Sucker Punch Aim To Get inFamous 2 To Look As Beautiful As Uncharted.

Empire City was a mess of jaggy lines, grubby textures and foggy city-scapes. In many ways, the game was supposed to look like that. inFamous' setting was dark and foreboding. But also, inFamous lacked that next-level beauty that so many PlayStation 3 exclusives provide these days. Sucker Punch want to change that with inFamous 2, and Naughty Dogs' stunning Uncharted 2 is their benchmark.

"We're getting a lot closer to it - we certainly are - and we've got a ways to go," Sucker Punch's development director Chris Zimmerman told VideoGamer.com.

"Clearly they are the inspiration for us. And not just in terms of the visuals, but all the things they did that made that game so great. We're working hard to get as close as we can to that goal, and I think we're going to get pretty close. People will look at it and I think that they'll say, look, you know this is in the same ball park."

According to numerous hands-on impressions with the game from E3, Sucker Punch are on the right path. Zimmerman puts that down to PS3 exclusivity.

"The thing that we've got going for us, like the Uncharted guys, we're Sony only. All we do is games for the PS3, which means that the engine that we're building can be completely tuned and targeted at the PS3 and at the things the PS3 does well.

"We can commit to doing all our systems in a very PS3 specific way. We can write SPU code for everything. As a result, we're able to do more. We're able to take more advantage of the hardware, because it's the only system we have to worry about. Just like Uncharted, we're able to do things that we would never be able to do if we were doing a cross-platform game.

"For instance, we moved most of our lighting on the SPUs for this game. So, casting light on the objects was all dynamic for us - completely dynamically lit. We did it on the graphics card, which was the traditional place to do it before. But we could move it to the SPUs, and so we did. And as a result we're able to do more stuff with the graphics chip. We can put more triangles on screen. We can have more detail. We can have more characters. We can have more everything. We were able to do that only because we knew we were going to be doing a PS3 game, and that's all we were going to be worrying about."

If Sucker Punch can get anywhere near Uncharted 2 with inFamous 2, it could be the best looking open-world game ever made.