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.

inFAMOUS 2 and inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood received widespread acclaim from the gaming community in 2011 not only for their amazing open-world super hero gameplay, but also for one very important, very unique feature: the ability to make your own missions. To bring out the best aspiring developers, we launched a contest late last year to see who could build the best mission within inFAMOUS 2. This mission needed to focus on telling a story about the main character Cole McGrath that could fit within the fiction of the universe. It also needed to play great, meaning good gameplay balance, strong action set-pieces, and a compelling narrative to pull you through.

From the missions that we’re submitted on infamousthegame.com, PlayStation and Sucker Punch reviewed only the most-played and highest-ranked missions as voted on by the community that plays. This tool not only makes it easy to find great missions in-game, but you can also browse and queue up missions to play in-game on the web by logging in with your PSN ID.

After much debate with the team from Sucker Punch, we’re ready to share the grand prize winner of the Cole’s Missing Mission contest. Introducing PSN member Seth9977 with his mission: Spying on the Spies. His mission brought a great story that matched the tone of Cole’s character while providing sweeping travel segments, awesome combat, and just the right amount of humor. He also goes a bit in-depth with Cole’s character to imply some deeper issues he’s struggling with and has some great call-backs to Cole’s time in Empire City. It’s now playable in inFAMOUS 2 under the Featured Missions category.

Hi everyone; Seth9977 here.

The thing that inspired me to make that mission was the story mission: “Alden Strikes” from inFAMOUS. I put my own little twist of Zeke being captured to bring back some good old memories of rescuing Zeke from inFAMOUS 1.

My advice to other mission builders:

It’s always best to get an idea of what you’re about to make, rather than sit there with nothing. Find something to spark your creativity, and don’t be afraid to try something new. It’s also best to learn how to use the tools. If you don’t know how something works, look at a template, play around with it, or come ask the friendly users at suckerpunch.com for help. Another thing that is a must for creating a fail-proof mission would be play testing and polishing. It’s always best to constantly test and play your mission whenever you make a change, look for ways that a player can break your mission. It will help you in the long run!

Whenever play testing a narrative, make sure to check your grammar, and read it out loud to make sure it sounds right. There are three questions that you should always ask yourself: 1) “Will this be enjoyable for the player?” 2) “Can less experienced players beat this?” and 3) “Will they be able to break my mission?” If you design around these questions, I’m sure you will have a great and fun mission for users to play!

My thoughts on the design tools:

The design tools overall are well made and allowed me to do a number of things. From creating a simple sentence to making an intense fight. I enjoy working a lot with narrative type stuff, so when I first picked up inFAMOUS 2, and fired up the UGC creator I was glad to see there was a way to implement a story into my mission. The variety of tools in the UGC creator has expanded upon the months, and I’m eager to see what else the people at Sucker Punch have to offer to us!
I would also like to thank everyone who has made this possible for me. I’ve learned a lot on my own, but when I got involved with the community at Suckerpunch.com and infamousthegame.com, I’ve learned a lot more on how the UGC creator of inFAMOUS 2 works. It wouldn’t have been possible without the players too! A lot of thanks have to go to the PlayStation.blog and PSN Community Management team too! Thanks for playing all my missions and inspiring me to keep on creating!

We also want to include mentions for the runner ups in this very heated competition. PSN members jedicam10 (Karma Police), The_Golden_Hero (Children of Empire City), and codybean1 (Cole in Time) also made some stellar missions. These missions are also now easily accessible in-game under the Feature Missions category.

Congrats again to Seth9977! Your $1,000 in PSN Voucher Codes, limited-edition Cole statue, and signed copy of inFAMOUS 2 from the Sucker Punch team is on its way!

First up we have concept art from inFamous: Festival of Blood. Emilio Gandin, our Lead Environment Artist, wanted to point out some of these pieces of concept art. We wanted to add a new area to the title and explored the idea of doing catacombs below the Cathedral. The dark gothic, claustrophobic catacombs fit perfectly with the vampire lore. Once levels featuring catacombs were playable, we started to explore how Cole would navigate through them. We wanted a way for Cole to quickly move through the space and we came up with the backstory of the catacombs being used to smuggle arms thus giving us a reason to include the rails that Cole can grind on.

