If you thought the original Infamous ran out of missions too quickly, developer Sucker Punch has you covered. Infamous 2 is going to let you create your own missions.
Today at GDC, Sony unveiled a brand new system in the sequel that allows players to place enemies, objects and more to create your very own challenges that pop up in New Marais. You can come up with stories, limit it to races, and even assign XP to completing a quest. A trailer listed a variety of missions (Defense, Escort, Search and Destroy, Survival, Shooting Gallery, Platforming, and Obstacle Course), but Sucker Punch said that the possibilities are endless and users can create whatever they want.
Once the creation is whipped up and uploaded, it's shared with the world. Players can select the criteria they want in their game -- say, the best shooter missions or the newest puzzle missions -- and those events auto-populate that the map. From there, players just walk up to the green cone of light, scope the vital info, and start the event. If a player hasn't cleared a story mission and a created mission uses an enemy or something from it, the player won't be able to access that created mission until he or she has unlocked that part of the story.
How does all this work? Well, if you played LittleBigPlanet 2, it's a lot like setting up a circuit board except the circuit board is the world. You choose to create a mission and can then fly to any part of the map. You place enemies and then start placing nodes -- little blue circles that govern the action of a level -- on the ground. You can set a node that cues enemies, connect that to another node that makes a car explode, and then connect that to a node that kicks on the music for a fight. Connected nodes get strung together with wires so you can see the relationship. If it sounds complicated, it's because it is, but once I saw someone tinkering, I understood how it all came together and think I'll be OK when I get my hands on the creator.
I played a couple quick missions, and it's easy to see how this could be awesome. One was a race through rings around the city, and the other was a goofy shooting gallery where I levitated propane tanks and hurled them at dancing enemies for points. These creations can be as serious or as silly as you want. For me, that means I'm going to break out the keyboard and work on some Trish/Cole fan fiction.
Like most user-created content these days, the creations are rated by the player when beat. This influences how many people see the creations. The "Famous" ranking means people are playing and enjoying your content -- your stuff will appear in other people's games if they're filtering for criteria your content contains. The "Sucker Punch Featured Content" means so many people like your stuff that the developer of the actual game is recommending people play it -- these will be the first created missions you see when you turn the game on.
If you're eager to get in on the creating action, a beta is scheduled for early April. Sucker Punch said details for the testing phase will go live March 14th on the official site. Although most of the beta creations will get erased before the game launches, the cream of the crop will be the first wave of Sucker Punch Featured Content.
