I think the whole retcon behind Infamous Second Son would have been better received If either Delsin and the other conduits weren’t conduits at all but some other type of enhanced humans with powers or a new type of conduits that where somehow given a genetically modified version of the conduit gene that makes them immune to the RFI a couple of years after Infamous 2
Just make it so the plague is gone but conduits still exist because everyone that was in remission had kids and the kids have a chance to have powers, they need to make an infamous 4 where delving teams up with Cole and Cole is brought back by delsin through conduit magic powers etc etc and they team up to defeat the new big bad, doop headquarters lol
There are actually a few ways we could explain it, but in my eyes you need to modify a bunch of things in SS. Perhaps the government wanted to somehow recreate the Conduits for power or something, ya know for Super Soldiers. Maybe the Ray Field radiation or even just the Beast himself created a subset Conduits that can function without Ray Field energy, making them immune to the RFI. Possibly the RFI just worked like FUCKING THANOS and pulled an Eren Jaeger by wiping out MOST of the Conduits! We don't know, and at this point I don't get paid to care. So take your pick.
The game offers through Cole Legacy dlc what some experts in verse believe happened. One being those that didn't have much radiation emitted from them were the ones that survived and became second gen conduits.
I have two theories and a change. Theory 1: the ray sphere although it was supposed to get rid of conduits it could’ve been restored and reversed engineered to create new conduits thus creating this situation. Theory 2: this could be a different continuity that has very similar events occur from the previous games however some tweaks and changes may have happened to make this continuity happen. Time travel is possible, which would mean someone made a change to the timeline. Change: my change for this mainly would been to not only acknowledge what one of the two theories but overall just write the Rowe brothers storyline a little better. Everything else will be enhanced because of this one story thread.
I view Second Son as an alternate timeline to the end on Infamous 2 in where instead of the RFI killing all conduits it only killed the conduits in New Marais and unlocked the Conduit Gene in dormant conduits (like Fetch and Eugene). This would makes sense to the story and also explain why Delson didn't know he was a conduit due to never touching another one until the events of the game.
@@ironwraith852 I started my comment with "as a alternate timeline" for that very reason. In an alternate timeline slight changes could happen like in DC or Marvel comics this way we are able to accept the ending in 2 while also having a fun what if in Second Son
I think it's clear Sucker Punch themselves intended for it to be canon, because there was even the pre order bonus, Cole's Legacy, where Zeke plays a major role, interacting with Delsin, (albeit just over the phone). And despite it's flaws that it does have, I do also consider it to be canon.
There was an episode of What Happened where it was revealed that the devs actually wanted a game full of conduits. They only committed to the good ending because so many players went for that ending over the evil ending
@@aurthurpendragon1015 It's honestly really nice of them to consider the player's choice. Most devs would have just gone along with their original vision instead of trying to go a different way.
There is a Dead Drop in inFamous 2 between John and Wolfe called Bad Omen that pretty much confirms that Kessler knew John was The Beast. The Dead Drop goes: John: “I was carrying the Ray Sphere out of the lab when Kessler stopped me. It was... strange. He said that I had an important destiny, that I'd accomplish great things.” Wolfe: “I used to be a skeptic, but many of his predictions actually do come true.” John: “I don't know... the way he looked at me... Made me want him to be wrong.” My head canon is that Kessler knew John was The Beast and in Kessler’s timeline the plague didn’t exist and The Beast was a monster hellbent on destroying all life and the plague was a consequence of Kessler rushing production of the Ray Sphere. Like he didn’t care about the side effects as long as it was able to make Cole a conduit without killing him.
@@supsup1 maybe it did for John in Kesslers timeline. Think about it, maybe John powers warped his mind because he had to keep them because he didn’t have Cole to transfer his powers to like he did in the Evil ending. John said he was tired of killing but if Evil Cole wasn’t around to give his powers to he had no choice but to continue to make new conduits on his own until the power corrupted him.
Who knows, maybe Kesslers plan was for Cole to become the Beast and kill him. But since someone else was affected by Ray Sphere, in this case John, Kessler left the future in Cole's hands. One think we do not know is who was the Beast in Kessler timeline. Was it John or someone from the First Sons...
@@supsup1 Uhm... Now that I think on that quote. What if the Beast in Kesslers timeline was another person, but now in this new timeline he needed someone to be the beast to once and for all erradicate all the conduints, so he chose John as a vessel for the Beast. Maybe that would make sense.
@@supsup1 I think it's better to leave Cole/Kessler behind. Cole is Dead so is Kessler. And well, now we have Delsin which is a big book of oportunities.
When the game first came out I was honestly surprised by just how much technology has improved in the Infamous universe in just 7 years until I remembered the First Sons
even if (for example) most of the cars portrayed (in-game. Remember, the differences) during in IF02's new marais city's streets, roads, etc were like shown to be out of date, let's just say: that the more modern era of Today's tech is still the same back in during the events of IF01's to IF02's.
[EDIT]: wait, define again by what you mean by your review in this?.... you mean like....super Human powers-birthing methods like the Ray Spheres, to the RFI, to Joseph B's Conduit power transfering device, to even Cole's and Zeke's Conduit-held melee weapon: the Amp, etc? back within that reality of InFamous' version of Humanity which is very much (at least in public) supposed to be not that different than our current era when it comes to technology and all of that. is that what you mean by 'surprised by how advanced' they are?
I heard originally there was supposed to be a sequel to the Infamous 2 bad ending which was supposed to be canon but I don’t know if this sequel was what Second Son was originally supposed to be. Imagine playing as a different version of Delsin fighting a much more powerful version of Evil Cole who would be a new Beast
I want delsin and Cole to team up for the 4th gam,, delsin gets like revive magic conduit something and revives Cole, they team up and maybe even go back in time, maybe save that for infamous 5
Cole died, and they went with the hero canon of the ending, and Foxx the director/creator stated Cole died and this is canonical and Delsin is his successor.
The inital plan for the third game was to follow the evil ending but they saw that more players picked the good ending by a wide margin. And didn’t want to canonize an ending only a small amount of players got
I never understood is why they never addressed this plot hole which puts this entire game's existence into question after 8 years. They could have done so in comics, books, interviews, or any other media. I also understand the question as to whether or not the game is canon as it doesn't address the most important world event of the previous game.
@@squallthegriever Yet neither of those are so significant issues that they prevent the story from making sense about the rest of the series. Sure they are plot holes that can be filled in by the player but they don't affect the story so much that it brings into question whether or not they could have happened. Especially since Kessler's time travel power was a one-time trip deal born out of desperation. As for his technology, we know the First Sons used it and were wiped out in Infamous 1. Neither plot hole is that much of a concern since most of their problems are self contained.
@@squallthegriever They DID address how Kessler time travelled. The short answer is that his powers had matured with age to the point of him learning how to time travel.
inFAMOUS 2 good ending: “The RFI wiped out every single conduit on earth. Activated or not.” Sucker Punch: “No it didn’t.” Players: “How didn’t it?” Sucker Punch: “idk”
Infamous second son holds a special place in my heart. First game I’ve ever bought with my own money on a system I bought. First game I’ve ever 100%, my cousin and I bonded over playing though the good/evil side and it brought me into the infamous universe. I do get where you’re coming from as it is a slap in the face to older fans.
I always saw InFamous Second Son as more of an elseworld scenario and not a legitimate sequel to the second game. In any other light, it kind of makes Second Son look worse since InFamous 2 felt like a perfect bookend to the series.
They did say they wanted to make the evil ending cannon, but changed their minds due most players played as the hero. I always thought the evil ending was better and more heart wrenching. If Infamous 3 had become a thing I believe it would end with Delsin showing Cole the monster he has become and Cole reevaluate his humanity. Could have been epic, if there is ever a Ghost of Tsushima sequel I hope we get the ending where Jin left his uncle alive and fully committing to the identity of the Ghost.
I always assumed Infamous Second Son was a sequel to Infamous, not Infamous 2 if that makes sense. It ignores so much of Infamous 2, including it's ending, that it didn't happen, so it's a Second infamous 2, a Second Son of Infamous, rather than Infamous 3
I think the reason why there are still conduits alive is because of Zeke taking Cole's amp weapon and hitting the rfi out of Cole's hand and breaking apart of it caused it to malfunction and it ended up doing something else that it was not supposed to do activate conduits gene and powers and leaving some conduits alive and yes it did what it was supposed to do kill conduits and curing the plague but yet again do to Zeke breaking it not fixing it good enough it caused a malfunction and it ended up doing something else so by the end of the day Zeke is ultimately responsible for why there are still conduits alive around a normal human man is the reason why there are still superhumans alive and well in the world
I remember reading somewhere that apparently Sucker Punch were going to make the Evil ending of Infamous 2 canon. But only changed it because the vast majority of players picked the good ending. I have no clue why they thought it would be a good idea to ditch one likely good storyline for one with no foundation to build off of. Second Son ended up being the equilivent of trying to build a skyscrapper on air, with the same consequences.
I wanna know what was going through their minds when they did that. Like what about the people who saw the evil ending first, or those who got both endings? Do they not matter lmao?
I was thinking the same thing. Also, if it took place concurrently to Infamous 2, where the end of SS is right before the ending of 2 (a few days-month) and if you get the bad ending where Delsin twkes over Seattle...short reign.
@@donschoenly6018 I'm a month late to this reply, but imagine how funny it'd be seeing evil Delsin put in all that work to reign over Seattle, just to get nuked by the RFI less than a month later lol.
There actually is an explanation to this, though it's a throw away line in the Cole's Legacy DLC. They basically said something along the lines of the plague still existing, but it's turning people into conduits instead of killing them. Kinda stupid that you need a pre-order DLC that became available after 8 years of the game being out.
I’m surprised you didn’t find Nate Fox’s old quote around the time SS was either announced or at E3. When asked about how it would continue after Infamous 2, he confirmed that it would take place after the Good Ending and noted how he actually wrote Infamous 2 to continue after the Evil Ending, with tons of new conduits allowing for more variety or something like that. They switched gears when they saw the PSN Trophy stats and discovered that more players finished the Good Ending over the Evil one I don’t know the exact time and place he said it, but if I had to guess, I’d assume it would be IGN’s E3 2013 coverage of Infamous SS. I used to watch IGN the most out of all the major gaming publications back in the day, and somewhere along the way I remember hearing Nate Fox talk about Infamous 2’s ending and how they wanted to continue the Evil one but saw that the Good one was more popular according to PSN Trophies
Personally if we ever get a new inFamous game, I hope it follows up on the second game's evil ending where Cole becomes the Beast and starts activating conduits the world over. It's the most natural way to continue the existence of conduits without a huge retcon or multi-generation timeskip. Plus they were initially going to have the evil ending be their canon going into second son, so I wouldn't mind seeing how that would've been handled had the devs not based their creative choice on trophy data. They could even bring Delsin back as the main character, having him be a conduit that Cole activated, but at the cost of his tribe, giving Delsin motive to want to stop Cole
Evil Cole a coward taking the easy way out? That’s one way to see it but I don’t think that’s fair to his character and the circumstances leading to his decision to join the beast. The guy went through a ton of shit only to find out at the last minute that he needed to sacrifice himself to save humanity. That’s not an easy choice to make, good Cole or evil Cole. There’s also the fact that Wolfe never told him that the RFI would kill him despite knowing very well that it could (Kuo says as much herself after the RFI fails to activate the first time) and he instead leads Cole to believe he can use it as a weapon to take the beast's powers away when he first meets Cole. Finally, there’s the issue of the RFI failing to fire off when it was supposed to. Everybody was unsure if it would cure the plague like they were told to believe so getting it to work would be a massive gamble that could very well blow up in their faces. John’s method of dealing with the plague, though costly, was proven to work and Cole choosing to help him was the only logical choice he could’ve made. P.S. I still want a sequel that follows the evil ending.
