Bubble. We don’t want it to feel like when [our hero] Delsin leaves the block, everything goes away. So we actually have things going on. There are more systems running concurrently than ever before – the urban ecosystem, all these pedestrians interacting with each other in ways that fill out their attitudes about what’s going on in the city. This is something new to Second Son that we’ve never tried in the previous two inFamous games.”
Second Son is a more serious game than its predecessors and the move to a real city as opposed to the fictional settings of Empire City and New Marais in the first two games reflects this but Fox says Sucker Punch wanted to create a superhero's playground first and foremost.
"We prioritised making the game as fun as possible. So we don’t model buildings just because that’s what they look like in reality. We take reality and then change it to make a really fun game. All landmarks, all aspects of architecture go through the lens of game design to make them function perfectly against Delsin’s powers.
“Seattle has a pretty dramatic landscape. There are big mountains and clouds that come in and streak through the sky, and rainfalls that arrive, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s a place that’s constantly changing, which makes it feel like a good landscape for a superhero.”
Fox has previously said that morality will be central to the game and while Second Son is based on the good ending of inFamous 2 which saw Cole sacrifice himself Delsin will not be tied to the same moral path and his powers will change based on player decisions.
Sucker Punch had thought most players would be evil in inFamous 2 but trophy data showed that only 20 per cent of players chose to adopt the Beast's powers and so they changed the story of Second Son.
inFamous Second Son is set for release exclusively on PlayStation 4 in 2014.
