When you have a lot of powers how do you keep from getting selection of them overcomplicated? Because you want people to be able to use everything, but you don't want to take them out of the action. So what do you do there?

NF: We let you choose how you want to map the controller to your play style. So you have a lot of powers that are similar to one another, and then you can outfit different buttons with different powers. And mentally you know, "This button does this kind of thing" and "this button does this kind of thing," but those kinds of things are different.

So for instance like your basic lightning bolt -- throwing a lightning bolt at somebody -- there are a lot of different varieties of throwing lightning bolts at people, and you can choose what kind you want to be mapped to that button.

And then depending on the situation, you have a quick change menu, so that you remap it very fast. But generally players kind of find out the sort of powers they like. I'm a coward and I hang back a lot. Maybe you're a badass?

No. But for the sake of argument go ahead.

NF: So, between two cowards, there are some powers that are really good at distance combat, and so you and I will probably have a very similar load out of what our controls look like.

But because all of the lightning bolts are on the same button, whenever you hit the button you know you're going to get a very reliable kind of power that is that lightning bolt -- but just with very different parameters.

So in that way it doesn't bake your noodle, it's just about not wanting to overload players with complexity. So people like ourselves will eventually achieve the long distance set, and probably stick there, but you know, there's a universe of players. Some people like to stay really far back, and then close, and then really mix it up. Some people like to move quickly, and that's what they really care about. Some people like to tank. We just want to make the game that makes everybody happy, right? That's the goal: making entertainment.

When it comes to user generated content, a lot of people have talked about how you know, with multiplayer being so important and social gaming, and things, the driven single player narrative is going to go away; that's the kind of fear that people have. I don't think it'll happen, but is this your solution to that kind of thing? Rather than going pure multiplayer, to go deeper into single?

NF: Infamous 2 is by far and away the most cinematic game we've ever gone before. We've got totally integrated mocap cutscenes where we try to harness the nuance of what the actor brought to the moment, where we mic them while they were up there, to try and get these very real performances. So it is in no way a diminished story at all, in fact it's the best we've ever done; I'm really proud of it.

The UGC, to me, what it does, is it leverages what we kind of already do when we make the game. It's an open world environment where we place things like turrets and enemies and script their behaviors, and it actually translates really well into letting people make what they want.

When we got done with Infamous 1, we were looking around at what we could give people so that they would say, "Oh wow, Infamous 2 is really different!" You know, we saw this little game, maybe you've heard of it, called LittleBigPlanet. We thought, "Man that is awesome smart." And a lot of the core concepts in LittleBigPlanet actually work inside of our game; the big difference is that our game is kind of like pre-packaged looking good, right? Like the city's made; you can climb on all of it! And if players want to put things down where they want or write little stories inside of that city, awesome!

You walk into it and you know the production values are actually pretty high. So if it doesn't matter what UGC mission you walk into, it's going to kind of be fun -- because it's infectious fun to whack the guy in the face with your amp weapon; you kind of can't go wrong. So that's why it seemed like a good idea. And on top of that -- and this is the killer -- I'm a very lazy person. I don't know about you.

Yes!

NF: So we are bonded in both being cowards and lazy.

That's right! [laughs]

NF: We download UGC missions and we put the mission starts in the world so that you get done playing a mainline narrative mission and you see this UGC mission just there. You don't have to go through any database to get it; you don't have to go online, it's just there.

You just walk in and you play it, and if you don't like it you can leave, but you probably will like it because we're going to post the best of the best. And it's effortless. So the cost of investment of going into it is extremely low, so you just have to walk into the mission start. And then you don't even know what you're going to get, it's like unwrapping a present.