Delsin Rowe is the star of Second Son, and you probably know someone like him: A 24 year-old who is absolutely convinced he’s destined for greatness; though so far that greatness has managed to elude him. He grew up just outside Seattle, where his great – if accidental – calling comes crashing into his life. After rescuing occupants from a fiery bus wreck, he discovers that he suddenly has the ability to direct, manipulate and even transform into… Smoke. Could he have absorbed this power from one of the passengers he pulled from the wreckage?

Setting the scene: It’s been seven years since the Cole McGrath episodes and the world has clearly changed. Anyone showing signs of being a so-called “bio-terrorist” is immediately handed over to the Department of Unified Protection (DUP) — a government agency created to ensure there is never a repeat of the catastrophic events of Empire City and New Marais. So Delsin, who has never been particularly respectful of authority, finds himself caught in the DUP dragnet – And decides he’s not going to go quietly.

Along the way, Delsin is going to ask questions that are not just relevant to the world of Second Son – but to the world we all live in today. A world where we are often instructed to surrender our freedoms to help improve our security. Ben Franklin once wrote “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Is he right?

As you play Second Son, you’ll explore lots of Seattle’s familiar landmarks. As with all games in this series, the path the gameplay and story take will depend on the decisions you make along the way. Of course, we are creating all these characters and locations at a remarkable level of detail – made possible by PS4. In fact, this trailer was produced in-house using our game engine – can you tell we’re having fun with the new GPU, tools, and our new VFX system?

We’ll be back in the coming weeks with more details, but until then you’ll find us at @suckerpunchprod, #SecondSon, and www.facebook.com/infamous.

It’s been a long time since my last PlayStation.Blog post, and today’s entry is a little….different. I’ll start with the marketing facts (inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood available now!!!! $9.99!! Only $7.99 if you are a PlayStation Plus member!!!) but really, I thought I’d give you a little insight into why and how we ended up making a vampire based spin-off of inFAMOUS.

For us, we’d been working for two projects and five-plus years on the main storyline of inFAMOUS. We wanted the DLC to be a chance to take all that art and technology and do something fun and different for players. We knew we couldn’t just release some more missions or a skin pack, so we took a bunch of pitches from all the departments here at the studio for what we might do. We wanted something that fit the world of inFAMOUS, would be fun to work on, and ideally would be unexpected, too.

One of the strong pitches we got was originally called “Vampire City” (a play on “Empire City” from inFAMOUS). The pitch was that Zeke was trying to impress a girl with a tall tale about Cole, Vampires, and the origins of Pyre Night. There was a lot to like about this pitch, some important ones were: finally getting to add flying to inFAMOUS, the strong “Pyre Night” set dressing we could add to New Marais, a solid supernatural basis for new powers, and of course having a launch date in the days before Halloween didn’t hurt, either. So it was decided, and work began!

About the same time, we had some promising PlayStation Move prototypes running. We’d initially thought we would use Move to support UGC authors–but as we progressed, we became convinced we could make the game fully playable with Move. So Move shifted to become a core gameplay feature, and our UGC team decided to tackle our next big wishlist item – “speech bubble” cutscenes. Like making narrative missions? Now you get set-up camera shots and add speech bubbles to characters!

So that’s the story behind “Festival of Blood”… We all hope you enjoy this little “what if” detour in the inFAMOUS universe… From all of us at Sucker Punch, Happy Halloween!!

P.S. I can also confirm the new cutscene tool and PlayStation Move support will appear in the main inFAMOUS 2 game any day now!

Well, it’s finally here… Launch day!

Two-plus years, eighty thousand individual checkins of art and code, countless hours of testing, and it all builds towards today! At long last we turn over the keys to you. It’s your game now… Whether you’re someone who plays the game on easy and wants to see how the endings differ, or a borderline crazy completionist who needs to get every last blast shard and every last XP possible. Or maybe you want to contribute your own pages to the story and create some missions for the whole community (including us at Sucker Punch!) to play and enjoy…

Whichever you are, it’s your game now. We hope you enjoy the game a bunch, and look forward to hearing from you all about your inFAMOUS 2 experience!

And it wouldn’t be a launch without posting without a quick peek at the new launch trailer, and of course the TV spot that you’ll see popping up all over the place!

Thanks again for all your support and feedback along the way, and here’s hoping you have as much fun playing inFAMOUS 2 as we did making it!

Have you ever put on a wedding or a huge party? A bunch of us are in working this weekend, but it’s not just the normal bug fixing, polishing, and optimizing. Today we’re hanging art, arranging some furniture, and (shudder) cleaning up our offices. All of this is being done in preparation for the 60+ media members who will be flying up to Seattle on Monday for our “Media Day” event for inFAMOUS 2. So you can think of this as our once-every-two-years chance to spruce up the place, and put on a little bit of a show.