I always took it as the Rayfield inhibitor, despite claims otherwise, DIDN'T kill everyone with the Conduit Gene just the vast majority of them. Kinda like how pesticides aren't 100% effective. No matter how effective they are, some survive anyway due to a resistance said pesticides... a resistance that often takes the form of a mutation. In the case of the Ray Field Inhibitor, the same thing happened. It seemingly killed all conduits, but didn't. The Survivors (Conduit or no) carried a mutation rendering them resistant the Ray Field Inhibitor's effects. Meanwhile in survivors with the unactivated gene carried a mutation of the conduit gene that lowered the activation threshold so there was the need of a catastrophic event to activate them. Hence no more plague, a relative few conduits survived, and Conduits activating via exposure to relatively minor amounts of Ray Field radiation/contact with activated conduits.
Actually for one point I do believe Kessler implies he just awakened his powers naturally throughout his life, but the Ray sphere is a result of his experimentation.
Infanous 2 is such a good game that the best part of the game is the cutscene where cole and zeke just sit down and drink beers while ignoring their phones. This game really deserves more love honestly
So for one, Sony did rush the game. From what i have read it involves wanting to have exclusive IP's out already so it was between Second Son and 1886. I believe about 4 to 6 months were shaven off and then just said March 2014 when it was suppose to be for September or October closer to the fall season the game seems to take place in, and yes that would create alot of flaws. Second, the developers did write themselves in a corner, that doesnt mean we can just and should just scrap Delsin and the characters we were introduced here when we still have also many questions Delsin story can answer. Celia is still out there and she was given information only Augustine knew as she uncovered details of the First Sons. This would set a perfect opportunity to redeem not only the writing but the the entire Second Son story. Third, Cole develpment was so well done because he had not only 2 games but a comic, a dope simple comic but dope. Also, Delsin has no ties to the Beast or Cole or Kessler. There is no need to connect them. Cole Legacy definetly could have been more, but they do offer some reasons why some Conduits were alive. I like to go by the idea that those that didnt edmit or produce radiation or huge waves it were not affected by the RFI, but yes Sucker Punch does need to go further into explaining why they didnt all die, but why take it out on Delsin himself? Instead of your bad idea which is just bring Cole back, sorry thats not any better. Thats worse, I see your bias with you just want Cole back. Which is fine but its not a better idea. Why not continue and finish off Delsins story and then move on from there. Celia can still re create the First Sons as she has knowledge of them and Darpa took Kesslers findings. They can easily use that and have some Neo First Sons who now work independently or with someone or some branch of the goverment or Darpa itself. Give is a Moya type character, have Delsin find and learn about the First sons which would help us the player have their story expanded and connect Kesslers findings, theories and ideas connect with Celia who should know about them. Maybe this time we can have Zeke meet Delsin and have them build a bond, maybe have this new group create super Conduits that surpass even Cole or the beast. We learned that some Conduits can only fly, or levitate some can only shoot beams out their eyes, i mean you can literally have a group try to create some Superman that goes wrong, you can have two antagonist that connect to the past but nope lets bring Cole back. Also, Delsin potential in power is a waste to throw away. Again, SP messed...no Sony messed up by rushing this game but there is potetial and I understand its not canon to you and many hate it but i cant see how when Paper Trail adds so much real life and grounds the game and expands on the universe. I cant see how that doesnt make people appreciate how life works. While Delsin is being used as something to be ignored, other fucked up things are happening in Seattle. Great video and i respect and hope I dont sound so condescending, but I cant agree with . "SS was a mistake" lets bring COLE BACK. Like thats not dumb either. Anyways hope all is well. Cheers.
This is the first time I ever did this for anything, but I actually did stop watching the video to go and play the entire Infamous series, Festival of Blood and First Light and all. And I gotta say, the contradictions are strong and I do think at some point the Second Son story gets very, VERY heavy handed in its request to the players to pretend that the ending of 2 was only half as true as it was presented. However, at the same time, despite the narrative dissonance I think that Second Son still holds up as a really strong story on its own merits. This comment is now hardly about the premise of the video, just have to point that out before I go on this tangent. Anyway, whether the story is strongly connected to the first two games or not I don't think matters all that much. I only say that because Delsin's story is such a neat little vignette into a superhero/villain origin story that I think it's still very much a good story that holds up on its own. Now does that make much sense? Maybe not. Without Cole and the Ray Sphere and all, there would be no Second Son story. But at the same time, if you gave me Second Son and didn't tell me that there were other games, I still would think that what you gave me is a really well wrapped package(just like poor Cole had to deliver). But yeah, I just wanted to share my own thoughts about this topic, even if it's only loosely related to the video topic. Kingf of Snarkstyle TBP made me go and play what is now one of my favorite franchises of all time(as I only ever got to play Infamous 2 before). And for that I am thankful.
They give out some canon reasons to why, in Coles legacy if i recall right. Also, in 2 it states that some Conduits all over the world died. Regardless, they did hint that those that probably didnt emit or produce radiation around em (that was the plague) probably didnt get affected by the RFI.
The game release a full year before it was meant to, acoarding to Delsins voice actor. That's why the evil has a lot of reused stuff from the good karma to the point of not even changin Reggie final words and Agusting powers not having an ult nor a way to execute/reduce enemies
Once art is put out to the public the right to interpretation no longer belongs to the author of not already clear within said story. You don’t just get to make a sequel to a story while ignoring everything important within the last 2 stories while still claiming it’s the same story. You cannot have your cake and eat it too especially when sequels necessarily don’t have as much freedom to do what you want in the story due to prior established story telling.
They gave a reason for it being canon. Saying that some conduits developed an immunity to the rfi, although idk how you can be immune to something like that. But then again I've seen some people never get sick, so idk.
@@youtubestudiosucks978 maybe some were immune from even before and being a dormant conduit increases the chances of one surviving, like an animal in a cocoon.
When I first played infamous 1 my theory was that Cole was The Beast, but it was the Infamous version of Cole. Because Kessler is able to travel back in time I thought that in an original timeline Cole got his powers became evil, and went insane and destroyed everything. Then he developed time travel abilities and went back to Kesslers universe and killed his family sending Kessler back in time. So I figured that Infamous 2 would have Cole fighting an insane, superpowerful, evil version of himself that was chasing Kessler through different timelines. Probably woulda been cool, but way more complicated. With the current cannon you don't have to draw flow charts at least
@@InFamXYTsomeone actually said that somehow the original timelines beast is actually Cole because of someone being impaled by ice so either that version of the beast had ice powers as well as his own abilities or Lucy Kuo was working with him
I wish there was a line of Infamous games that take place after the evil ending of the first game. I wish Evil Cole had his own canon timeline for us to play through.
The only way Second Son could have kept it's narrative intact canonically is if it continued the evil ending of Infamous 2. Cole has become the beast and Delsin is one of many activated conduits. That would've justified why conduits are still a thing and how they got their powers.
5:16 I think it's implied that conduit genes can be naturally activated. (likely through immense distress considering both Kessler and Fetch develop new powers while while highly stressed.)
The only thing I can think of is with Augustine her powers are shown to be able to cut off another conduits so maybe she was immune to the RFI and maybe the RFI itself is what caused these conduits to activate like maybe it was a consequence of using the RFI and Kessler going back in time that the timeline altered allowing for some conduits to be activated by the inhibiting of a ray field
Personally I always believed that the reason conduits could still exist after Cole sacrificed himself is that when he tried to use it the first time with Zeke, Nix, and Kuo present the RFI began to kill Cole and company. Zeke being a quick albeit reckless thinker takes the Amp and slams the RFI out of Cole’s hands. Choosing the good ending after this event tells us that Zeke had to work to repair the RFI, and here’s where my theory comes into play because although Zeke is pretty smart, he isn’t Dr. Wolf, and he doesn’t fully understand the RFI. Once Coke defeats The Beast and uses the RFI it works and Coke succeeds, kind of. All the living conduits with active conduit genes are killed off, and most with an inactive gene are killed as well, but due to the damage Zeke inflicted on the device and the shoddy repair it doesn’t kill everyone who has the gene but instead activates their powers. My theory is that Hank, Eugene, Fetch, Augustine, Delsin, and everyone else were all activated at the same time due to the RFI. We know that a massive amount of energy is required to activate a conduit, so maybe the energy of all the dying conduits was transferred into the others somehow. We really have no idea what the conduit gene is or how it works so nothing is off the table. The only exception I could see in this theory is Augustine because she said she was activated by the beast, but who knows maybe she was just wrong. Hopefully some of these questions get answered if we ever get a Second Son 2
Although your alternative storyline idea greatly reminds me of The Force Unleashed, I still dig it and I think it would have been a better route than the official story. I could see the alternate story having a deep emotional impact.
For me, I didn’t mine the retcon but when I first got Second Son, I was going through a dark moment in my life and I didn’t know anything about the first 2 games
I always thought to myself that the remaining conduits were very few in numbers at first after the ending of Infamous 2. Being so few was added to the fear against them as it was harder to accept them as a norm hence why "bioterrorists" was the name they got. And after a while naturally more of them started showing up due to the conduit gene evolving naturally now. This was in my headcanon anyways.
I feel like the reason conduits came back is explained by Zeek in the dlc where you help him a little and when you complete the dlc it gives you Cole's jacket outfit.
I mean you could pull a massive stretch and say that only dominant gene conduits died and all the current conduits are recessive gene conduits, which would be why they seem to control more mundane things like smoke and concrete.
For being such a big fan of the series, i hadn't really thought about how Second Son connected with the first 2. But yeah, remembering that Kessler **spoilers** is Cole from the future, I assume he must have experimented with other timelines to deduce what he needed to do so his younger self would do the most evil/good in both 1 and 2 (we don't know how time travel works in this world, so I'm assuming its "every travel through time creates a different timeline" rules). Maybe theres multiple timelines where he did things slightly different in order to see the outcomes. Seeing as how he named his organization "The First Sons", maybe thats his way of numbering each experiment, "First Sons" being his "perfect" outcome. "Second Son" could probably be a slight variation of "First", where maybe the only difference is "Instead of every Conduit dying from the RFI, only Cole and the Beast die", hence why conduits are still around, and when we talk to Zeke in the DLC missions, we get confirmation that Cole is gone. Not just that, but notice how in 1 and 2, the cities are named differently, "New York" is "Empire City", "New Orleans" is "New Mirais". But in Second Son, Seattle is just Seattle. I'm assuming that the whole "different timelines" thing would get touched up on in further sequels or comics or something after fans would start asking this exact question we're making, but they probably got too busy making Ghost of Tsushima to really pan it out. I just really hope they'll give it another shot after GoT 2 gets finished, GoT is fantastic, and could probably be deemed the last amazing PS4 era game, but InFAMOUS still has so much potential. Sure it could be argued that in this current era of "hero fatigue" (personally I don't this its so much "hero fatigue" but more so "badly written hero fatigue") a new InFAMOUS game wouldn't do well, but look at the Spider-Man games, and even Wolverine in the next year or so, if a hero is written well, and the gameplay is fun, it'll do well. Only time will tell, but we can hope.
Second Son was clearly the intended sequel to 2, but was originally based off 2's "Evil" ending. They likely had the full story down before the trophy data came out and they decided to switch which ending was canon, and the script suffers for this. I mean, imagine Second Son's story but in its intended timeline. Seven years have passed since the fall of New Marais, and Cole has gotten to most of the country, using intel taken from Darpa, the NSA, the First Sons and Vermaak in order to recreate the power distribution tech there. He gets a willing conduit, Augustine, to do the transfer process and become head of ghe new police force so that this new society has some structure. Meanwhile, Cole heads to Seaford (the name they were originally gonna use) to activate more conduits. Delsin's village is near the outskirts of the blast but Delsin and Reggie crash into the DUP vehicle holding Fetch and Hank Daughtry mid transport and so are closer to the blast. This means the Plague hirs the Akomish tribe and Delsin, the newly-minted Conduit, needs to beat Augustine to get the tech he needs and save his people.