In the spirit of the season we also wanted to share our Holiday Cards. This year Senior Artist Edward Pun, Artist Mike Haney, and Lighting Artist Jason Connell teamed together to create this Santa inspired Cole, delivering gifts to the kids of New Marais.

From all of us here at Sucker Punch Productions, we hope you had a Happy Holidays and are looking forward to the New Year. We look forward to talking with you in 2012.

Later today look for our next blog post with some unreleased concept art from inFamous: Festival of Blood and our Sucker Punch Holiday Cards. Be sure to Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook. From all of us here at Sucker Punch have a Happy Holiday.

A couple of weeks ago we released an update for inFAMOUS 2 that included the 2D Cut Scene tool that was in packaged inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. This update allows you to create your own comic book-inspired cut scenes for your missions, giving you tons of control over the types of stories you tell. To guide you through the creation process, we created a new video tutorial explaining the basics of the 2D Cut Scene tool — you can watch it below.

If you are new to UGC, be sure to watch all of our tutorials which will explain all the basics on creating a great UGC mission.

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS 2 and inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

Soooo I kinda let the cat out of the bag in one of my replies to a recent Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time blog post, but I thought I would make it more official here: The Sly Collection is heading to PSN as a PlayStation Store download! Look for all three full games to be available for download in the US on Tuesday, November 29th.

The Sly series is such a PS2 classic; they are still as much fun to play today as the day they came out. And in their new, remastered form, all three titles feature Trophies, wide screen HD running at a smooth frame rate (60 frames per second!) and they are all playable in stereoscopic 3D. You can purchase the Sly Collection for $29.99 or you can buy the individual titles for $9.99 each. Speaking from personal experience, Once you play one, I know you will want to play them all!

So if you have not had a chance to play the new Sly Collection on Blu-ray, or you just want to revisit your favorite boss battle in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus or finally complete all those Master Thief Challenges in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, then check them out on PSN on the 29th. But no stealing!!

BTW: If you are way ahead of the curve and picked up The Sly Collection on Blu-ray, don’t feel left out — the PlayStation Move-enhanced minigames are still exclusive to that version, so enjoy!

There is no better way to get in some excellent thieving practice in advance of next year’s launch of the fourth installment in the series – Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (short of breaking and entering your local mob run private art collection). You can learn more about Sly’s next, new for the PS3 adventure in my recent blog post, which shows off Rioichi Cooper, Sly’s playable ancestor in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. Rioichi’s ninja mastey will make for some great sneaking techniques, so give him a look and let us know what you think!

The response so far to inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood has been amazing, and we’re thrilled people are enjoying Cole’s new horror-themed adventure. Just to add some digital chocolate to your Halloween haul we’re putting up an insider movie to show off the coolest powers and enemies you’ll go up against in inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood.

On top of that PlayStation Move is now part of the inFAMOUS world. You can play inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood with PS Move…and coming soon you will be able to play inFAMOUS 2 with Move as well via a free update. So check out the video and have a freaktastic Happy Halloween.

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

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!

inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood will be available on the PlayStation Store in just a couple days: Tuesday, October 25th in North America for $9.99, and $7.99 for PlayStation Plus members (you can even pre-order now on the PlayStation Store). Play it with the classic DualShock or try it out with PlayStation Move support!

Before you get your hands on the game, we had Animation Director Billy Harper and Marketing Director Ken Schramm pack their bags for a whirlwind three-day tour spanning 5,668 miles, two coasts, three cities, and over 20 interviews with press from North America and beyond. It was an amazing couple of days of sharing the latest adventure in the inFAMOUS universe.

We have been pretty quiet about Festival of Blood since we teased you with a clip revealing Bloody Mary at PAX. Since then we have been hard at work crafting this next adventure, adding in all the final details and finishing touches on this standalone game to make the perfect purchase right in time for Halloween. This press tour allowed us to pull the curtain back and give one big preview before the game comes out next week. Billy and Ken covered tons of the new features in Festival of Blood, some of which we will cover here.

With a totally new story in Festival of Blood, of course we had to give Cole a totally new set of powers. One power that fans have always wanted in an inFAMOUS game has been the ability to fly, and with Festival of Blood we thought it was time to give Cole the chance to spread his wings. Bat wings, that is, with a new power called Shadow Swarm. While Shadow Swarm allows you to experience New Marais in a whole new way, it does come at the expense of the innocent people walking around in the night as you must feed upon them to fuel your flight.

