Why inFamous got a new Cole (and why he was changed back)

You know, we never thought that our joke about New Orleans' heat (well, fake New Orleans) would hold much water in the reasoning behind Cole's new, jacket-less look in inFamous 2, but it turns out that's a big part of the logic. "New Marais is a city in the south: it's hot, it's humid, there's no way he can keep his leather jacket on, not for 10 minutes. So one of the decisions was to remove the jacket and put him in a T-shirt," Sucker Punch art director Mathias Lorenz said in a recent interview. Another factor, Lorenz says, was the addition of more complex parkour to inFamous 2. "I wanted to show off his body more rather than have his jacket hide his muscles," Lorenz explained.

Alongside the fresh moves, Sucker Punch enlisted the help of a new voice actor who could also do motion capture work for the sequel's 3D cutscenes. Thusly, to make the voiceover work appear more natural, the new look also reflected that voice actor's real-life looks. As we already heard, however, the decision after E3 was to revert Cole almost entirely back to his original, messenger bag-toting form. But why? "When we revealed Cole at E3 2010, we were taken aback by the uproar of fan support for the original Cole," Lorenz says. Though the folks at Sucker Punch weren't expecting such a backlash, "we listened to our fans and went back and took the best of everything to end up with the design we have settled on now." And there you have it -- don't go asking for the jacket to come back, though. It's simply too hot.