inFamous developer Sucker Punch Productions says it was a rough ride figuring out the PlayStation 3 architecture but the payoff was worth it because the Xbox 360 just doesn’t have the power to handle such complex games.
inFamous, an open-world sandbox game in which the hero finds himself gifted with unique powers following a devastating explosion in Empire City, was well-received following its launch in May 2009. The development process was a bumpy one at times, according to Sucker Punch Development Director Chris Zimmerman, but he said the lessons learned by the studio through its struggles with the PS3 will most definitely be reflected in the sequel.
“We made some really dumb decisions in [inFamous], but we’ve managed to fix them,” he said in an interview with Play Magazine. “We had to tear a whole bunch of stuff up and put it back together. In technical terms the biggest thing that we’ve done is migrate a much larger part of our code to run on the SPUs. The PS3 has this elaborate architecture where there’s a whole bunch of different places you can have your code run and we had it all running in the slow part.”
The payoff for slogging through the PS3 learning curve, Zimmerman added, is that it can handle games other platforms can’t. “If you look at games like Uncharted 2, that’s a game that you actually can’t do on Xbox no matter how clever you are, there’s just more processing power on the PS3,” he said. “inFamous 2 is going to be the same way. You’ll look at it and see that there’s no way we could have done this game on 360.”
inFamous 2 is currently targeted for release sometime in 2011.
