Infamous: Second Son is set to launch next week, marking one of the first big exclusives for the freshly launched PlayStation 4. It's also a departure from prior Infamous games, featuring a new protagonist who can absorb the powers of other super-beings. According to Sucker Punch, this is a direct response to decisions from Infamous 2 that they felt got too complex.

"One of the early decisions was that we were going to make a game where you have multiple power sets," studio cofounder Brian Fleming said on the PlayStation.Blog. "That was an important decision to us, as we felt that a single power set--for inFAMOUS 2, in particular--got overly sophisticated and more difficult to actually play. It just made it a little bit too complex for some players. So we wanted to simplify the controller layout. One way to do that was to have layered power sets, and that was a very specific, early design decision."

So far, we only know about smoke and neon powers, but Fleming signaled that others are being saved for when the game launches, so players can still be surprised.

Similarly, he said, the new protagonist Deslin Rowe came directly out of its decision to set the game in the studio's hometown of Seattle. The area is home to Native American reservations, which inspired the identity of this new hero. The two ideas worked in tandem and informed each other to produce the final concept. "You take those two things and start working on them in parallel, and eventually they became Second Son."