PS3 exclusivity means Sucker Punch can do 'more of everything'.
Uncharted 2's visuals were stunning - so stunning, in fact, that you'd think it would be impossible for a developer to create an open world game that matched Naughty Dog's effort.
But that's exactly what fellow PS3-exclusive developer Sucker Punch is aiming for with inFamous 2.
Indeed the game, which sees super-powered Cole McGrath parkour his way around the fictional city of New Marais, is being influenced by Naughty Dog's spiffing blockbuster.
"We're getting a lot closer to it - we certainly are - and we've got a ways to go," Sucker Punch development director Chris Zimmerman told VideoGamer.com at E310 last week.
"Clearly they are the inspiration for us. And not just in terms of the visuals, but all the things they did that made that game so great. We're working hard to get as close as we can to that goal, and I think we're going to get pretty close. People will look at it and I think that they'll say, look, you know this is in the same ball park."
We got a chance to go hands-on with inFamous 2 during a behind-closed doors presentation at the show, and we can confirm that it indeed does look great for an open world game - and a marked improvement on the two million-selling original.
Zimmerman puts the jump in quality of presentation down to Sucker Punch being a PS3-exclusive developer.
"The thing that we've got going for us, like the Uncharted guys, we're Sony only. All we do is games for the PS3, which means that the engine that we're building can be completely tuned and targeted at the PS3 and at the things the PS3 does well.
"We can commit to doing all our systems in a very PS3 specific way. We can write SPU code for everything. As a result, we're able to do more. We're able to take more advantage of the hardware, because it's the only system we have to worry about. Just like Uncharted, we're able to do things that we would never be able to do if we were doing a cross-platform game.
"For instance, we moved most of our lighting on the SPUs for this game. So, casting light on the objects was all dynamic for us - completely dynamically lit. We did it on the graphics card, which was the traditional place to do it before. But we could move it to the SPUs, and so we did. And as a result we're able to do more stuff with the graphics chip. We can put more triangles on screen. We can have more detail. We can have more characters. We can have more everything. We were able to do that only because we knew we were going to be doing a PS3 game, and that's all we were going to be worrying about."
Zimmerman isn't the only one at Sucker Punch who reckons the PS3 is great. Co-founder Brian Fleming described the console's SPUs as "monsters" in an interview with VideoGamer.com from E310.
Fingers crossed inFamous 2 ends up looking the business. The game's out next year.
