Open worlds can be hard to develop. One does not simply create a world and inject life into it at the drop of a hat. Many of an open-world game's best attributes are emergent, and its up to the developer to tap into the correct beats to make these attributes shine. Such is the case in Sucker Punch's upcoming game, Infamous: Second Son.

"We have a term inside the studio called ‘the reality bubble’," Sucker Punch's Nate Fox explained, "you don’t want to have the game feel like when Delsin leaves the block, everything goes away. So we actually have things going on when Delsin leaves the block. We have a lot of pedestrians interacting with each other in ways that fill out their attitudes about what’s going on in the city."

There are numerous actions by NPCs that players will run into while traversing Seattle. "You will see people either making protests against bioterrorists or in the wake of the city being liberated, some crime will pop up. So you might see drug dealers dealing to pedestrians, which has nothing to do with you other than the fact that it’s you causing the chaos," Mr. Fox explained, "but it’s going on all around you. Making things feel less comic-booky. Moving away from fictional Empire City to Seattle and tapping into prevailing concerns about the growing sense of living in a surveillance state."

Infamous: Second Son is being developed by Sucker Punch Productions and will be published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4 on March 21st, 2014.