[In this extensive interview Nate Fox, game director for Sucker Punch's <I>Infamous 2</i>, discusses the process the team went through in implementing improvements and changes to its superhero open world game -- and why location matters.]

Released back in 2009, the original Infamous followed the story of an everyday man turned superhero, with a huge emphasis on building up your powers and then deciding to either save the world or cause havoc and destruction. With the impending release of sequel Infamous 2, developer Sucker Punch is looking to take the superhero elements just that little bit further this time around.

In this interview, Gamasutra talks to Sucker Punch's Nate Fox about what we can expect of the second title, with discussion regarding Arkham Asylum combat influences and the use of hexes to build the game world quickly in the original game.

Talk also turns to the karma system implemented in the first release, and how Infamous 2 will be taking a much broader view on the effects of good vs evil, giving players the feeling of being a real superhero or villain.

It seems like you're really going a lot further with the superhero thing. With the last game when you were kind of trying to find the fun it was like, "Oh wait, he's kind of like a superhero," and that's what people seem to resonate with. It looks like that's happening a lot more, is that an intentional push?

Nate Fox: Well, actually we're really intense on making sure that Cole MacGrath is an everyman, he's still this messenger guy who got superpowers who lives in the real world. It's just that the real world now has become sort of polluted with superpower things, and people freak out about it -- just like they would in everyday life.

But to make a game that's fun as possible I want to make sure that gamers have a lot of really kick-ass toys to play with and different abilities. And so when we went from Infamous 1 to Infamous 2, we took all the best abilities from the first game and then we added more, so there's just a real wealth of them.

Sort of makes him look more like a superhero, though. I mean he may say everyman things, but now he has more powers than the previous dude ever did.

NF: Who's going to complain about having more powers, right? I mean… it's kind of what you go to games for, right? I mean a lot of games are power fantasies, and so we just keep giving you more and more and more powers, all of which you can own and master.

In the postmortem, you talked about how players kept wanting to use melee so you've improved it here. Is there any Arkham Asylum influence on that?

NF: Oh dude, totally. Arkham Asylum is awesome. They present that kind of like "I'm going to use the knuckles on my fist to shatter your jaw bones," -- they present it in such a way that you feel the impact and makes you feel really strong as you're playing. It's impossible not to look at that game and think, "Oh, they're getting it right; these guys have figured it out."

Our system, of course, has to fit in with all those range powers, so I mean, that's the real difference in my mind -- it's that we wanted to very much streamline it so you can effortlessly go from grinding on a high voltage line, jumping off it, floating through air, blasting a guy in the face, landing next to his buddy and crushing his skull. These things should all happen in the space of like four seconds, and look good.

And one of the things about Arkham was the flow of the combat. It was extremely fluid, and it looked to me like that was what you were trying to do there with moving between targets and things like that.

NF: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we don't talk about a lot, but I think is really fundamental, is animation improvement. I mean the flow of the sense of, muscularity almost, because things have weight behind them, and impact, and time dilatation. It all adds up to make you feel really strong.

Yeah, animation's a particularly interesting thing. I was talking to the Street Fighter IV dudes, and you've got to weigh the importance between completing a move fluidly, animation-wise, and getting it as quickly as you're pressing a button. There's that kind of push-pull there where you want the player to feel strong, but you don't want the animations to drive the gameplay.

NF: It's totally right. In traditional animation, it's all about anticipation, but in video games it's all about the follow-through. Because you can't have any anticipation because, when you hit the button, that means punch, man, lickety split. So yeah, I feel for them. They must have it times seven, right? Their game moves at the speed of thought! "Blanka must jump now!" and "Swipe face now!" And look awesome while doing it.