Hands On: inFamous 2

Sucker Punch held a media event earlier today in downtown Seattle for journalists to get their chance to play the game and experience how user-generated content is created and how it factors into the game. There’s plenty to discuss, so let’s get right into the three different styles of gameplay that I got to take a look at.

The first was a battle with a Godzilla-style creature as tall as the city buildings, which really showed off the massive level-scale in inFamous 2. This creature has the typical glowing weak points that needed to be shot as it vomited a never-ending supply of enemies. The little buggers were only a nuisance thanks to Cole’s new melee weapon, Gus the Amp. Gus does extreme damage to enemies and does it extremely stylistically.

The second was more of a “defeat all of the guys who get in your way of finding something” type mission. The only thing that I really got out of this mission was a sense of how powerful some of Cole’s new powers really are. For the purposes of giving us a good look at these new powers, Sucker Punch turned on unlimited manna and unlimited health, allowing us to destroy anything that we came into contact with. While it was a good thought, I wanted more of a sense for how the game was actually going to play, not how it would play under these set conditions. This mission ended with Cole taking on a creature equipped with elemental ice powers and ice armor. This was a surprisingly fun battle that I found really enjoyable, even if I did spend most of my time spamming him with Cole’s powers continually.

But let’s get to the meat of inFamous 2: user-generated content. This is something that hasn’t really been done before in an open-world game like inFamous. Let me start things off by saying that this isn’t just a basic level editor for moving objects around a map – this is a full on mission creator. It relies heavily on logic rather than just simply moving geometry around. Creating a mission requires stringing nodes together and each one has its own function attached to it. For example, a member of the Sucker Punch team went through with me and created a level in which two enemies kidnap a woman but before Cole can rescue her, he must collect 20 orbs. This isn’t just as simple as dropping two bad guys and twenty orbs into the world though. First, the enemies have to be programmed to be neutral towards both the woman and Cole and then the bad guys must give Cole a quest saying “Give us the monies”. When the quest is triggered, the orbs appear, and once they’re collected, the all functions of the mission are satisfied and the mission ends.

To make creating a series of commands more visually based than normal programming, each node must be linked by a power cord. This makes the often daunting task of making sure that everything is done correctly, much simpler to comprehend and see exactly where the problem is. These user-generated missions aren’t confined to certain areas of the map either; they can take place all over the city. Once a level is finished, players can upload them into the game’s world so that anyone else can play it, and it shows up during the singleplayer campaign. If you don’t want to see these missions, they can be turned on and off very easily so not to interfere with your solo-play.

One thing that I often worry about with online level creation is someone else seeing what I have made, editing one thing, and uploading it as their own creation. InFamous 2 doesn’t work like that. Players can “remix” levels, but any changes made to any level will display “Based on a level by alexrubens”, for example. That way everyone knows who put the original idea together.

You might be thinking “but what if I am not good at all of this logic stuff?”, that is where the remix feature becomes extremely useful. You can make a really cool level design, and then leave it out in the world for friends or strangers to add their own flavor to it. My friends can remix my levels and code everything so that it works just as was originally planned. Instead of individuals creating levels on their own, groups of people can now work together – albeit at different times – to build levels using their own creative strengths. And if you aren’t the kind of person who likes to start from scratch, there are templates available from every basic mission type from Kill ‘Em All to Collectables.

InFamous 2 is trying to do something different with user-generated content, making it almost as important as the main story itself. While often silly or just plain stupid, the sample user-generated missions that I was able to try really showed some promise. If these were any indication of what is to come, I will probably be spending most of my time playing user missions rather than actual story missions when inFamous 2 is released on Playstation 3 on June 7^th. And if you aren’t quite sure about it yourself, the inFamous 2 beta is launching later this week.