Infamous: Second Son’s Technology and Surprising Origins

With the release of Infamous: Second Son just over a week away, it’s no surprise that more and more details are coming out. This time, we don’t have any new gameplay details, but still a lot of interesting bits of information.

Early today, some game footage was leaked that contained a scene from the E3 2013 trailer. The scene looked significantly different, and when a series of comparison shots were revealed, some fans began to insist there was a downgrade in the game’s graphics. Tech Art Lead Jason Connell responded to the rumors by saying there is no downgrade in quality. The differences in that scene are because of the lighting, as they set it in the evening for the final product, while the original trailer showed it in the daylight.

He went on to share a lot of details about the lighting effects in Second Son. At night, the city skies will mimic the real effect known as “light pollution,” where “the clouds turn an average light color from the city below.” Although there is no dynamic time system, the time will change as the player progresses with the story, through eight different times of day. The brightness will vary according to the time of day, just as it does in real life. He also praised the PS4’s power for allowing them to do so many great things, such as allowing for “more lights, more reflections, more particles, [and] lights in particles.”

He’s not the only one who mentioned the particle effects, either. Sucker Punch’s co-founder, Chris Zimmerman, said that with the PS4, “we can have particle systems with tens of thousands of particles without any trouble, and have up to a hundred or two thousand particles on screen at once in effects-heavy shots.” These particle effects are what allow for the beautiful powers we’ve seen so far in Second Son’s trailers.

We’ll leave you with one final, bizarre piece of information, which Zimmerman shared with GameSpot. The Infamous series was originally planned as “Animal Crossing, but you were a super hero.” At one point, they imagined a section where you confronted “a gang of purple gorillas who were stealing balloons.”

We aren’t quite sure how Sucker Punch went from purple gorillas to the current incarnation of the Infamous series, but the previous games and everything we’ve seen about Second Son makes us glad it happened!