Ok so.. There is a dlc quest line, only for delux edition (later released free and un the PS+ service) that just tells you "Not everyone died" and cole brother appears and says "Cole would be proud of you", he says it even if you leave the quest for after beating the game on the bad ending so it was clearly rushed like the rest of the game
I was trying to head cannon several reasons as to why conduits reemerged but it's almost impossible to do so, it's been a minute since I played the game so at first I thought "well maybe since the detonation of the rfi new conduits have been bred, like what if Cole had a child with Trish it'd only be half conduit or the gene would be recessive" but even still, the rfi was stated to have killed everyone with a conduit gene present, even false conduits like Kuo (I think that was her name) died, and only 7 years have passed. This made me come up with a second theory which almost worked but there's a snag. I was thinking, ray spheres kill several people and transfer their energy to conduits in a sense, not precisely but that's the general idea, what if the rfi did the same thing but in reverse on a world wide scale? The wave kills conduits and takes their genes, wiping all the old conduits, but in the process creates new ones. However Augustine being there when the beast attacks empire city, with her gaining powers, kills this theory as she would have died after the rfis used. There's also a theory I'm currently forming while typing this, maybe the rfi did kill every conduit, but some of them were revived. My main support for this would be Cole and John white. You COULD say john died, he was atomized by the ray sphere but his soul,or essence or energy remained. So it's wishy washy if you want to consider him dead, BUT his physical being definitely was destroyed, as for Cole, at the very end we see a question mark shaped lightning bolt strike either cole himself in his casket, the boat he's on, or it's just on the horizon it's very quick but I'm pretty sure it strikes Cole directly. Now this was probably done initially to leave it somewhat open to coles fate in case they wanted to do more with him, but they did continue the series and that is the cannon ending so what would the lightning mean in universe? Was Cole revived? Well why didn't he return or find Zeke, that could simply be explained as he wanted to leave the life of a conduit behind and finally have a family, he gave his life for the world and that was enough. This theory could also support Augustine as she was turned by the beast and so could have been more resilient and nearly everyone on the eastern seaboard was dead so there would have been no one to take her gene, or simply.... Maybe some conduits just got lucky and that's all. Maybe some of them posses an already mutated variation of the conduit gene that the RFIs creator didn't take into account, as conduits are pretty rare when compared to the general population, one with a mutated gene would be rare even among conduits, and maybe the rfi empowered those with mutated conduit genes while it's was killing common conduits, or again transferring their power Even still, to have to head cannon so many extravagant scenarios to make the story work at all is unacceptable. They literally could've said on the prologue screen "the world believes that the rfi killed every conduit on earth 7 years ago...This is not the case" and really what else would you have to do? They wouldn't even have to answer why all the conduits didn't die, they just didn't, things didn't go as expected as they more often than not don't. And then tie in some of my theories and the surviving conduits could've become super conduits or something and they could really expand the power set of you and the antagonists and aid the story, the beast was so cool because he was like an event, nuked his happy ass all the way down the east coast, imagine fighting a conduit who wiped out a continent in an instant, that'd be cool AF if done right.
if i had to rewrite the story, i dont think i would discard the characters we got in second son but try to improve them. For those characters to get their powers, i would first stablish a bigger timeskip of perhaps 20 years or so. Military groups or even world countries would be digging the corpses of the conduits trying to study their genetics after the incident with the Beast. They would experiment in many kinds of people in many different ways, like testing on prision immates like Henry Daughtry, or developing products that could be labeled as medications of some and give those to people that can be easly tracked and supervised. Augustine could be created by a group under ONU to contain those other groups and detain any possible new conduit. She could be a clone of a person who awakened her powers due to the Beast rampage. She remembers the devastation and is obsessed with killing all conduits because she believes that all are spawns of the devil himself because of the memories and to reflect the general outlook the world got from that incident. Now there is a better context for a simmilar scenario to the game we got.
If i rember correctly apparently when they were doing the motion capture , they didn't have a finished script so Troy Baker and Travis Willigham had to improvise the scenes
The thing is, why does it matter if it is canon or not? As fans of anything we always seem to default to gauging something's quality based on this nebulous idea of canonicity, but really the fact that the game exists is in and of itself what matters. I'm reminded of the endless debates I had as a kid on the playground with my friends about the Dragonball Z movies and how Cooler is or isn't canon. Canon isn't that important as long as it's enjoyable. Maybe it doesn't link up perfectly with Infamous 2's ending, sure. What it does do however is tell a story within its own world that doesn't necessarily rely on the previous two games' backstory. Whether you think the story is good is another question entirely, but we need to let go of this idea of canon being the be all end all of every franchise ever written.
They never said that the Inhibitor was a guarantee for killing all conduits. They said that it would cause Conduits to die. The characters only assumed it was all of them. Plus, it’s possible that all the conduits in Second Son are indeed part of an evolved branch of Conduits. Where they didn’t actually need Ray Sphere Particles in order to have powers.
Even if the RFI isn’t guaranteed to kill all conduits, how is it that it was powerful enough to kill conduits way overseas but not kill delsin and the others in Seattle? Even if they were more evolved conduits, there is nothing to suggest that they are. How exactly are they more evolved anyway? How could they even be more evolved? Evolutions and mutations in dna take many generations to occur and they were all alive at the same time Cole was before he died so that explanation just doesn’t make sense even as a theory.
The way i head canon it is that, if you were young enough, and in overall great health, you got weak and sick for a few weeks at the end of infamous 2, but you eventually recover. And that this caused the gene to mutate to activate from intesnse emotional overload. This SHOULD be said in game but i can believe this is kinda just, not talked about. Also i believe Cole is resurrected at the end of 2 by that lightning strike.
You're not too far off the mark regarding Second Son's birth. According to what I've heard (though I can't say if it's entirely true), Sony was pressuring Sucker Punch to make a game from a recognized brand for the PS4, while SP were antsy to get started on Ghost of Tsushima. So a deal was made where SP would make Second Son (and First Light), then be left to their own devices to make their dream game. Whether that's entirely the case, I can't be sure. I have heard that SP were tempted to make a sequel based on the Evil ending where Cole took over as the Beast, but supposedly shifted gears because of data showing players had chosen the Good ending more than the evil. That would have been quite interesting to say the least, though it would have also necessitated a new protagonist since Cole would have been far too powerful to keep as the player character, and another nerf like what he had in Infamous 2 would have just been insulting to the audience. In regards to the canon of Second Son, it is undeniably shaky. While having Dormant conduit gene holders could have worked, it certainly would have messed with the way Zeke described the "purge" in the second game. Dormant genes or recessive ones might have been able to explain the survival of conduits, even if it's not entirely true to real life genes, granted, real life genes also can't give people flight or crap literal lightning either. Still, it is a shame that Second Son feels so hodgepodge in its plot. I would say the evil storyline is alright, and does seem to make more sense in most ways, like Delsin clearly becoming addicted to obtaining new powers, with the only problem being how Reggie still acts all caring toward Delsin before he dies, which makes me wonder if the good ending and path were written at the last minute, or just "out of obligation" because the last two games had two endings.
You know I would love for sucker Punch to consider second son a spin-off and to create infamous 3 following the evil ending. We don't even have to play as cole we can play as a random conduit or even have a power Creator when we could create our own powers. You know delson's skill set kind of makes sense if he was the main character for infamous 3 because with the ability to absorb other conduits its powers would make him a major player.
I know this will never happen. But they should've just done the alleged original plan, making the Evil Ending canon in 2. It had so much more potential for future stories. To this day I still find it dumb that they threw it away only because more players saw the good ending more based on the Playstation Trophy data, like no shit that players are going to go for the Good Ending, I think almost every single person does the Good Ending 1st because normally _THAT'S_ the one that leads to the main character NOT dying.
Just dropping by to tell you all that "inFamous 3" would've followed the evil ending of the second game but it was scrapped of fear that most players wouldn't understand it. See, the fact is most people only play through the good ending and end it there, but "cannonically" the evil ending would be the path to follow. This makes me so sad cause the evil ending is so much better. If you play the game on good karma up until the "final" choice the game makes so much sense, something that I recommend anyone with a copy of inFamous 2 to do at some point. Or don't, cause knowing that Seconc Son exists because some people looked at some trophy statistics and thought that making a game following the bad ending was bad idea, is so fucking frustrating. Second Son to me is a crime against amazing potential, specially when the evil ending after a good karma playthrough is so good and sets up something far better. P.S.: doing good karma playthrough with evil ending actually made me cry
Exactly. I don’t remember having played through the game as a hero and chose to side with John before. I wanna do that but I also don’t wanna play at 30fps lol. I wish Sony would release a remastered collection for current gen and PC already.
The first game's recordings do state the gene is natural to humans, it just needs a kickstart. Still, I think the story would be more interesting if it was set after the bad karma ending from "Infamous 2".
Wasn't the vampire from festival of blood a conduit too. She was around for like 200 years before the main game assuming that festival of blood is loosely canon
I do have a theory that liquid Ray Feild Radiation is what gave Kuo her powers as well as the D.U.P soldiers. • The only thing that activates power is Ray Feild Radiation so whatever they used on Kuo had to be connected. • I also believe that Augustine didn't use the power transfer device for her soldiers rather liquid Ray Feild Radiation + her blood to guarantee they'd get her concrete power.
InFAMOUS Second Son took a lot of bad paths about what the game was about and it's content. Basically what we have now was planned as InFAMOUS 3 but ended up being a Origin Story for Delsin, an introduction to this new world of InFAMOUS after the already seen events. Some stuff was better. In the concept arts that you can find at Artstation you can see some of this stuff like the DUP not being a military thing but more of a Private Service or the DUP concrete powers where thought first as Glass Powers... But I guess this is related to making a game as fast as possible since PS4 at that time was releasing.
A theory was that the R.F.I was damaged when Zeke knocked it out of his hands and even though he fixed it it was still damaged to the point were it couldn't kill all Conduits. • And it altered Ray Feild Radiation to activate powers more easily than previous conduits so that stress can do it more easily.
I should note if TV tropes is to be trusted Second Son was originally going to follow the evil ending but they changed gears upon seeing the statistics are realizing how few players went the evil route. Depending on when they found this out there might not have been much time to change the script
I think the reason coduits are still around is because at the end of Infamous 2, it just said that a bunch of conduits started dying, not ALL of them. Which is why theres so few in second son. In infamous 2 evil route, you can see people with the conduit gene and theres quite a few just in new marais. Its somewhat reasonable to think that some conduits may have survived.
I'm glad you made this video. Yea "hoping no one would notice" is exactly what happened cuz even i didn't. I bought the explanation that this was a new gen of conduits without realizing the time inconsistency. The whole thing is just disrespectful in retrospect. Especially late game; no ng+, no ucg creator, boring side missions, short story, weak plot l overall. Honestly you come to second son for the powers and thats it.
Zeke was also in Second Son, albeit in a dlc side mission available via preorder bonus, where he tells you that Cole died confirming that Infamous 2's "good ending" was the "canon ending."
