They had some kickass developer streams on YouTube. I still remember when they were playing Saints Row 3 and (I think it was the lead designer) being amazed that a helicopter had an interior texture for the cargobay even though 99% of the time you wouldn’t see it. Also skinballs and how they used markers to determine NPC behaviour out in the world.
Also the horror story of how they spent weeks compiling visibility volumes for Saints row 1 and having to satisfy silly requirements set by Microsoft such as having a game trailer play on the title screen if no input was detected for a set period of time. They just played a video of them playing the fucking game so they didn’t have to do any cinematics lmao.
The Red Fraction Guerilla stream was extremely interesting. How they managed to make destructible buildings and the limitations of that system. They used a stress mechanic that used key parts of a buildings frame to determine how stable it is (can’t remember if they used vertex weighing or not).
But unfortunately the most talented on the team didn’t get much of an input of where the IP went
Damn, knowing this reboot was supposed to be the start of the new Saints Row franchise. It’s depressing to just see it crumble down like this. I mean seriously in the broad scheme of things what happened here? It’s like after SR4 they were all out of ideas.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.
I’d say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a “GTA clone” and into its own category.
Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don’t really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.
3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.
For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the “Johnny Gat is the GOAT” attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.
This has more to do with Embracer Group’s June announcement for upcoming large scale restructuring, layoffs, game cancelations, and studio closures than anything else. Embracer has even hit hard at studios that were profitable or had games in the pipeline that were expected to be a huge sales success.
As much as I love games, the industry is a tough place to work, and the layoff cycles are striking once again.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.
And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.
Saints Row 2022 took a very different direction than all of the previous games combined, and it wasn’t a direction the die-hard fans of the series liked for the most part.
The same thing is gonna happen with the always-online likely DRM-filled freemium Skate 3 sequel called Skate. I can see that one end up flopping and that might kill off the series, and that makes me really sad. It makes me even more sad because it’s the first Skate game in the series actually coming to the PC, and they’re almost guaranteed to fuck it up. Corporate greed is killing gaming, modern gaming is shit for the most part.
Volition died a long time ago. It started in 2017 with Agents of Mayhem. Saints Row: The Third Remastered and Saints Row IV: Re-Elected Edition continue the fall. SR 2022 finished the job.
They made good games in the past. But we’re talking about the past not now.
I think they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2. It’s fun fooling around and being wacky in a game that has realism to it but when the game is built solely around being wacky it’s just boring.
I don’t agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don’t want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it’s own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.
SR3 was the top game for me. SR4 was a bit too much, but SR3 felt like it hit that sweet spot of goofiness, insanity, and just enough realism for me to keep me invested in the world
SR 1 and 2 were the best because they were like GTA, I don’t consider it a bad thing. 3 and 4 were a bit boring for me because Steelport was one of the dullest cities I’ve ever seen in a game.
My perception of Saints Row isn’t that they did something wrong or changed in a bad direction, but to the contrary, the type of humour and “amusement” the game relied on didn’t age particularly well, it comes from the age of le random, LMFAO and similar content.
Yup. There’s a lot of dumb moaning about how it “went woke” and that it changed too much, but having played it, it’s biggest flaw (imo) was that it didn’t change enough. It tried to integrate humor and story that peaked in the late 2000s and mash it together with a “modern” setting and cast. And it didn’t help that the gameplay felt as aged as the humor. All in all, it was too medium for it’s own good, taking too few risks and not changing enough for a franchise that made it’s mark pushing the envelope.
Damn shame. I’ve not played the recent game but I loved Saints Row 3. Spent a lot of hours just driving around and beating people up with a dildo. Sad times.
3 was the first GTA type of game I ever finished in my life. Could never fight through 3, VC, SA, 4, or 5, but I blasted through SR3 every day till I finished it
They actually understood that things can and should be fun
Volition has been a long standing company with a slew of awesome games. They did a ton with THQ like 20 years ago that were amazing.
Summoner is one of my favorite games to date. It didn’t age well, but the story was amazing.
The descent games were intense as well.
I couldn’t find it on their wiki page, but I’m pretty sure they had a hand in loads of wrestling games in the late 90’s early 2000’s. WWF no mercy, smack down 1-4 as well.
As for saints row, I beat 1-3. The storyline to the first was unmatched by any GTA storyline. It was a shame to see them slink away from the original due to ridicule of being a “GTA clone.” The story was compelling, the voice acting outside of johnny gat was decent. The multiplayer experience offered far more than anything GTA had at the time. The best we got for GTA was in 2008 when they released their free roam multiplayer with GTA 4. By then saints row 2 had full coop.
Case and point. You’re either too young to know this developer in their prime, too retarded to recognize the loss of a good developer (albeit they haven’t put out much in the last few years), or both.
I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.
They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn’t do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn’t anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.
I honestly think gamer’s expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn’t meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.
The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.
Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.
Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.
Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.
Saints Row reboot at least had an interesting setting and played okay. But it was let down by awful writing and a lack of scope.
It didnt have all the features of even Saints Row 2. The plot seemed to pander to millennials in a very “how do you do fellow kids” kinda way. Some of the gameplay was repetitive and boring and it had a few bugs.
With a different writing team and another year in development, it could have been a huge success, but they didnt so it wasn’t. RIP Volition.
We have to remember that it’s the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.
You don’t understand, it’s not the companies that make everything suck, it’s the management, modern software management crushes the beauty out of both the work and the design, and passionate visionaries are displaced for marketing droids with PowerPoint slides about dlc monetization through nfts.
That’s sad, but not unexpected. The studio had pretty massive layoffs a few years ago I think when their Overwatch clone didn’t sell well. And this Saints Row reboot didn’t do well either.
Hope all the good people here find some work, one of my favorite LPers worked there and he’s a good guy. Sucks he and others have been jerked around twice like this.
theverge.com
Aktywne