So here’s my Virtual Media Day for you guys, a blow-by-blow breakdown of what we’re showing.

In the morning we’ll be hosting all the international press members on a tour of our studios in Bellevue. We will hold out some hope for good weather so we can do some interviews and photos out on the deck. We’ll turn the visitors loose on the bustling metropolis that is Bellevue, Washington and start prepping for our afternoon show. South of the Mariners stadium, we’ll be hosting an evening event showcasing three inFAMOUS 2 highlights:

First, a battle with the monster we call The Behemoth. If you remember way way back to our E3 demos last year, we hinted at the existence of this monster…Well, here’s your chance to see him! As far as inFAMOUS 2 goes, he’s one of the most important enemies we’ve built. We showed an early version of him at our very first greenlight meetings back in December 2009. Seems like a long time ago!

Second, we’ll show a mission called Forced Conduits. If you’ve been following along closely, you know that Conduits are people who are candidates to become super powered. But in this mission, we find out that someone has figured out how to somehow force ordinary people to become conduits… An interesting development in the narrative of inFAMOUS 2!

Finally, we’ll show a handful of missions created in our User-Generated Content tools. I got the chance to play through these missions over the weekend, and the exciting thing for me was the diversity of gameplay being built by the QA staff helping us get ready for our inFAMOUS 2 Limited Beta (on Tuesday!!!). We’ll be showing nicely created combat scenarios, a very cleverly told story mission, and a lyrical reference to an arcade game gone by. A good set overall!

It’s a pretty exciting week, I hope you all get the chance to check out a little more about these new missions! Wish us luck with the media, and I’ll be back again soon with another update!

Today I’m here to talk about everyone’s favorite topic: powers! More specifically, how does Cole manage to improve on is already impressive set of electrical abilities?

For those of you who don’t know the original inFAMOUS story, Cole’s electrical powers appear when he’s caught in the blast of a mysterious device called the Ray Sphere. Cole gains more and more abilities, becomes more and more powerful, and survives the gauntlet of Empire City… but he also is given a glimpse into his future. He realizes that even at the height of his powers, he is no match for the challenge that awaits. A battle with a great Beast looms, and Cole isn’t ready to face it.

So in inFAMOUS 2, Cole travels South to New Marais to trace a path to the man behind the Ray Sphere technology, Dr. Sebastian Wolfe. With buddy Zeke riding shotgun, they set off to find the key to the next step in Cole’s evolution and a new level of power– powers that will be necessary if Cole hopes to survive the upcoming battle.

When Cole and Zeke eventually track down Dr. Wolfe, he explains that over years of experimenting, he had isolated the specific type of energy responsible for all genetic mutations. Dr. Wolfe’s technology—like the Ray Sphere—was all created to concentrate and manipulate this energy. To most people a dose of this mutative energy is fatal—but for a small fraction, the energy unlocks their untapped potential. These rare individuals are called Conduits, and of course Cole is one of them.

Wolfe has also developed a device—called a Blast Core—which can store this type of energy safely for an extended period of time… Over the years, he’s built and charged six of these Blast Cores. So to continue his evolution, Cole will need to locate these all-important Blast Cores, and absorb their energy into his body. But Wolfe fears the Blast Cores will fall into the wrong hands, so he has moved them to safe locations around the city — and Cole will have to hunt them all down.

Of course our story will take some important twists and turns along the way, we’ll meet other Conduits, and as in the original inFAMOUS game, your choices about what kind of person you are. But no matter which path Cole follows, one thing remains the same: without the Blast Cores he won’t survive.

I think most of us at Sucker Punch have noticed the days starting to blur together a bit. So while I had a quiet moment here on Southwest Flight 651, I thought I’d put the time to good use and give you an update on our progress with I2 (inFAMOUS 2) … Ken’s post from last week got the ball rolling, let’s see if I can spill some more beans on the Karma system…

When we took a look at the Karma system in I1 (inFAMOUS, the first game) we wanted to keep the successful stuff, but also make improvements … As a top line, we knew we wanted to continue to offer players the choice and responsibility that comes along with having powers. This is one of the central themes of many archetype super-hero stories, as well as an interesting exploration of the relationship between power, responsibility and the test of character that powers bring. So, that had to stay.

But on the flip side, we got feedback from fans that some of the choices felt too mechanical, and they wanted their choices to have more meaning in the narrative and in the world. So, our challenge with I2 was to make these choices more real, more believable, and yet still keep them visible and clear to the players.

When we spent time thinking and designing the improved Karma system, we ultimately concluded that there was a way to make these choices both clearer and much more believable: to make your Karma decisions more about relationships and less about the specific choice at hand. So instead of a question that really didn’t relate to our primary gameplay (e.g. “should we take this food or give it away?”), in I2 we let the player decide who to ally with on a quest, or choose between Kuo’s surgical strike or Nix’s no-holds barred assault. You aren’t just choosing a mission, you’re choosing an ally and alienating another person. This was both clear for players, and more real.

