Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we’re here.
Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.
Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!
Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.
Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.
Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.
Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.
I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.
Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).
I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.
SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.
I recall a few games where I’ve had to limit the processor speed.
The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either “The 11th Hour” or “The 7th Guest”. It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.
At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone's dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying... That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations... that would be absolutely ghoulish.
Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.
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.
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.
From Wikipedia: In November 2022, Embracer Group stated that Saints Row “did not meet the full expectations and left the fanbase partially polarized”, but financially “performed in line with management expectations in the quarter.”
The piles of money were as high as we expected, but really we wanted them to be higher
More like "We don’t want to say it was only that game… "
Though actually with it a year later, I would say their follow up effort wasn’t amazing them… which makes more sense. They probably were going through Pre-prod on “saints row too” or what ever it was going to be. And Embracer didn’t want to continue.
Sales are typically not going to be followed up by refunds in a meaningful way, however poor public reception will hurt the sales of the next iteration.
The sales were ok but the consensus is that the game is shit, or ” the udders are dry, time to slaughter the cow"
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.
Just because the studio shut down doesn’t necessarily mean they lost their jobs. Often (especially for a giant publisher like Embracer), talent gets moved to other studios since it’s easier and cheaper than hiring new people.
But when you’re part of a smaller studio, you have creative control and freedom you don’t get when you’re a cog in someone else’s machine. People who go into this industry typically are looking for that more than just a salary, especially since other non-game jobs usually pay better. Although, idk what Volition was like internally, so maybe it sucked to work there.
This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.
It wasn’t published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic’s offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.
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.
In my dreams, Hideo Kojima, the old Castlevania people, the fired senior writers at BioWare, and now, the old gods of Volition when it was good, are quietly building a studio together somewhere. With Mick Gordon and Jeremy Soule running OSTs.
That’s entirely unconfirmed hearsay. He’s also been in this industry since FF6, working with a heck of a lot of people, so it would very much be sudden and unusual.
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