Sucker Punch Productions began to develop Second Son while the PlayStation 4 was still being designed.[28] Having finished work on
Infamous: Festival of Blood, they began to plan a new entry in the
Infamousseries[29] under the working title Infamous 3.
[30] As early as
2010, they discussed with
Sony their desire to
bring Infamous to a new PlayStation platform.
[29]
Sucker Punch were
in close connection with the PS4's lead system architect Mark Cerny, who visited the studio several times. They gave Cerny feedback about
how much power a new PlayStation system would require to render their ideal open world, how fast it would be capable of doing so and to what degree of texture detail. "We had some experience there that was useful for that team when they were planning some aspects of the hardware design", producer Brian Fleming explained.
[30] He found that during the PS4's development,
there was a great level of interactivity between the system's designers and game developers such as Sucker Punch.
[29]
Sucker Punch made suggested improvements they would like to see for the
DualShock 4 gamepad. Second Son's designer Jaime Griesemer
traveled to Sony's headquarters in Japan to discuss such improvements. The developers found they were able to adopt the DualShock 4's touchpad into Second Son's gameplay (for example, players emulate the in-game
fingerprint scanner using the DualShock 4 touchpad).
[29]
The game was envisioned to take full advantage of the hardware, without the imposition of porting to older platforms like the PlayStation 3. The hardware let developers improve the
particle system that lights Delsin's face up while he draws neon power from billboards
[28] and add detailed reflections to the game world.
[31] The increased memory bandwidth let the team render characters with higher fidelity.
[29] They found the PS4's simplified architecture so easy to work with that they were able to reach very high graphical quality even though the hardware was new.
[32]
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