Niet alleen hebben we ons kunnen verlekkeren aan een korte demo van inFAMOUS 2, we hebben ook de kans gehad om uitgebreid te praten met Nate Fox, de gamedirector van InFAMOUS 2. Het volledige interview met hem kun je hier onder lezen.

Budgetgaming: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Nate Fox, I am the game director on InFAMOUS 2. I was a game designer on all of the Sly Raccoon games and was the game director on InFAMOUS 1.

Budgetgaming: What are the biggest changes in InFAMOUS 2?
Nate Fox: My favorite changes that we gave Cole McGrath, who is kind of an electric superhero, a big metal weapon that makes hand to hand combat feel awesome. Only Cole can use the weapon because he can charge it up with electricity and I love it.

Also, we changed the Karma system around. We tried to make it more about personalities, instead of it being more abstract. So when Cole hits problems in the game, he has to decide if he is going to be a hero or a villain. There are actual people, real characters arguing, trying to convince the player to one course of action or another and that really changes the dynamic because you feel like you´re helping somebody or letting somebody down. It´s like the real world.

Finally, we are providing players with a user generated mission editor, which allows players to make their own InFAMOUS stories, put them on the internet and become kind of famous as great designers.

Budgetgaming: You told us about the big electric bat, which can be used for melee attacks. While there wasn’t any melee combat in InFAMOUS, why did you decide to give melee combat such a prominent role?
Actually, we heard from fans that they wanted it. We realized that part of the Super hero experience is kind of this bareknuckle beatdown that you see in so many films. We wanted to integrate that element into the game and make it a vital part of any combat encounter. I am really proud of how it turned out in the end. And the best part is that it’s easy to pull off some melee moves and then use Cole’s other powers. You can go for some melee combat, and then quickly blast somebody with a lightning bolt and then jump of the top of a building, all in a couple of seconds.

Budgetgaming: Could you give us some examples of some of the new powers that we will get to play with?
Oh, yeah of course. One of my favorites is called the Ionic Vortex, which is a giant cyclone of electricity you can launch. What I love about it, is that it just picks up everything in the world and then sends it flying, smashing into other aspects of other parts of New Marais. New Marais is just way more destructible than Empire City (Stad uit het origineel – Yorn). So that you feel that intense power, when you unleash it, everything starts breaking and crumbling.

Another power that I really like is this kind of ice launch, where Cole can create this pillar of ice underneath him which sends him up into the air and which makes climbing effortless. It is quick and because Cole can jump into the air and float in a cloud of electricity, he gets flung into the air and move sort of smoothly across the landscape with increased speed. It makes getting around a lot easier.

Budgetgaming: What will the role of New Marais be for your character?
Cole is kind of forced to leave Empire city because ‘the beast’ defeats him and he heads down to New Marais because that’s the only place he can get more and stronger super powers. While he is down there in New Marais and trying to become more powerful, ‘the beast’ is actually travelling down the coast heading for New Marais, so it’s sort of a race against time. Cole needs to get powerful enough to confront and beat ‘the beast’ and also deal with the problems that are in New Marais before ‘the beast’ arrives.

Budgetgaming: In the first game you were weak and you became a hero throughout the story. In InFAMOUS 2 you already have the powers that you got in InFAMOUS, but are still weak because of this ‘Beast’ that you can’t defeat. What’s the thought behind ‘the beast’?
We wanted players to start InFAMOUS 2 as a really powerful, strong character, to experience being superhuman. To do that, we had to make sure that players had a lot of powers. Building from that point, you are just adding more and more powers to a point that it’s almost getting ridiculous to how powerful Cole is. It’s like becoming a Super- Superhero and that means you need villains that are equally strong and ‘the beast’ is the ultimate expression of that.

Budgetgaming: You mentioned ice and in the demo we saw the element fire. In InFAMOUS, only electricity could be used, what is the role of these new powers.
Well, Cole is still a electricity based super hero, that is totally his thing. He draws electricity from the city grid to heal himself and for ammunition and then fire and ice are powers he gets from partnering up with these two characters Nix and Quo . They are an addition to his arsenal, but they don’t replace his electrical arsenal.

Budgetgaming: What is the role of Nix and Quo ?
Nix and Quo are these kind of sidekicks to Cole. They both have superpowers of their own, so Cole will go out on missions with them and they have ‘buddy powers’. For instance, Nix can hold up enemies with these sort of oily tendrils and Cole can blast electricity at them and then all these oil tendrils will explode at once and lay waste to all five enemies at the same time.