Here are a couple videos which demonstrate what I’m talking about, but let me set them up a bit … At this point in the game, Kuo has been captured by the local Militia that’s taken over New Marais. We find out that Kuo is being held at a makeshift prison (a converted old mansion on the edge of town). Cole needs to mount a rescue, but the fortified target rules out a frontal assault.

Cole’s buddy Zeke proposes a rescue plan. He has seen a convoy of captured police officers being paraded through the city. He wants to bust up the convoy, free the officers, and then lead the police on an assault of the old mansion/militia stronghold. Turns out other cops are being kept there as prisoners, if Cole helps bust them free he’ll get Kuo out at the same time … of course that also means there’ll be more cops on the street (which is sometimes uncool for vigilantes). Cops love us, Kuo goes free, all is good! Okay, let’s have a look:

Nix’s idea? Well as you know from Ken’s piece, Nix is more of a chaotic personality. Her plan? Load up a streetcar with explosives and run it down the tracks at full speed towards the mansion. It’ll derail, crash through the front gate and explode in a huge fireball … Great diversion, and tons of collateral damage on the Militia, even if a few prisoners might become collateral damage. After the explosion, we team up and slog our way through the remaining resistance and get Kuo back. Nix, of course, has some super powers of her own, and they are particularly useful in combination with Cole’s arsenal. Just another bit part of the plan! Let’s take a quick look:

So in the case of these two choices, you end up rescuing Kuo along either path, but that won’t always be the case. Sometimes the implications of your choices will be clear (like above) and sometimes they will be murky. The choices you make will affect the world itself, the citizens’ reaction to you, and of course the ending of the game in an important way. What we hope is that you all find them entertaining, occasionally thought provoking, and lots of fun.

Before I go, I want to wrap up with a few more answers to questions we received after Ken’s post. #1. YES, a lot of content is backing up the Karma system, not just different cut scenes – in fact the example above is all gameplay, There are NO differences in the cut scenes. And saving Kuo is just the beginning— there are going to be a very sizable number of missions set up in choices like this, and plenty of unique content on either side. #2. YES, the game should be more balanced for those of you who want to play more “Neutral” or switch sides.

So there you go, I’m about to land and the flight attendants are eyeballing me. We’ll have more on the Karma system later this month on Spike’s GTTV which airs on Feb. 24th. Until then, choose your friends carefully!

3+ years, 60+ people, insane amounts of caffeinated beverages, and 70,000+ individual checkins of code, art, and media, and what do you get? A gold disc for inFAMOUS! We got the news late yesterday (just in time for the team to run off and tip a few back!) and I’m not sure it’s really sank in for me yet. But it’s official, and somewhere I hope they’re stamping out your copy of inFAMOUS right as you read this!

It’s a tradition here to bust out old builds and videos of the game and laugh at ourselves for how *crappy* the game was 2 years ago. It’s a strange combination of humiliation at how we ever showed those builds to people, appreciation to Sony for believing in us even when the game was so provably terrible, and sense of accomplishment at how far we were able to come, especially in the last 6-12 months. Plus it’s just plain hilarious to see some of our really BAD ideas on-screen.

But that’s the journey of making video games. We’re proud of what we accomplished getting to here, but the point of it all was to make something for you guys to enjoy — and we’re hopeful that you will drop us a note and let us know what you think after you’ve beaten the game! Enjoy the ride and thanks so much for all your support!

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to know what the last few weeks were like for Brian and the Sucker Punch team, look out for the Road To Gold dev diary releasing in May.

That’s okay, it’s good for them to think the producer is a little nuts I think… In a sort of twisted way I really enjoy the final crunch of game production. We are working a ton, and of course miss our families and lives, but to me it feels like the best part of the project, and I don’t think I’m alone in that sense… What can I say? We’re workin’ hard and it really shows in the game. The detail work, the polish, the bug fixing — it all has a massive effect on the end experience… But while we’re feeling good, we’re also a long way from that release disc… Gotta keep grinding….

So okay, enough babble… You’re here to see a new inFamous trailer, not listen to me gaze at my navel, so let’s get on with it, and I’ll give you some thoughts and tidbits….

The FX and details on the powers are a continued source of work and polish, and if you look closely at the piece, you’ll see Cole deployed his Polarity Wall shield, something we’ve not shown before… Yet another power for his arsenal!

Probably time for me to get back to the electron mine… Status meeting in 12 minutes and I’m behind on all the stuff I was supposed to be doing instead of writing blog posts :-D. Talk to you more when we get close to the end…

-Brian