I could be wrong but i dont recall it ever saying that the Ray Sphere is what gave conduits their powers in Kessler's original timeline. My theory is that the conduit gene is similar to the X gene in Marvel or Meta gene in DC, where people can manifest powers due to extreme trama or stress. My examples of this are what we know about the main cast of Second Son. Hank was a carreer criminal in and out of prision and while he loved it its still a pretty stressful life to lead, Eugene was builled his entire life and then he was pushed too far, we know Delsin lost his parents (its never stated how or when) but thats a huge trama for someone to go through and given that his powers are just to absorb others they could have manifested without anyone even noticing. As for Fetch, we dont know what her initial stresser was but we saw that in First Light her abilities increased or expanded everytime she had one of her "episodes". So this leads me to believe in the original timeline conduits appeared naturally but the gene remained dormat until some time in the future and so when Kessler went back in time to make Cole a conduit he needed something to jump start the gene because it would have been too late to just wait for it to activate naturally like it was suppose to thus the creation of the Ray Sphere came to be. This then in my opinion ties into how conduits still exist in Second Son. The RFI was successful in wiping out the plague and killing most conduits all over the world but that wouldn't stop new people from being born with the gene and after enough time had passed the conduit gene was then able to activte naturally like it was suppose to, although in this timeline it activated faster due to Kessler's interference, forcing to activate early. As for those conduits who survived like augustine..... it maybe be a lazy reason but it could be that because it was the beast who activted her powers she wasnt effected by the RFI.
I played second son without playing any of the other games and it was one of the few game I ever got the platinum trophy for. I had no idea they made such a slip up with their story until I stumbled upon this video today lmao. I still regard second son as one of the best games I have played and one of the only ps4 games that felt next gen to me .
13:20 can it really be considered a tradition if they’ve only done it once (Sly Cooper)? From what I can tell they didn’t own the rights to Rocket on Wheels so I wouldn’t count that as their franchise (or even a franchise given it was just one game)
‘Retcon’ wouldn’t have been needed if devs had stuck to their guns and just followed up to the ‘canon’ ending in inFamous 2. Instead of caving to crybabies that wanted Cole McGrath to end the 2nd entry as a ‘good guy’ by sacrificing himself.
I don't want it to be cannon. I had my own idea how to do a third one: you play as Kessler and the game starts by leading up to when he goes back in time, first like 20 min maybe as a tutorial, but similar set up as the Ray Sphere shards power up, as future technology that traveled with you back in time, that you need to collect in order to power up. Throughout the game once in the present you have the option "go public with the information you have, save lives, but get black sited to be experimented on by the government," No beast because no First Sons. Other option, take out the First Sons your own way, the discoveries die with them, opening the door for you becoming THE ONLY Superhero, Super Villain, or new life as like a scientist yourself. The other options is you joining the First Sons for various reasons, some as undercover for the other 2, some as forced cooperation, some as just the offer of power. All to answer the question: Why didn't Kessler just murder these guys when he arrived back in time.
I read somewhere that the developers of Infamous 2 wanted to continue with the evil ending but more people did the good ending so they were kind of stuck and had to rush ideas
I think a lot of the problems Second Son has is also it's inability to understand how the fuck did Conduits survive, the DLC barely answers those questions, in fact, it creates more questions than it bothers answering. And in regards to Agustine, how did she and Celia (the paper conduit) even survive the RFI? And why is the Conduit gene back after that device made it completely extinct? For a game that can't even tell it's ass from it's elbow, it answers a lot of the questions poorly, like how a lot of the D.U.P got Agustine's powers without a machine made for said task, how did Fetch, Eugene and Hank got their powers, how the fuck a device like the RFI cleaned Ray Sphere radiation only for that to be back in a year. All of this makes absolutely zero sense and it made me wish they went for the evil ending instead, I didn't even know we chose how the franchise would go going forward, at least with that ending I won't have to bear Delsin's douchiness. One thing I think could've worked out for Second Son was using the First Sons again, say that they recreate a new version of the Ray Sphere using Kesler's research, they blow up some cities and that would result on the Conduit gene taking a new form, like before, radiation would start traveling the entire country and actiavting Conduits at random. I think that would also answer the increase on Conduits because, as far as we know, the only Conduits active are the ones on Empire City (that died when the Beast nuked the entire city), the ice squad and the monsters Bertrand created, maybe even people the Beast activated on his way to New Marais and all of them died with the RFI. What if Agustine was actually caught into new Ray Sphere's explosion and she along with Celia are turned, same thing as her backstory, yadda yadda yadda and the D.U.P is created. Maybe a new detail is that she gets her hands on the Ray Sphere and, because of her position of power, Agustine kidnapps randoms on the street and uses them to create more Conduits, she needs to keep the D.U.P or else the goverment will take custody of them. What happens with Delsin, to be honest I don't give a flying shit, he can do whatever.
An even bigger plot hole, is that it’s implied in one of the dead drops in infamous 2 - that Kessler secretly knew John would eventually become the beast. So if Kessler knew the beasts identify in his original timeline, why would he side with the people responsible for creating the device that created him, instead of immediately tracking down John and killing him? Thus preventing his original timeline from happening in the first place.
I think they went about it wrong. They could've easily said the new conduits are a result of gene therapy sneakily done through various medical treatments etc.
I loved the games story when I played back in 2015. I was too young to realize all the flaws in the story. It's a bummer because this series had huge potential to be one of Sony's greatest franchises. Thankfully the gameplay is so damn amazing, which is the most important thing in video games.
I think the question of second son's canonicity could have been solved if the game opened stating that only the conduits who had their powers activated died due to a design flaw with the RFI only eradicating ray sphere radiation and thus only harming conduits who were already exposed to it not effecting those who's powers were still dormant only rendering them unconscious for a short period of time
Thanks for shouting out the kinda-sorta theory about a second, original Beast. I've had that one for years, but all I tend to get is about the dead drop message that seems to indicate it is John White. I get that, but it seems like Kessler never knew his Beast's name, and with how far back in time he went, even confirming that someone was born to the same family could be iffy. My headcanon: The Beast was inevitable. Someone or something like it was going to emerge, and worse, the original timeline Beast still existed and might one day duplicate Kessler's time journey. John White was a practice Beast against the original, one manipulated by Kessler to be Cole's prep run. Now, if we're using comic book logic, such as Cole seemed to like, alt-timelines like Age Of Apocalypse or Flashpoint don't go away when time is set right, they just become alternate realities. So maybe in a game we'll never see, the new protagonist or a surviving Cole will have to face down a truly rampaging Beast. Anyway, thanks for at least acknowledging it.
My headcanon is when Zeke hit the RFI with the Amp he said he could fix it but what if it wasn't completely fixed, which is the reason why conduits are still around in the events of Second Son
The evil ending in infamous 2 was supposed to be the continuation but they said they saw that 78% of people were picking to sacrifice Cole so they changed it for some reason. Nate said he was disappointed he didn't get to continue the story the way he wanted to, which was filling the world full of conduits. In the end I still don't see why they kept it going story wise but it's still a really good game and fun.
As far as the Kessler retcon stuff and conduits being tied to the ray sphere , here's my theory. In Kessler's timeline conduits are a mutation like mutants and all Kessler did was artificially jumpstart this evolution early in the timeline and if that's the case then there most likely was no ray sphere radiation to poison the population, just the Beast and his genocide so that was the only threat he knew of to warn Cole of. As far as the ending to Infamous 2 it's been a long time since I played it so I don't remember but did they specify that the rfid would wipe out the conduit gene or just conduits?
In Second Son, there are a few ways it can work in my eyes. Conduits are still around because John created/activated more of them, and some people have the conduit gene. The RFI took out the active conduits, but in those with a dormant gene, it caused the mutation that activated the conduit gene. Easy.
Its canon, the thing is the original concept was that it was gonna go off the evil ending. But since so many played the good ending, they changed it. Also the creator does have the authority over canon. Thats why fanons exist.
I thought it was made pretty clear that John was the Beast in both timelines, and that Kessler thought he had a chance to beat him when he was younger but chose not to because he didn't want to risk his family. That why his goal was to make Cole inFamous and stronger. Important to note that John wasn't activated at first either, only when the ray sphere is activated/destroyed the 2nd time in the first game. I also don't think they specified the plague happening in the alternate timeline, that may have been a side affect of the ray sphere being the main cause of conduit outbreaks instead of say a current through a blast core which is how Cole and Delsin enhance their powers in the follow up games.
According to the “Cole’s Legacy” DLC there are 2 theories as for why conduits still exist after inFAMOUS 2: 1- the plague wasn’t cured it instead mutated people to have the conduit gene 2- somehow the conduit gene was spread from previous conduits The guy who discovered the theories said he’d looked into them and found no evidence for either but I personally believe the first theory is more accurate as it would explain why conduits are sprouting up left and right. Although this theory implies that Zeke is now a conduit (and potentially the same powers as Cole if he was struck by the lighting bolt in the final shot of inFAMOUS 2) so hey, his dream from the first game to let others have powers (himself included) came true.
InFamous is indeed one of my favourite PlayStation exclusives ever. When I replayed these games again. I still enjoyed it,especially InFamous 2. But Second Son on the other hand is a hit and miss for me back when I first played during its launch title. Gameplay is fun and the main protagonists is okay,but the story is kinda “eh” to me. They did say that they use InFamous 2s good ending to continue Second Sons storytelling,but they weren’t no connection to the previous game. They don’t mention Cole’s sacrifice nor they didn’t bother showing Zeke. Zeke would make sense to be here. He’ll become a guide to Delsin and his powers and give some connected storytelling.
I think the whole retcon behind Infamous Second Son would have been better received If either Delsin and the other conduits weren’t conduits at all but some other type of enhanced humans with powers or a new type of conduits that where somehow given a genetically modified version of the conduit gene that makes them immune to the RFI a couple of years after Infamous 2
Or maybe the RFI itself had its own radiation that created a new batch of conduits while whiping out the first one.
Just make it so the plague is gone but conduits still exist because everyone that was in remission had kids and the kids have a chance to have powers, they need to make an infamous 4 where delving teams up with Cole and Cole is brought back by delsin through conduit magic powers etc etc and they team up to defeat the new big bad, doop headquarters lol
There are actually a few ways we could explain it, but in my eyes you need to modify a bunch of things in SS.
Perhaps the government wanted to somehow recreate the Conduits for power or something, ya know for Super Soldiers.
Maybe the Ray Field radiation or even just the Beast himself created a subset Conduits that can function without Ray Field energy, making them immune to the RFI.
Possibly the RFI just worked like FUCKING THANOS and pulled an Eren Jaeger by wiping out MOST of the Conduits!
We don't know, and at this point I don't get paid to care. So take your pick.
The game offers through Cole Legacy dlc what some experts in verse believe happened. One being those that didn't have much radiation emitted from them were the ones that survived and became second gen conduits.
I have two theories and a change. Theory 1: the ray sphere although it was supposed to get rid of conduits it could’ve been restored and reversed engineered to create new conduits thus creating this situation. Theory 2: this could be a different continuity that has very similar events occur from the previous games however some tweaks and changes may have happened to make this continuity happen. Time travel is possible, which would mean someone made a change to the timeline. Change: my change for this mainly would been to not only acknowledge what one of the two theories but overall just write the Rowe brothers storyline a little better. Everything else will be enhanced because of this one story thread.
I view Second Son as an alternate timeline to the end on Infamous 2 in where instead of the RFI killing all conduits it only killed the conduits in New Marais and unlocked the Conduit Gene in dormant conduits (like Fetch and Eugene). This would makes sense to the story and also explain why Delson didn't know he was a conduit due to never touching another one until the events of the game.
@@ironwraith852 I started my comment with "as a alternate timeline" for that very reason. In an alternate timeline slight changes could happen like in DC or Marvel comics this way we are able to accept the ending in 2 while also having a fun what if in Second Son
Feel the Gene just managed to survive to some capacity.
