Sucker Punch collaborated with Media Molecule on community ideas.
During the week of the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Infamous 2 developer Sucker Punch unveiled its top-secret mission creator mode. Players are given all the tools to create and share their own missions that can be accessed from within the game by other players online.
The hope is there will be, quite literally, an endless amount of new missions available to the players, with the community deciding which creations are the best of the best.
"We've been kicking around the idea for a long time, even before we even begun working on the first Infamous," Chris Zimmerman, Development Director at Sucker Punch, told IGN. "We started talking about it seriously while we were wrapping up Infamous 1. We were talking about what we were going to do in Infamous 2 to really differentiate it."
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Zimmer explained the addition of a mission creator mode wasn't something fans from the first Infamous were clamoring for, mainly because the idea of user-generated content is still very new.
"Since it's such a different kind of idea, this isn't something where people have seen it in other games and they're like, 'Oh, I wish we had this in Infamous.' It's something really new and as a result it's not what people ask for," he said. "We were encouraged by the wild success of LittleBigPlanet. Even though it's a different genre and a completely different kind of game, it showed there was this thirst that people had for having this creation/sharing experience. We thought the same desires would be present for Infamous players, too."
Given this new focus on community for user-created missions, Zimmerman said the team had been collaborating with Media Molecule, creators of LittleBigPlanet, to help understand and integrate community functionality. "We've been talking to them, especially about managing the community and understanding how people think about it and how to share," he said. "They've been very helpful."
The beta for Infamous 2's mission creator kicks off next month on April 12. Fans can head over to the official website to sign up for a chance to win a spot. Beta sign ups close on March 21. Sucker Punch will pick the best beta missions to be spotlighted in the game when it ships this June.
"It's frightening, it's terrifying," Zimmerman joked when asked about doing a beta test. "It's not only our first beta but also our first online experience as well. It's like jumping off the high board, it's a long ways down to the water but you got to jump."
Sucker Punch teased the new mission creator mode on the developer's Facebook page days before its reveal. Zimmerman said they received over 200 guesses, none of which were correct. One of the more popular guesses a multiplayer mode, which Zimmerman says Super Punch had discussions early on to include.
"We were more excited about doing [user-generated content]," he explained. "Clearly [multiplayer] came up, but we thought that given what we've built and what we thought we could do, we could provide something that was cooler and way more fun for the people that loved Infamous."
Zimmerman concluded by saying he thinks user-generated content, and more specifically social interactions, will play a major role in gaming going forward, as the industry has already started to see with LittleBigPlanet, Spore, and Minecraft.
"I don't think it's right for all games, but it's what people are used to these days," he explained. "That's the thing that's changed in the last five years is expecting this online social experience to be part of your life. I have teenage daughters and they're never out of their social experience, they're always dialed into what's going on. It would be surprising if people didn't want that in their games as well.
"Things like Facebook and Twitter, those experiences are all about sharing. That's what they are. Twitter is just sharing, that's all it is. If people expect that out of their experience, they're going to expect it out of their games as well," Zimmerman added. "I think it's going to be surfacing differently in different kinds of games.
"There will be people that do the sorts of things we're doing, especially if the [mission creator] is a success, and there will be people who do different things that think sharing is not about building new things, but sharing reactions. It's hard to predict."
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