Speaking of Pyre Night, all of New Marais celebrates this hallowed night by shrouding the entire city with banners, fireworks, and pedestrians dressing up in the streets. The look of the Pyre Night comes from Sucker Punch’s City Team spending the summer dreaming up the spooky street party that features surprises around every corner. The abandoned subway lines of New Marais have been converted to macabre underground catacombs. Stepping into these dark corridors would leave anyone unsettled, even more so when you find out that Bloody Mary’s minions have been crawling around inside them for years.

User-generated content (UGC) is a key part of the inFAMOUS universe, as you can see from our Cole’s Missing Mission Contest (the grand prize winner receives a $1,000 PlayStation Store gift card!), and we haven’t forgotten this feature with Festival of Blood. Over the last couple of months we have been listening to your feedback and playing all the missions we can from the community and the one thing we have been seeing is the desire to create strong narrative missions. To help users tell their stories, we are happy to add the new 2D cutscene tool with Festival of Blood that allows you to create comic book-inspired cutscenes in your missions. You now can create intro sequences, provide key story details mid-mission, or end your mission with a bang. Along with the 2D cutscene Tool, Festival of Blood brings a whole new set of gory assets to the UGC universe and you can now design missions with as many fiends and harpies as you want.

If you haven’t had a chance, read some of the previews we have listed below:

• GameSpot
• Shacknews
• Kotaku
• Examiner
• Examiner
• Destructoid
• IGN
• GamesRadar
• G4TV
• San Jose Mercury News

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

Now, to get ready for the release of inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood on PlayStation Network, we’re announcing “Cole’s Missing Mission,” our very first mission design contest in the inFAMOUS universe.

Think you’re an expert in creating missions in inFAMOUS 2? Now you’ve got a chance to prove it. Using the UGC tools in inFAMOUS 2, we’re challenging you to come up with a Narrative based mission that tells a unique Cole story; meaning you’ll need to apply the Narrative tag to your mission for it to be considered. The winning mission will have all the right stuff: a great Cole-centric story, all while happening within one mission (so no multiple part missions, i.e. Part 2, Part 3, etc). The level must be created after the announcement date (today), and submitted before October 22nd October 25th.

To make the cut, the level must have a user rating of 4.5 stars and have at least 15 ratings. One grand-prize winner will receive a Good and Evil Cole statue from inFAMOUS 2 , their mission featured in-game as a highlighted mission, $1,000.00 in PlayStation Store credit in the form of a voucher (voucher will be emailed to the winner’s email address that is linked to their PSN ID), a signed copy of inFAMOUS 2 by the Sucker Punch team, and the winning mission will be highlighted on the PlayStation.Blog. Two runner-ups will each have their designed mission featured in-game as a highlighted mission, $100.00 in PlayStation Store credit in the form of a voucher , and the mission highlighted on the PlayStation.Blog.

Once you’ve created and published your mission with the ‘Narrative’ tag applied, you’ll need to do the following to submit it to the contest:

• Navigate to infamousthegame.com on the internet and sign into the website with your PSN ID.
• Navigate to Community –> UGC Missions. Scroll to the bottom and select “My Published” and identify the level you want to submit.
• Select and submit the level (“Entry”) by clicking on “Submit My Mission” button.
• Submit your entry or get more info by going to the official inFAMOUS website.

Once you’ve submitted, we’ll be reviewing all qualified entries starting October 25th, and announcing the winner on November 11th, 2011. You can read full contest rules here.

So make your “Cole’s Missing Mission”! Although it should have a narrative focus, don’t forget, it should be fun and fair to play as well. After all, inFAMOUS is known for super-hero action, so we can’t forget the fun stuff! You’ll want to have as many people review and play your mission before you submit it as well. If you need help, check out Sucker Punch’s UGC Tutorial Videos to get a grasp on the basics. Get ready for even more inFamous with the standalone PSN title inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood, coming to PSN October 25. Stayed tuned to the PlayStation.Blog for details on all things inFAMOUS!

For more details on Cole’s Missing Mission design challenge contest, see the Official Rules.