That desire, combined with the data that the majority of people who played Infamous 2 follow the good Karmic path, led Sucker Punch to turn Cole into a vampire, because it explores the dark side of being super-powered and struggling for control.
In Infamous’ Festival of Blood, You’ll Never Be Nice, But Might Be a Swarm of Bats
Huh. I would’ve interpreted that differently. Like, I would probably have noticed the fact that Sucker Punch’s writers have almost zero ability to convincingly write moral dilemmas.
Practically all of Cole’s choices are either: “Be a dick,” or “Don’t be a dick.” And usually there’s no clear underlying motivation for choosing one way or the other. The only really compelling reason for making evil decisions in Infamous is because you want to farm evil karma to unlock evil powers. But the evil powers aren’t really particularly more awesome, so why bother?
Compare this with Mass Effect: Mass Effect has nothing like a complex morality going for it, but it does consistently present you with situations where there are good reasons for making either “paragon” or “renegade” choices. After I finished ME2, I immediately started a new game to explore the consequences of different choices, but in neither play-through did I just farm good or evil karma. I was invariably sucked into the role-playing aspect of it, i.e., thinking through how my “good” Shepard and my “bad” Shepard would react to various situations.
(I should admit, there is one compelling reason to play Infamous as an evil Cole: It is legitimately fun to wander around the city just throwing cars at civilians and blowing shit up. It’s only fun for a half hour or so, though.)