If the gene popped up once, it could, theoretically, re-evolve itself back into genome
I think it's clear Sucker Punch themselves intended for it to be canon, because there was even the pre order bonus, Cole's Legacy, where Zeke plays a major role, interacting with Delsin, (albeit just over the phone). And despite it's flaws that it does have, I do also consider it to be canon.
There was an episode of What Happened where it was revealed that the devs actually wanted a game full of conduits. They only committed to the good ending because so many players went for that ending over the evil ending
@@sketchstevens5859 That would've been interesting. A sequel that followed the evil ending.
@@aurthurpendragon1015 It's honestly really nice of them to consider the player's choice. Most devs would have just gone along with their original vision instead of trying to go a different way.
@@sketchstevens5859 The artist's vision is the most important part of any work of art, though.
True
There is a Dead Drop in inFamous 2 between John and Wolfe called Bad Omen that pretty much confirms that Kessler knew John was The Beast. The Dead Drop goes:
John: “I was carrying the Ray Sphere out of the lab when Kessler stopped me. It was... strange. He said that I had an important destiny, that I'd accomplish great things.”
Wolfe: “I used to be a skeptic, but many of his predictions actually do come true.”
John: “I don't know... the way he looked at me... Made me want him to be wrong.”
My head canon is that Kessler knew John was The Beast and in Kessler’s timeline the plague didn’t exist and The Beast was a monster hellbent on destroying all life and the plague was a consequence of Kessler rushing production of the Ray Sphere. Like he didn’t care about the side effects as long as it was able to make Cole a conduit without killing him.
@@supsup1 maybe it did for John in Kesslers timeline. Think about it, maybe John powers warped his mind because he had to keep them because he didn’t have Cole to transfer his powers to like he did in the Evil ending. John said he was tired of killing but if Evil Cole wasn’t around to give his powers to he had no choice but to continue to make new conduits on his own until the power corrupted him.
Who knows, maybe Kesslers plan was for Cole to become the Beast and kill him. But since someone else was affected by Ray Sphere, in this case John, Kessler left the future in Cole's hands. One think we do not know is who was the Beast in Kessler timeline. Was it John or someone from the First Sons...
@@supsup1 Uhm... Now that I think on that quote. What if the Beast in Kesslers timeline was another person, but now in this new timeline he needed someone to be the beast to once and for all erradicate all the conduints, so he chose John as a vessel for the Beast. Maybe that would make sense.
@@supsup1 I think it's better to leave Cole/Kessler behind. Cole is Dead so is Kessler. And well, now we have Delsin which is a big book of oportunities.
@@supsup1 Please, like I said to other user, let Cole just as a legacy, let him die already.
When the game first came out I was honestly surprised by just how much technology has improved in the Infamous universe in just 7 years until I remembered the First Sons
even if (for example) most of the cars portrayed (in-game. Remember, the differences) during in IF02's new marais city's streets, roads, etc were like shown to be out of date, let's just say: that the more modern era of Today's tech is still the same back in during the events of IF01's to IF02's.
[EDIT]: wait, define again by what you mean by your review in this?....
you mean like....super Human powers-birthing methods like the Ray Spheres, to the RFI, to Joseph B's Conduit power transfering device, to even Cole's and Zeke's Conduit-held melee weapon: the Amp, etc? back within that reality of InFamous' version of Humanity which is very much (at least in public) supposed to be not that different than our current era when it comes to technology and all of that.
is that what you mean by 'surprised by how advanced' they are?
I heard originally there was supposed to be a sequel to the Infamous 2 bad ending which was supposed to be canon but I don’t know if this sequel was what Second Son was originally supposed to be. Imagine playing as a different version of Delsin fighting a much more powerful version of Evil Cole who would be a new Beast
I want delsin and Cole to team up for the 4th gam,, delsin gets like revive magic conduit something and revives Cole, they team up and maybe even go back in time, maybe save that for infamous 5
Cole died, and they went with the hero canon of the ending, and Foxx the director/creator stated Cole died and this is canonical and Delsin is his successor.
@@kirerunte1046 You mean Infamous 4?
The inital plan for the third game was to follow the evil ending but they saw that more players picked the good ending by a wide margin. And didn’t want to canonize an ending only a small amount of players got
100% would of made for a better game and story.
I never understood is why they never addressed this plot hole which puts this entire game's existence into question after 8 years. They could have done so in comics, books, interviews, or any other media. I also understand the question as to whether or not the game is canon as it doesn't address the most important world event of the previous game.
They never addressed how Kessler time travelled. they never addressed what happened to his technology either in Infamous 1. Its not just Second Son.
@@squallthegriever Yet neither of those are so significant issues that they prevent the story from making sense about the rest of the series. Sure they are plot holes that can be filled in by the player but they don't affect the story so much that it brings into question whether or not they could have happened. Especially since Kessler's time travel power was a one-time trip deal born out of desperation. As for his technology, we know the First Sons used it and were wiped out in Infamous 1. Neither plot hole is that much of a concern since most of their problems are self contained.
@@squallthegriever Literally brought up something so insignificant lol
@@squallthegriever They DID address how Kessler time travelled. The short answer is that his powers had matured with age to the point of him learning how to time travel.
inFAMOUS 2 good ending: “The RFI wiped out every single conduit on earth. Activated or not.”
Sucker Punch: “No it didn’t.”
Players: “How didn’t it?”
Sucker Punch: “idk”
Infamous second son holds a special place in my heart. First game I’ve ever bought with my own money on a system I bought. First game I’ve ever 100%, my cousin and I bonded over playing though the good/evil side and it brought me into the infamous universe. I do get where you’re coming from as it is a slap in the face to older fans.
I always saw InFamous Second Son as more of an elseworld scenario and not a legitimate sequel to the second game. In any other light, it kind of makes Second Son look worse since InFamous 2 felt like a perfect bookend to the series.
They did say they wanted to make the evil ending cannon, but changed their minds due most players played as the hero. I always thought the evil ending was better and more heart wrenching. If Infamous 3 had become a thing I believe it would end with Delsin showing Cole the monster he has become and Cole reevaluate his humanity. Could have been epic, if there is ever a Ghost of Tsushima sequel I hope we get the ending where Jin left his uncle alive and fully committing to the identity of the Ghost.
I always assumed Infamous Second Son was a sequel to Infamous, not Infamous 2 if that makes sense. It ignores so much of Infamous 2, including it's ending, that it didn't happen, so it's a Second infamous 2, a Second Son of Infamous, rather than Infamous 3
I think the reason why there are still conduits alive is because of Zeke taking Cole's amp weapon and hitting the rfi out of Cole's hand and breaking apart of it caused it to malfunction and it ended up doing something else that it was not supposed to do activate conduits gene and powers and leaving some conduits alive and yes it did what it was supposed to do kill conduits and curing the plague but yet again do to Zeke breaking it not fixing it good enough it caused a malfunction and it ended up doing something else so by the end of the day Zeke is ultimately responsible for why there are still conduits alive around a normal human man is the reason why there are still superhumans alive and well in the world
I remember reading somewhere that apparently Sucker Punch were going to make the Evil ending of Infamous 2 canon. But only changed it because the vast majority of players picked the good ending. I have no clue why they thought it would be a good idea to ditch one likely good storyline for one with no foundation to build off of. Second Son ended up being the equilivent of trying to build a skyscrapper on air, with the same consequences.
I wanna know what was going through their minds when they did that. Like what about the people who saw the evil ending first, or those who got both endings? Do they not matter lmao?
@@yvngn1ng3n14 nobody matters, we are only made out of it
That is correct, the villain was going to be Cole as the new found Beast, Sounded epic.
It didn’t help that the ending more or less makes the decision for you
I think Second Son would make more sense if it took place during the events of the first two games as some sort of interquel.
I was thinking the same thing. Also, if it took place concurrently to Infamous 2, where the end of SS is right before the ending of 2 (a few days-month) and if you get the bad ending where Delsin twkes over Seattle...short reign.
Or an alternative universe where Cole doesn't exist
Bro I've been saying the same thing for years
@@donschoenly6018 I'm a month late to this reply, but imagine how funny it'd be seeing evil Delsin put in all that work to reign over Seattle, just to get nuked by the RFI less than a month later lol.
@@calvinpeters653 this
My pitch for a follow up to Infamous 2 would have been a prequel following Kessler in the original timeline
That would've been way better received and would've wrapped everything up in a perfect bow
@@Mandalore7354 Indeed
@@Umbraarro9426 Infamous Second Son the sequel no Infamous fan asked for
@@Mandalore7354 Lol, yeah
Either that, or following on the events of the Evil ending.
There actually is an explanation to this, though it's a throw away line in the Cole's Legacy DLC. They basically said something along the lines of the plague still existing, but it's turning people into conduits instead of killing them. Kinda stupid that you need a pre-order DLC that became available after 8 years of the game being out.
I’m surprised you didn’t find Nate Fox’s old quote around the time SS was either announced or at E3. When asked about how it would continue after Infamous 2, he confirmed that it would take place after the Good Ending and noted how he actually wrote Infamous 2 to continue after the Evil Ending, with tons of new conduits allowing for more variety or something like that. They switched gears when they saw the PSN Trophy stats and discovered that more players finished the Good Ending over the Evil one
I don’t know the exact time and place he said it, but if I had to guess, I’d assume it would be IGN’s E3 2013 coverage of Infamous SS. I used to watch IGN the most out of all the major gaming publications back in the day, and somewhere along the way I remember hearing Nate Fox talk about Infamous 2’s ending and how they wanted to continue the Evil one but saw that the Good one was more popular according to PSN Trophies
Personally if we ever get a new inFamous game, I hope it follows up on the second game's evil ending where Cole becomes the Beast and starts activating conduits the world over. It's the most natural way to continue the existence of conduits without a huge retcon or multi-generation timeskip. Plus they were initially going to have the evil ending be their canon going into second son, so I wouldn't mind seeing how that would've been handled had the devs not based their creative choice on trophy data. They could even bring Delsin back as the main character, having him be a conduit that Cole activated, but at the cost of his tribe, giving Delsin motive to want to stop Cole
Exactly that would’ve been dope
Evil Cole a coward taking the easy way out? That’s one way to see it but I don’t think that’s fair to his character and the circumstances leading to his decision to join the beast. The guy went through a ton of shit only to find out at the last minute that he needed to sacrifice himself to save humanity. That’s not an easy choice to make, good Cole or evil Cole. There’s also the fact that Wolfe never told him that the RFI would kill him despite knowing very well that it could (Kuo says as much herself after the RFI fails to activate the first time) and he instead leads Cole to believe he can use it as a weapon to take the beast's powers away when he first meets Cole. Finally, there’s the issue of the RFI failing to fire off when it was supposed to. Everybody was unsure if it would cure the plague like they were told to believe so getting it to work would be a massive gamble that could very well blow up in their faces. John’s method of dealing with the plague, though costly, was proven to work and Cole choosing to help him was the only logical choice he could’ve made.
P.S. I still want a sequel that follows the evil ending.
Games hardly if ever follow the evil ending.
I always took it as the Rayfield inhibitor, despite claims otherwise, DIDN'T kill everyone with the Conduit Gene just the vast majority of them. Kinda like how pesticides aren't 100% effective. No matter how effective they are, some survive anyway due to a resistance said pesticides... a resistance that often takes the form of a mutation.
In the case of the Ray Field Inhibitor, the same thing happened. It seemingly killed all conduits, but didn't. The Survivors (Conduit or no) carried a mutation rendering them resistant the Ray Field Inhibitor's effects. Meanwhile in survivors with the unactivated gene carried a mutation of the conduit gene that lowered the activation threshold so there was the need of a catastrophic event to activate them. Hence no more plague, a relative few conduits survived, and Conduits activating via exposure to relatively minor amounts of Ray Field radiation/contact with activated conduits.
