As someone who loved their older games, this sucks; but as someone who has played their newer games, this was expected.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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The remake was so boring that I uninstalled the game before I even finished the first mission.
I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.
It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.
City Unleashed: Crime Revolt
Default (GPT-3.5)
User Create the plot for a game similar to the first four Saints Row games
ChatGPT Title: "City Unleashed"
Plot: In the sprawling metropolis of Havencross, crime syndicates have taken control, leaving the city in chaos. You play as a street-smart vigilante who rises to power in order to reclaim the city from the clutches of these criminal organizations. As you build your own crew and establish dominance, you'll face off against rival gangs, corrupt officials, and powerful crime lords.
Starting as a small-time crook with a personal vendetta, you'll complete daring heists, engage in intense street races, and execute audacious stunts to earn respect and resources. Your actions catch the attention of an underground resistance that seeks to topple the syndicates. They offer you support, guidance, and a chance to reshape Havencross.
The game offers an open-world environment, allowing you to explore the sprawling city, engage in a variety of activities, and make choices that influence the narrative. Customization plays a significant role, not only in terms of your character's appearance but also in building your gang's identity, from outfits to vehicles to hideouts.
Throughout the game, you'll encounter memorable characters, each with their own motivations and backstories. As you forge alliances and rivalries, the balance of power in the city shifts dynamically. The story takes unexpected turns as you uncover the dark secrets behind the syndicates' rise to power and their connections to influential figures in the city.
With a blend of over-the-top action, humor, and engaging storytelling, "City Unleashed" captures the essence of the first four Saints Row games, delivering a high-octane, open-world experience filled with outrageous missions, explosive combat, and a dynamic environment that reacts to your choices.
ChatGPT did way better.
I'll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
- Create other games worth mention.
- Have memorable characters.
- Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
- Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I'd level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
- Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
- Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that's where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.
Yeah there's always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn't even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
SR2 just felt like the crazy Vice City sequel that Rockstar refused to give me at the time.
San Andreas, GTA4 felt too serious. SR3 and 4 felt too silly, to the point of turning into Crackdown.
GTA5 felt back on track though, and that's probably mostly down to Trevor. You can cause utter mayhem without breaking character.
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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.
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.
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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.
And here I thought that tying game speed to CPU speed was a concept that died in the early 90s...
Pfft-- Japanese devs are still doing this stupid shit nowadays. It's no wonder their in-house PC ports are usually hit or miss.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Let's try being Overwatch!
Let's try starting from scratch!
Let's try permanently shutting down!
Probably just no more actually talented people where they were needed. Be it anything from devs to board of directors.
I mean, SR4 was fun, but ideas seemed to be dwindling down already.
A lot of the features in SR4 were DLC in SR3. I think they took the story as far as it can reasonably go. SR2 was the best.
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.
Buy up everything and WHOOPS we spent too much close down everything!
Fucking bullshit.
Truthfully Agents of Mayhem isn't Overwatch... Which is kind of the problem. It wasn't saints row, It wasn't a new game. It just kind of existed.
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.
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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.
Epic was the least of the problems here.
SR2022 is free on PS+ next month and all the advice I've seen says "save your bandwidth and time".
Raise a glass to a fallen comrade, and maybe play Red Faction Guerrilla again, but the Volition of old was gone a long time ago.
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
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.
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And another studio hits the dust. So long! We hardly knew yee. At least be grateful you haven't ended up in the Call of Duty mines, like Raven.
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This is a long time coming, but they'll always be the studio that made Freespace 2, the 6DoF combat sim GOAT
I mean, I could see this coming.
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.
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.
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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
they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2
And yet their successful games were SR3 and SR4, when the games could stand on their own instead of needing to tag along with GTA for publicity.
They had absolutely 1 thing to do:
Remake Saints Row 2.
And they continued to ignore what everyone wanted.
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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
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I think everyone was kinda expecting it but it's still sad to see 😥
They had a lot of hits. Descent was revolutionary.
30 year old studio. That's quite sad. Another victim of hyper capitalism.
Damn hyper capitalism. THQ should have kept funneling money to a company that couldn’t make a game people wanted.
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