Cole can’t do this by himself, but with Nix by his side, it’s easy. These two girls also represent ‘order’ and ‘chaos’. Nix is kind of a hedonist and just wants to have a good time. You have superpowers, so who is going to stop you. As a gamer, I like to play that way. Quo is much more thoughtful and says you should do the right thing. They show you how you are doing in the game.

Budgetgaming: You were talking about morality, about being good or being evil. The impact of this decision was not that big in the original, it mainly changed what powers you could use. How is this in InFAMOUS 2?
Well, you get very different missions, so the experience you have playing the game, the actual story that you experience as you go through the plot of the game, changes. And the ending is radically different. I know most players play as the good guy, but you should know, I love the chaotic ending.

Budgetgaming: So you are generally a good guy, but in the game you prefer to be the bad guy?
Yeah, you know cause in life, you have to do the right thing. Videogames provide us with this opportunity to explore things that we can’t do in real life. It is safe.

Budgetgaming: There was some critical feedback on the way the story was told in InFAMOUS, it was too lightweight and you could easily miss important events when you weren’t paying enough attention. Has this been improved in InFAMOUS 2?
The storytelling in InFAMOUS 2 has definitely improved, because we did motion capture and record the voices and facial expressions of our actors simultaneously, so you get a lot of subtlety and spontaneity. This makes it easier to connect to the characters emotionally. On top of that we still have the 2d graphic novel style cut scenes. These two combined along with big set piece events make the story move along pretty well and I find it to be pretty compelling.

Budgetgaming: Almost every game these days tries to implement a multiplayer mode, why is there no multiplayer option in InFAMOUS 2?
Well, our number one priority with InFAMOUS 2 was to create this very heavyweight, long campaign. 20% of the campaign is linked to your choice of karma so it is very big and then with the rest of our energy we said: “Let’s make this user generated mission editor because it is something that is new in these kind of games”. There are no open world games that let players make their own missions. We definitely talked about the option of multiplayer, but there are a lot of games which have an awesome multiplayer mode. So we thought, we’ll do something different and give players a new experience. That’s why we created the UGC mission editor.

Budgetgaming: You told us in the presentation that there will be missions that will get a Sucker Punch stamp of quality. How will you evaluate the created missions, since there will be a lot of gamers that will try to create something worthy of playing?
After you have played a UGC mission, players can rate it with stars. We are going to look at the missions which are very popular and say, okay, of the five star missions, these are the ones which are spectacularly good. We will then say that those are Sucker Punch recommended missions and then you can choose the option of only showing the UGC recommended missions. That way you’ll know that they are going to be fantastic.

Budgetgaming: How will the experience differ between the newcomer and the InFAMOUS fan?
While you start with a lot of powers in InFAMOUS 2, we teach them to you pretty slowly, so for an experienced player, they won’t even see the teaching, because they’ll just know what to do. However if you aren’t used to the game, you won’t be overwhelmed at the beginning, you will kind of get these things explained to you over time. Even though you might stumble over some button combinations, the game doesn’t really ask you to use these combinations right off the bat.

Furthermore, when you load up InFAMOUS 2, the game can tell if you have played InFAMOUS, so you can choose to continue your good or your evil story from InFAMOUS and get some bonuses in InFAMOUS 2. Or you can start a new game and will totally recap the story from InFAMOUS, so that players aren’t lost.

Budgetgaming: As the game director, what are you most proud of, of implementing in InFAMOUS 2?
My favorite thing we implemented in InFAMOUS 2, which was actually the hardest thing to do, was integrating these performance capture cutscenes into an open world game. That was hard for us technically. We kind of had to figure out how to do it ourselves and I think it makes the experience feel more moving as a result. But it certainly was though. Sucker Punch had never tried this before. The real point of making the game is for this awesome singleplayer campaign, and it helps that a lot. So I am very glad that we did it.

Budgetgaming: And for our last question as a fan of the series: will Sly Raccoon ever be back?
Haha you know, I hope so, I don’t know anything, but I would love to see more Sly Raccoon. He was in PSN Move Heroes, but there was no Murray (de bestuurder in de Sly serie – Yorn) and Sly games need Murray.

Budgetgaming: Thank you for this interview.
Nate fox: You’re very welcome.