Actually for one point I do believe Kessler implies he just awakened his powers naturally throughout his life, but the Ray sphere is a result of his experimentation.
Infanous 2 is such a good game that the best part of the game is the cutscene where cole and zeke just sit down and drink beers while ignoring their phones. This game really deserves more love honestly
So for one, Sony did rush the game. From what i have read it involves wanting to have exclusive IP's out already so it was between Second Son and 1886. I believe about 4 to 6 months were shaven off and then just said March 2014 when it was suppose to be for September or October closer to the fall season the game seems to take place in, and yes that would create alot of flaws.
Second, the developers did write themselves in a corner, that doesnt mean we can just and should just scrap Delsin and the characters we were introduced here when we still have also many questions Delsin story can answer. Celia is still out there and she was given information only Augustine knew as she uncovered details of the First Sons. This would set a perfect opportunity to redeem not only the writing but the the entire Second Son story. Third, Cole develpment was so well done because he had not only 2 games but a comic, a dope simple comic but dope. Also, Delsin has no ties to the Beast or Cole or Kessler. There is no need to connect them. Cole Legacy definetly could have been more, but they do offer some reasons why some Conduits were alive.
I like to go by the idea that those that didnt edmit or produce radiation or huge waves it were not affected by the RFI, but yes Sucker Punch does need to go further into explaining why they didnt all die, but why take it out on Delsin himself? Instead of your bad idea which is just bring Cole back, sorry thats not any better. Thats worse, I see your bias with you just want Cole back. Which is fine but its not a better idea. Why not continue and finish off Delsins story and then move on from there. Celia can still re create the First Sons as she has knowledge of them and Darpa took Kesslers findings. They can easily use that and have some Neo First Sons who now work independently or with someone or some branch of the goverment or Darpa itself. Give is a Moya type character, have Delsin find and learn about the First sons which would help us the player have their story expanded and connect Kesslers findings, theories and ideas connect with Celia who should know about them.
Maybe this time we can have Zeke meet Delsin and have them build a bond, maybe have this new group create super Conduits that surpass even Cole or the beast. We learned that some Conduits can only fly, or levitate some can only shoot beams out their eyes, i mean you can literally have a group try to create some Superman that goes wrong, you can have two antagonist that connect to the past but nope lets bring Cole back. Also, Delsin potential in power is a waste to throw away. Again, SP messed...no Sony messed up by rushing this game but there is potetial and I understand its not canon to you and many hate it but i cant see how when Paper Trail adds so much real life and grounds the game and expands on the universe. I cant see how that doesnt make people appreciate how life works. While Delsin is being used as something to be ignored, other fucked up things are happening in Seattle. Great video and i respect and hope I dont sound so condescending, but I cant agree with . "SS was a mistake" lets bring COLE BACK. Like thats not dumb either. Anyways hope all is well. Cheers.
This is the first time I ever did this for anything, but I actually did stop watching the video to go and play the entire Infamous series, Festival of Blood and First Light and all. And I gotta say, the contradictions are strong and I do think at some point the Second Son story gets very, VERY heavy handed in its request to the players to pretend that the ending of 2 was only half as true as it was presented.
However, at the same time, despite the narrative dissonance I think that Second Son still holds up as a really strong story on its own merits. This comment is now hardly about the premise of the video, just have to point that out before I go on this tangent. Anyway, whether the story is strongly connected to the first two games or not I don't think matters all that much. I only say that because Delsin's story is such a neat little vignette into a superhero/villain origin story that I think it's still very much a good story that holds up on its own. Now does that make much sense? Maybe not. Without Cole and the Ray Sphere and all, there would be no Second Son story. But at the same time, if you gave me Second Son and didn't tell me that there were other games, I still would think that what you gave me is a really well wrapped package(just like poor Cole had to deliver).
But yeah, I just wanted to share my own thoughts about this topic, even if it's only loosely related to the video topic. Kingf of Snarkstyle TBP made me go and play what is now one of my favorite franchises of all time(as I only ever got to play Infamous 2 before). And for that I am thankful.
Please tell me that was a joke about not remembering they made the sly trilogy... That is one series they loved!
This game really should’ve taken place during, or before, Infamous 2. Easy explanation for the conduits issue.
The conduits in remission could have just had kids and that's how it began again and the plague is gone
They give out some canon reasons to why, in Coles legacy if i recall right. Also, in 2 it states that some Conduits all over the world died. Regardless, they did hint that those that probably didnt emit or produce radiation around em (that was the plague) probably didnt get affected by the RFI.
@Kire Runte not possible considering that there is a seven year gap between infamous 2 and second son.
@@VJ2099 they grow up so fast 😢
The game release a full year before it was meant to, acoarding to Delsins voice actor. That's why the evil has a lot of reused stuff from the good karma to the point of not even changin Reggie final words and Agusting powers not having an ult nor a way to execute/reduce enemies
actually the evil karma ending was supposed to be canon for second son but they changed it to good karma cause that was the more popular ending.
Once art is put out to the public the right to interpretation no longer belongs to the author of not already clear within said story. You don’t just get to make a sequel to a story while ignoring everything important within the last 2 stories while still claiming it’s the same story. You cannot have your cake and eat it too especially when sequels necessarily don’t have as much freedom to do what you want in the story due to prior established story telling.
14:30 your wrong the author/creator or ip owner decides what’s canon
They gave a reason for it being canon. Saying that some conduits developed an immunity to the rfi, although idk how you can be immune to something like that. But then again I've seen some people never get sick, so idk.
Ok
But how can you gain immunity to something like the RFI which was a one-time thing?
@@yvngn1ng3n14 maybe it works like the beer virus where it's only an issue if you already have something else it can exploit
@@youtubestudiosucks978 maybe some were immune from even before and being a dormant conduit increases the chances of one surviving, like an animal in a cocoon.
When I first played infamous 1 my theory was that Cole was The Beast, but it was the Infamous version of Cole.
Because Kessler is able to travel back in time I thought that in an original timeline Cole got his powers became evil, and went insane and destroyed everything. Then he developed time travel abilities and went back to Kesslers universe and killed his family sending Kessler back in time.
So I figured that Infamous 2 would have Cole fighting an insane, superpowerful, evil version of himself that was chasing Kessler through different timelines.
Probably woulda been cool, but way more complicated.
With the current cannon you don't have to draw flow charts at least
In the infamous 1 ending the beast actually looks like Cole for some reason
@@InFamXYTsomeone actually said that somehow the original timelines beast is actually Cole because of someone being impaled by ice so either that version of the beast had ice powers as well as his own abilities or Lucy Kuo was working with him
@@shadowslayer2929 maybe, I mean Kessler's timeline wasn't probably the exact same as Cole's so you never know
I wish there was a line of Infamous games that take place after the evil ending of the first game.
I wish Evil Cole had his own canon timeline for us to play through.
The only way Second Son could have kept it's narrative intact canonically is if it continued the evil ending of Infamous 2. Cole has become the beast and Delsin is one of many activated conduits. That would've justified why conduits are still a thing and how they got their powers.
of course it would have, but then the world would be entirely different, wouldn't it?
The evil karma ending is canon. More people just did the good karma ending according to trophy data
5:16 I think it's implied that conduit genes can be naturally activated. (likely through immense distress considering both Kessler and Fetch develop new powers while while highly stressed.)
The only thing I can think of is with Augustine her powers are shown to be able to cut off another conduits so maybe she was immune to the RFI and maybe the RFI itself is what caused these conduits to activate like maybe it was a consequence of using the RFI and Kessler going back in time that the timeline altered allowing for some conduits to be activated by the inhibiting of a ray field
Personally I always believed that the reason conduits could still exist after Cole sacrificed himself is that when he tried to use it the first time with Zeke, Nix, and Kuo present the RFI began to kill Cole and company. Zeke being a quick albeit reckless thinker takes the Amp and slams the RFI out of Cole’s hands. Choosing the good ending after this event tells us that Zeke had to work to repair the RFI, and here’s where my theory comes into play because although Zeke is pretty smart, he isn’t Dr. Wolf, and he doesn’t fully understand the RFI. Once Coke defeats The Beast and uses the RFI it works and Coke succeeds, kind of. All the living conduits with active conduit genes are killed off, and most with an inactive gene are killed as well, but due to the damage Zeke inflicted on the device and the shoddy repair it doesn’t kill everyone who has the gene but instead activates their powers. My theory is that Hank, Eugene, Fetch, Augustine, Delsin, and everyone else were all activated at the same time due to the RFI. We know that a massive amount of energy is required to activate a conduit, so maybe the energy of all the dying conduits was transferred into the others somehow. We really have no idea what the conduit gene is or how it works so nothing is off the table. The only exception I could see in this theory is Augustine because she said she was activated by the beast, but who knows maybe she was just wrong. Hopefully some of these questions get answered if we ever get a Second Son 2
Although your alternative storyline idea greatly reminds me of The Force Unleashed, I still dig it and I think it would have been a better route than the official story. I could see the alternate story having a deep emotional impact.
Apart from the continuity issue my only gripe with the game is that it felt really short. Like a whole district was just gone.
I’ve literally been binge watching all your videos and I gotta say I never get sick of these
For me, I didn’t mine the retcon but when I first got Second Son, I was going through a dark moment in my life and I didn’t know anything about the first 2 games
I always thought to myself that the remaining conduits were very few in numbers at first after the ending of Infamous 2. Being so few was added to the fear against them as it was harder to accept them as a norm hence why "bioterrorists" was the name they got. And after a while naturally more of them started showing up due to the conduit gene evolving naturally now. This was in my headcanon anyways.
I feel like the reason conduits came back is explained by Zeek in the dlc where you help him a little and when you complete the dlc it gives you Cole's jacket outfit.
The government recreated the conduit gene and released it into the world and I guess it mutated to activate whenever instead of needing a Ray Sphere.
I mean you could pull a massive stretch and say that only dominant gene conduits died and all the current conduits are recessive gene conduits, which would be why they seem to control more mundane things like smoke and concrete.
For being such a big fan of the series, i hadn't really thought about how Second Son connected with the first 2. But yeah, remembering that Kessler **spoilers** is Cole from the future, I assume he must have experimented with other timelines to deduce what he needed to do so his younger self would do the most evil/good in both 1 and 2 (we don't know how time travel works in this world, so I'm assuming its "every travel through time creates a different timeline" rules).
Maybe theres multiple timelines where he did things slightly different in order to see the outcomes. Seeing as how he named his organization "The First Sons", maybe thats his way of numbering each experiment, "First Sons" being his "perfect" outcome. "Second Son" could probably be a slight variation of "First", where maybe the only difference is "Instead of every Conduit dying from the RFI, only Cole and the Beast die", hence why conduits are still around, and when we talk to Zeke in the DLC missions, we get confirmation that Cole is gone. Not just that, but notice how in 1 and 2, the cities are named differently, "New York" is "Empire City", "New Orleans" is "New Mirais". But in Second Son, Seattle is just Seattle.
I'm assuming that the whole "different timelines" thing would get touched up on in further sequels or comics or something after fans would start asking this exact question we're making, but they probably got too busy making Ghost of Tsushima to really pan it out. I just really hope they'll give it another shot after GoT 2 gets finished, GoT is fantastic, and could probably be deemed the last amazing PS4 era game, but InFAMOUS still has so much potential. Sure it could be argued that in this current era of "hero fatigue" (personally I don't this its so much "hero fatigue" but more so "badly written hero fatigue") a new InFAMOUS game wouldn't do well, but look at the Spider-Man games, and even Wolverine in the next year or so, if a hero is written well, and the gameplay is fun, it'll do well. Only time will tell, but we can hope.
