Despite being titled ‘All Your Questions Answered’, Sucker Punch Co-Founder and inFamous: Second Son Producer Brian Fleming tip-toed around a lot of important questions about the game on the PS Blog, either to avoid spoilers or because they weren’t talking about it yet.
So, you won’t find answers about what the post-launch DLC will be, how many powers there are after Smoke and Neon, how exactly Delsin’s appearance will change in respect to his karma, full details on how they use the light bar, whether there’s an inFamous game coming to Vita, or even how long the game is (Sucker Punch Co-Founder Chris Zimmerman did say the main story is roughly 10 – 12 hours, not counting side missions and everything you can collect).
What Fleming was able to talk about, however, are some more pieces of information regarding the powers in general:
One of the things we haven’t talked about is how many powers are in each set, and how many upgrades are available. Without putting specific numbers on it, there’s a substantial number of individual powers in each set, and many — if not all of them — are upgradeable.
While inFamous: Second Son will be using the DualShock 4’s light bar in certain ways, and the touch pad to drain powers, Fleming said the “biggest things that we’re excited about regarding DualShock 4 are the improvements made in the tension on the sticks, and the shape of the sticks themselves, all of which make for better control. Not just for inFamous, but every PlayStation game is going to benefit from the smaller dead zones, the improved triggers — all of that closed the distance between the player and the game.”
Mentioning how you’ll be destroying DUP infrastructure that has been put up in the city – all of which will topple over if you blow up one corner – Fleming also revealed what the most challenging technical aspect for the game has been:
Probably the design implementation and the boot-strapping of our new effects system. When we went into this project, we knew that we wanted to start from scratch on our visual effects. The VFX for a game like this are as important as any aspect of what we do, so we didn’t want to just take our old system and add a couple of features.
So the system was redesigned to entirely run in the graphics chip. There’s so much computational power there. And then we had to design an authoring system, and it ended up being dramatically more technical to author particle effects and special effects in our game than it had previously.
There was a really big technical jump required of the art team. They had to get comfortable with linear algebra and vector fields, and all kinds of crazy advanced mathematics. It’s really to their credit that they were able to train themselves and come to an understanding of all the math that goes into making the particle effects work. And the results are spectacular.
With the full inFamous: Second Son trophy list being revealed yesterday, we know quite a few of the things you’ll be able to do during the game that aren’t about progressing the story. Once you beat the main campaign though, that isn’t the end of your time in Seattle:
The inFamous games always have secondary content spread throughout the world. There’s a fairly large DUP presence inside the city that remains to be cleared out after you finish the main game. They’ll continue to launch incursions into the city after you’ve wrapped up the campaign, so they’ll be plenty to keep you going.
And then, of course, for a lot of players the first thing they’ll want to do is go back and play the other “karmic” direction. Between that mix of things, people should have plenty to do in the after-game and in their second playthrough.
In case you’ve missed this info before, inFamous: Second Son is a single-player experience with no multiplayer, there will be no User Generated Content like in inFamous 2, there are no plans for a demo, the install size is 24GB, and, while this is Delsin’s story, there may be “a couple of fun things in there for the fans” who have played the previous games.
You’ll be able to buy inFamous: Second Son in a little over a week when the game launches on March 21st.