Second Son was clearly the intended sequel to 2, but was originally based off 2's "Evil" ending. They likely had the full story down before the trophy data came out and they decided to switch which ending was canon, and the script suffers for this.
I mean, imagine Second Son's story but in its intended timeline. Seven years have passed since the fall of New Marais, and Cole has gotten to most of the country, using intel taken from Darpa, the NSA, the First Sons and Vermaak in order to recreate the power distribution tech there. He gets a willing conduit, Augustine, to do the transfer process and become head of ghe new police force so that this new society has some structure. Meanwhile, Cole heads to Seaford (the name they were originally gonna use) to activate more conduits. Delsin's village is near the outskirts of the blast but Delsin and Reggie crash into the DUP vehicle holding Fetch and Hank Daughtry mid transport and so are closer to the blast. This means the Plague hirs the Akomish tribe and Delsin, the newly-minted Conduit, needs to beat Augustine to get the tech he needs and save his people.
If Infamous Second Son took place after the evil ending of Infamous 2 it would be slightly more believable.
There are people on the street who say things like “you’re the second coming of Cole!” while you’re a hero
Ok so.. There is a dlc quest line, only for delux edition (later released free and un the PS+ service) that just tells you "Not everyone died" and cole brother appears and says "Cole would be proud of you", he says it even if you leave the quest for after beating the game on the bad ending so it was clearly rushed like the rest of the game
I was trying to head cannon several reasons as to why conduits reemerged but it's almost impossible to do so, it's been a minute since I played the game so at first I thought "well maybe since the detonation of the rfi new conduits have been bred, like what if Cole had a child with Trish it'd only be half conduit or the gene would be recessive" but even still, the rfi was stated to have killed everyone with a conduit gene present, even false conduits like Kuo (I think that was her name) died, and only 7 years have passed. This made me come up with a second theory which almost worked but there's a snag. I was thinking, ray spheres kill several people and transfer their energy to conduits in a sense, not precisely but that's the general idea, what if the rfi did the same thing but in reverse on a world wide scale? The wave kills conduits and takes their genes, wiping all the old conduits, but in the process creates new ones. However Augustine being there when the beast attacks empire city, with her gaining powers, kills this theory as she would have died after the rfis used. There's also a theory I'm currently forming while typing this, maybe the rfi did kill every conduit, but some of them were revived. My main support for this would be Cole and John white. You COULD say john died, he was atomized by the ray sphere but his soul,or essence or energy remained. So it's wishy washy if you want to consider him dead, BUT his physical being definitely was destroyed, as for Cole, at the very end we see a question mark shaped lightning bolt strike either cole himself in his casket, the boat he's on, or it's just on the horizon it's very quick but I'm pretty sure it strikes Cole directly. Now this was probably done initially to leave it somewhat open to coles fate in case they wanted to do more with him, but they did continue the series and that is the cannon ending so what would the lightning mean in universe? Was Cole revived? Well why didn't he return or find Zeke, that could simply be explained as he wanted to leave the life of a conduit behind and finally have a family, he gave his life for the world and that was enough. This theory could also support Augustine as she was turned by the beast and so could have been more resilient and nearly everyone on the eastern seaboard was dead so there would have been no one to take her gene, or simply....
Maybe some conduits just got lucky and that's all. Maybe some of them posses an already mutated variation of the conduit gene that the RFIs creator didn't take into account, as conduits are pretty rare when compared to the general population, one with a mutated gene would be rare even among conduits, and maybe the rfi empowered those with mutated conduit genes while it's was killing common conduits, or again transferring their power
Even still, to have to head cannon so many extravagant scenarios to make the story work at all is unacceptable. They literally could've said on the prologue screen "the world believes that the rfi killed every conduit on earth 7 years ago...This is not the case" and really what else would you have to do? They wouldn't even have to answer why all the conduits didn't die, they just didn't, things didn't go as expected as they more often than not don't. And then tie in some of my theories and the surviving conduits could've become super conduits or something and they could really expand the power set of you and the antagonists and aid the story, the beast was so cool because he was like an event, nuked his happy ass all the way down the east coast, imagine fighting a conduit who wiped out a continent in an instant, that'd be cool AF if done right.
if i had to rewrite the story, i dont think i would discard the characters we got in second son but try to improve them.
For those characters to get their powers, i would first stablish a bigger timeskip of perhaps 20 years or so. Military groups or even world countries would be digging the corpses of the conduits trying to study their genetics after the incident with the Beast. They would experiment in many kinds of people in many different ways, like testing on prision immates like Henry Daughtry, or developing products that could be labeled as medications of some and give those to people that can be easly tracked and supervised.
Augustine could be created by a group under ONU to contain those other groups and detain any possible new conduit. She could be a clone of a person who awakened her powers due to the Beast rampage. She remembers the devastation and is obsessed with killing all conduits because she believes that all are spawns of the devil himself because of the memories and to reflect the general outlook the world got from that incident.
Now there is a better context for a simmilar scenario to the game we got.
If i rember correctly apparently when they were doing the motion capture , they didn't have a finished script so Troy Baker and Travis Willigham had to improvise the scenes
^ Easiest answer ever, ofc it’s canon. I even having Delsin rocking Cole’s jacket from the game that started it all🤌🏼
The thing is, why does it matter if it is canon or not? As fans of anything we always seem to default to gauging something's quality based on this nebulous idea of canonicity, but really the fact that the game exists is in and of itself what matters. I'm reminded of the endless debates I had as a kid on the playground with my friends about the Dragonball Z movies and how Cooler is or isn't canon. Canon isn't that important as long as it's enjoyable. Maybe it doesn't link up perfectly with Infamous 2's ending, sure. What it does do however is tell a story within its own world that doesn't necessarily rely on the previous two games' backstory. Whether you think the story is good is another question entirely, but we need to let go of this idea of canon being the be all end all of every franchise ever written.
They never said that the Inhibitor was a guarantee for killing all conduits.
They said that it would cause Conduits to die.
The characters only assumed it was all of them.
Plus, it’s possible that all the conduits in Second Son are indeed part of an evolved branch of Conduits. Where they didn’t actually need Ray Sphere Particles in order to have powers.
Even if the RFI isn’t guaranteed to kill all conduits, how is it that it was powerful enough to kill conduits way overseas but not kill delsin and the others in Seattle? Even if they were more evolved conduits, there is nothing to suggest that they are. How exactly are they more evolved anyway? How could they even be more evolved? Evolutions and mutations in dna take many generations to occur and they were all alive at the same time Cole was before he died so that explanation just doesn’t make sense even as a theory.
The way i head canon it is that, if you were young enough, and in overall great health, you got weak and sick for a few weeks at the end of infamous 2, but you eventually recover. And that this caused the gene to mutate to activate from intesnse emotional overload. This SHOULD be said in game but i can believe this is kinda just, not talked about. Also i believe Cole is resurrected at the end of 2 by that lightning strike.
Thank You So Much For Making More inFAMOUS Videos, I need an inFAMOUS 3 with the evil ending of the second game with The Beast Cole 😎
You're not too far off the mark regarding Second Son's birth. According to what I've heard (though I can't say if it's entirely true), Sony was pressuring Sucker Punch to make a game from a recognized brand for the PS4, while SP were antsy to get started on Ghost of Tsushima. So a deal was made where SP would make Second Son (and First Light), then be left to their own devices to make their dream game. Whether that's entirely the case, I can't be sure. I have heard that SP were tempted to make a sequel based on the Evil ending where Cole took over as the Beast, but supposedly shifted gears because of data showing players had chosen the Good ending more than the evil. That would have been quite interesting to say the least, though it would have also necessitated a new protagonist since Cole would have been far too powerful to keep as the player character, and another nerf like what he had in Infamous 2 would have just been insulting to the audience.
In regards to the canon of Second Son, it is undeniably shaky. While having Dormant conduit gene holders could have worked, it certainly would have messed with the way Zeke described the "purge" in the second game. Dormant genes or recessive ones might have been able to explain the survival of conduits, even if it's not entirely true to real life genes, granted, real life genes also can't give people flight or crap literal lightning either. Still, it is a shame that Second Son feels so hodgepodge in its plot. I would say the evil storyline is alright, and does seem to make more sense in most ways, like Delsin clearly becoming addicted to obtaining new powers, with the only problem being how Reggie still acts all caring toward Delsin before he dies, which makes me wonder if the good ending and path were written at the last minute, or just "out of obligation" because the last two games had two endings.
You know I would love for sucker Punch to consider second son a spin-off and to create infamous 3 following the evil ending. We don't even have to play as cole we can play as a random conduit or even have a power Creator when we could create our own powers. You know delson's skill set kind of makes sense if he was the main character for infamous 3 because with the ability to absorb other conduits its powers would make him a major player.
I know this will never happen. But they should've just done the alleged original plan, making the Evil Ending canon in 2. It had so much more potential for future stories.
To this day I still find it dumb that they threw it away only because more players saw the good ending more based on the Playstation Trophy data, like no shit that players are going to go for the Good Ending, I think almost every single person does the Good Ending 1st because normally _THAT'S_ the one that leads to the main character NOT dying.
Just dropping by to tell you all that "inFamous 3" would've followed the evil ending of the second game but it was scrapped of fear that most players wouldn't understand it. See, the fact is most people only play through the good ending and end it there, but "cannonically" the evil ending would be the path to follow.
This makes me so sad cause the evil ending is so much better. If you play the game on good karma up until the "final" choice the game makes so much sense, something that I recommend anyone with a copy of inFamous 2 to do at some point.
Or don't, cause knowing that Seconc Son exists because some people looked at some trophy statistics and thought that making a game following the bad ending was bad idea, is so fucking frustrating.
Second Son to me is a crime against amazing potential, specially when the evil ending after a good karma playthrough is so good and sets up something far better.
P.S.: doing good karma playthrough with evil ending actually made me cry
Exactly. I don’t remember having played through the game as a hero and chose to side with John before. I wanna do that but I also don’t wanna play at 30fps lol. I wish Sony would release a remastered collection for current gen and PC already.
@@yvngn1ng3n14 Bruh, big same
inFamous needed a remake *far* more than last of us and *especially* horizon zero dawn.
Considering Infamous is older than both of those games
If the conduit gene popped up once, why couldn't it re evolve back into the genome?
The first game's recordings do state the gene is natural to humans, it just needs a kickstart.
Still, I think the story would be more interesting if it was set after the bad karma ending from "Infamous 2".
I loved second sun, and really wish it had sequels. I get why people might not like it but I loved the indigenous ties into the story.
Wasn't the vampire from festival of blood a conduit too. She was around for like 200 years before the main game assuming that festival of blood is loosely canon
I do have a theory that liquid Ray Feild Radiation is what gave Kuo her powers as well as the D.U.P soldiers.
• The only thing that activates power is Ray Feild Radiation so whatever they used on Kuo had to be connected.
• I also believe that Augustine didn't use the power transfer device for her soldiers rather liquid Ray Feild Radiation + her blood to guarantee they'd get her concrete power.
InFAMOUS Second Son took a lot of bad paths about what the game was about and it's content. Basically what we have now was planned as InFAMOUS 3 but ended up being a Origin Story for Delsin, an introduction to this new world of InFAMOUS after the already seen events. Some stuff was better. In the concept arts that you can find at Artstation you can see some of this stuff like the DUP not being a military thing but more of a Private Service or the DUP concrete powers where thought first as Glass Powers... But I guess this is related to making a game as fast as possible since PS4 at that time was releasing.
A theory was that the R.F.I was damaged when Zeke knocked it out of his hands and even though he fixed it it was still damaged to the point were it couldn't kill all Conduits.
• And it altered Ray Feild Radiation to activate powers more easily than previous conduits so that stress can do it more easily.
Why not prequel? Specifically about Kessler going back in time and taking over the First Sons.
I should note if TV tropes is to be trusted Second Son was originally going to follow the evil ending but they changed gears upon seeing the statistics are realizing how few players went the evil route. Depending on when they found this out there might not have been much time to change the script
This is true
I think the reason coduits are still around is because at the end of Infamous 2, it just said that a bunch of conduits started dying, not ALL of them. Which is why theres so few in second son. In infamous 2 evil route, you can see people with the conduit gene and theres quite a few just in new marais. Its somewhat reasonable to think that some conduits may have survived.
I'm glad you made this video. Yea "hoping no one would notice" is exactly what happened cuz even i didn't. I bought the explanation that this was a new gen of conduits without realizing the time inconsistency. The whole thing is just disrespectful in retrospect. Especially late game; no ng+, no ucg creator, boring side missions, short story, weak plot l overall. Honestly you come to second son for the powers and thats it.
Zeke was also in Second Son, albeit in a dlc side mission available via preorder bonus, where he tells you that Cole died confirming that Infamous 2's "good ending" was the "canon ending."
New TBP video, let’s go!
Notifications squad, let’s go!
@@Private-Potato
Eyyy!
Notification squad!
I could be wrong but i dont recall it ever saying that the Ray Sphere is what gave conduits their powers in Kessler's original timeline. My theory is that the conduit gene is similar to the X gene in Marvel or Meta gene in DC, where people can manifest powers due to extreme trama or stress. My examples of this are what we know about the main cast of Second Son. Hank was a carreer criminal in and out of prision and while he loved it its still a pretty stressful life to lead, Eugene was builled his entire life and then he was pushed too far, we know Delsin lost his parents (its never stated how or when) but thats a huge trama for someone to go through and given that his powers are just to absorb others they could have manifested without anyone even noticing. As for Fetch, we dont know what her initial stresser was but we saw that in First Light her abilities increased or expanded everytime she had one of her "episodes". So this leads me to believe in the original timeline conduits appeared naturally but the gene remained dormat until some time in the future and so when Kessler went back in time to make Cole a conduit he needed something to jump start the gene because it would have been too late to just wait for it to activate naturally like it was suppose to thus the creation of the Ray Sphere came to be.
This then in my opinion ties into how conduits still exist in Second Son. The RFI was successful in wiping out the plague and killing most conduits all over the world but that wouldn't stop new people from being born with the gene and after enough time had passed the conduit gene was then able to activte naturally like it was suppose to, although in this timeline it activated faster due to Kessler's interference, forcing to activate early. As for those conduits who survived like augustine..... it maybe be a lazy reason but it could be that because it was the beast who activted her powers she wasnt effected by the RFI.
I played second son without playing any of the other games and it was one of the few game I ever got the platinum trophy for. I had no idea they made such a slip up with their story until I stumbled upon this video today lmao. I still regard second son as one of the best games I have played and one of the only ps4 games that felt next gen to me .
"I don't remember anything else they've made."
You don't remember sly cooper? You have an excellent series to catch up on!
I like how the description for TBPs idea for Infamous 3 is basically Star Wars The Force Unleashed but without lightsabers lol.
13:20 can it really be considered a tradition if they’ve only done it once (Sly Cooper)? From what I can tell they didn’t own the rights to Rocket on Wheels so I wouldn’t count that as their franchise (or even a franchise given it was just one game)
‘Retcon’ wouldn’t have been needed if devs had stuck to their guns and just followed up to the ‘canon’ ending in inFamous 2.
Instead of caving to crybabies that wanted Cole McGrath to end the 2nd entry as a ‘good guy’ by sacrificing himself.
I don't want it to be cannon. I had my own idea how to do a third one: you play as Kessler and the game starts by leading up to when he goes back in time, first like 20 min maybe as a tutorial, but similar set up as the Ray Sphere shards power up, as future technology that traveled with you back in time, that you need to collect in order to power up.
Throughout the game once in the present you have the option
"go public with the information you have, save lives, but get black sited to be experimented on by the government,"
No beast because no First Sons.
Other option, take out the First Sons your own way, the discoveries die with them, opening the door for you becoming THE ONLY Superhero, Super Villain, or new life as like a scientist yourself.
The other options is you joining the First Sons for various reasons, some as undercover for the other 2, some as forced cooperation, some as just the offer of power.
All to answer the question: Why didn't Kessler just murder these guys when he arrived back in time.
It's weird that the Beast isn't even mentioned.
I read somewhere that the developers of Infamous 2 wanted to continue with the evil ending but more people did the good ending so they were kind of stuck and had to rush ideas
"Isn't that a mix of 17 X-Men plots" is the entire plot of Infamous in a nutshell.
I think a lot of the problems Second Son has is also it's inability to understand how the fuck did Conduits survive, the DLC barely answers those questions, in fact, it creates more questions than it bothers answering. And in regards to Agustine, how did she and Celia (the paper conduit) even survive the RFI? And why is the Conduit gene back after that device made it completely extinct? For a game that can't even tell it's ass from it's elbow, it answers a lot of the questions poorly, like how a lot of the D.U.P got Agustine's powers without a machine made for said task, how did Fetch, Eugene and Hank got their powers, how the fuck a device like the RFI cleaned Ray Sphere radiation only for that to be back in a year. All of this makes absolutely zero sense and it made me wish they went for the evil ending instead, I didn't even know we chose how the franchise would go going forward, at least with that ending I won't have to bear Delsin's douchiness.
One thing I think could've worked out for Second Son was using the First Sons again, say that they recreate a new version of the Ray Sphere using Kesler's research, they blow up some cities and that would result on the Conduit gene taking a new form, like before, radiation would start traveling the entire country and actiavting Conduits at random. I think that would also answer the increase on Conduits because, as far as we know, the only Conduits active are the ones on Empire City (that died when the Beast nuked the entire city), the ice squad and the monsters Bertrand created, maybe even people the Beast activated on his way to New Marais and all of them died with the RFI. What if Agustine was actually caught into new Ray Sphere's explosion and she along with Celia are turned, same thing as her backstory, yadda yadda yadda and the D.U.P is created. Maybe a new detail is that she gets her hands on the Ray Sphere and, because of her position of power, Agustine kidnapps randoms on the street and uses them to create more Conduits, she needs to keep the D.U.P or else the goverment will take custody of them.
What happens with Delsin, to be honest I don't give a flying shit, he can do whatever.
An even bigger plot hole, is that it’s implied in one of the dead drops in infamous 2 - that Kessler secretly knew John would eventually become the beast.
So if Kessler knew the beasts identify in his original timeline, why would he side with the people responsible for creating the device that created him, instead of immediately tracking down John and killing him? Thus preventing his original timeline from happening in the first place.
I think they went about it wrong. They could've easily said the new conduits are a result of gene therapy sneakily done through various medical treatments etc.
I loved the games story when I played back in 2015. I was too young to realize all the flaws in the story. It's a bummer because this series had huge potential to be one of Sony's greatest franchises. Thankfully the gameplay is so damn amazing, which is the most important thing in video games.
Still love SS and prefer it over 2. 2 got too gimmicky to me and why 1 stands story wise as the best.
inFamous 2 is still top 5 PS3 exclusive for me.
Actually Sucker Punch’s original idea for an Infamous 3 was actually supposed to follow the bad ending of Infamous 2
Foxx already said that wasnt true. He said he just went by the natural popular ending. Never was there a bad ending canon made.
I think the question of second son's canonicity could have been solved if the game opened stating that only the conduits who had their powers activated died due to a design flaw with the RFI only eradicating ray sphere radiation and thus only harming conduits who were already exposed to it not effecting those who's powers were still dormant only rendering them unconscious for a short period of time
They should of stuck with the evil ending of 2 being canon which was the original plan. plus it makes sense for a multitude of reasons.
Thanks for shouting out the kinda-sorta theory about a second, original Beast. I've had that one for years, but all I tend to get is about the dead drop message that seems to indicate it is John White. I get that, but it seems like Kessler never knew his Beast's name, and with how far back in time he went, even confirming that someone was born to the same family could be iffy. My headcanon: The Beast was inevitable. Someone or something like it was going to emerge, and worse, the original timeline Beast still existed and might one day duplicate Kessler's time journey. John White was a practice Beast against the original, one manipulated by Kessler to be Cole's prep run. Now, if we're using comic book logic, such as Cole seemed to like, alt-timelines like Age Of Apocalypse or Flashpoint don't go away when time is set right, they just become alternate realities. So maybe in a game we'll never see, the new protagonist or a surviving Cole will have to face down a truly rampaging Beast.
Anyway, thanks for at least acknowledging it.
My headcanon is when Zeke hit the RFI with the Amp he said he could fix it but what if it wasn't completely fixed, which is the reason why conduits are still around in the events of Second Son
The evil ending in infamous 2 was supposed to be the continuation but they said they saw that 78% of people were picking to sacrifice Cole so they changed it for some reason. Nate said he was disappointed he didn't get to continue the story the way he wanted to, which was filling the world full of conduits. In the end I still don't see why they kept it going story wise but it's still a really good game and fun.
As far as the Kessler retcon stuff and conduits being tied to the ray sphere , here's my theory. In Kessler's timeline conduits are a mutation like mutants and all Kessler did was artificially jumpstart this evolution early in the timeline and if that's the case then there most likely was no ray sphere radiation to poison the population, just the Beast and his genocide so that was the only threat he knew of to warn Cole of. As far as the ending to Infamous 2 it's been a long time since I played it so I don't remember but did they specify that the rfid would wipe out the conduit gene or just conduits?
In Second Son, there are a few ways it can work in my eyes. Conduits are still around because John created/activated more of them, and some people have the conduit gene. The RFI took out the active conduits, but in those with a dormant gene, it caused the mutation that activated the conduit gene. Easy.
Its canon, the thing is the original concept was that it was gonna go off the evil ending. But since so many played the good ending, they changed it.
Also the creator does have the authority over canon. Thats why fanons exist.
I thought it was made pretty clear that John was the Beast in both timelines, and that Kessler thought he had a chance to beat him when he was younger but chose not to because he didn't want to risk his family. That why his goal was to make Cole inFamous and stronger. Important to note that John wasn't activated at first either, only when the ray sphere is activated/destroyed the 2nd time in the first game. I also don't think they specified the plague happening in the alternate timeline, that may have been a side affect of the ray sphere being the main cause of conduit outbreaks instead of say a current through a blast core which is how Cole and Delsin enhance their powers in the follow up games.
According to the “Cole’s Legacy” DLC there are 2 theories as for why conduits still exist after inFAMOUS 2:
1- the plague wasn’t cured it instead mutated people to have the conduit gene
2- somehow the conduit gene was spread from previous conduits
The guy who discovered the theories said he’d looked into them and found no evidence for either but I personally believe the first theory is more accurate as it would explain why conduits are sprouting up left and right. Although this theory implies that Zeke is now a conduit (and potentially the same powers as Cole if he was struck by the lighting bolt in the final shot of inFAMOUS 2) so hey, his dream from the first game to let others have powers (himself included) came true.
Cole was supposed to end evil but no Sucker Punch let there writing be determined by the choice of the player like some patreon voting poll
InFamous is indeed one of my favourite PlayStation exclusives ever. When I replayed these games again. I still enjoyed it,especially InFamous 2. But Second Son on the other hand is a hit and miss for me back when I first played during its launch title. Gameplay is fun and the main protagonists is okay,but the story is kinda “eh” to me. They did say that they use InFamous 2s good ending to continue Second Sons storytelling,but they weren’t no connection to the previous game. They don’t mention Cole’s sacrifice nor they didn’t bother showing Zeke.
Zeke would make sense to be here. He’ll become a guide to Delsin and his powers and give some connected storytelling.