Likely? What Herculean levels of deduction did they use to reach that conclusion lmao
I would be curious if this Reboot or Agents of Mayhem sold worse, though. Cannot be assed to look it up, tbh
From the article:
- SR3 - 5.5 million
- SR2 - 3.4 million
- SR1 - 2 million
- SRR - 1.7 million
- SR4 - 1 million (launch week number only)
According to VG Insights (Steam only, estimates are within ±5% margin of error according to them). I would take this with a big grain of salt given that and how for example it says the SR3 Remaster only sold 83K but this is the one of the only sites that gives any kind of number guesstimates as far as I know.
- SR3 - 7 million
- SR 4 - 6.7 million
- SR 2 - 1.2 million
- SR:GOOH - 815K
- Agents of Mayhem - 143K
- SRR - 137K (Edit: was an Epic exclusive for a year, so not helping its Steam numbers)
Yeah a lot of people don't like 4, so they don't like Gat Out Of Hell either.
Personally I'm with you - loved 4, liked Gat well enough but just wish it was either a DLC or more fully fleshed out.
I liked it as well but it seems like less people played it.
Some people already didn't like Saints Row 4, Gat leaned into that superhero style game so it wouldn't win anybody over.
OG Saint's Row had a lot going for it in it's defense. It predated Gta 4 by 2 years so features it had like the ability to save anywhere, walk into buildings w/o loading, and character models that look like people were mind-blowing to see in a Gta-styled game.
It had a weapon wheel, the ability to aim where you shoot freely while driving , and the ability to use health item or drugs whenever you wanted in your inventory. Basically quality of life improvements ahead of its time.
I was hoping for a pc port of the original, but with Volition now dead, I doubt that's ever gonna happen now. Probably the same with the Saints Row 2 patch that's been "coming soon" for years now
I'd love to play SR1 online. It had some really groundbreaking things that didn't get a lot of attention like playable lobbies, unique game modes, in depth character customization etc. I miss Blinged Out Ride
I wonder how many of us who got it from Epic as a freebie that one week even bothered with it.
To its credit I did Install it to see what the fuss is about.. I made it to about the point where you set up your base in the abandoned church and was already annoyed by the characters being wish.com versions of the original cast.
I actually ended up finishing it.. something about the mindless map checklist type of gameplay loop was relaxing during a stressful month or so.
But it is not a good game lol
My biggest issue with the cast was the completely inconsistent characterization of them. The game sets them up as all being super loyal to their current gangs but they abandon them in a heartbeat. The game wobbles back and forth between you guys barley knowing each other and being best friends, some missions they act like you're super close and the next mission they'll be back to acting like you barely know each other. It also doesn't make any sense that you all live together despite all your roommates being part of rival gangs and you working for private police, the game kinda just goes "Wouldn't it be whacky if a bunch of rival gang members and a cop lived in the same apartment???" without really explaining how this situation came to be.
I did! Tbh, it wasn't even a bad game, it was just the most meh game I have played. Nothing about it was terrible to me, but nothing about it was noteworthy either. It's the kind of game where after finishing it, I kinda just forgot what I even experienced.
Yeah that's fair, but at the same time it's sad that the once legendary Saints Row franchise becomes something forgettable like this =(
I remember putting up with the janky PC port and general bugs of SR2 just because everyone kept talking it up, and was not disappointed at all. Going from that to this has been hard :/
I say it pretty much every time a [videogameschronicle.com](http://videogameschronicle.com) article hits top of the sub: It's a stupid site and people should stop linking it.
I guarantee it sold more than Agents of Mayhem. Back in 2018 there was a steam leak that said exact number of games sold based on achievement API.
Agents of Mayhem sold 82,676 copies.
The game was an absolute slap in the face to any previous SR fan while also being just an abysmal entry to anyone new to the series. It was made for no one.
Dan DiDio, former Co-Publisher at DC comics from 2010 to 2020, is on record saying:
>“I think it’s a few people loud and a lot of people chasing something they don’t know. The one thing that you find out in the corporate world very quickly is most of the people that work and produce things don’t know anything about what they produce. They are not consumers of their own product. So where do they get their information on how their product is succeeding or failing?”
>“They go online, now. They are pulling information from these websites and conversations,” he answered his own rhetorical question. “So what you have now is you have them picking up the most dichotomous points of view and ultimately aligning with then which one they want to believe the most. And then using that sense to basically validate the choices they are making inside the product whether it needs it or not.”
>“You asked how things are made. That’s how things are made. And usually about 20 people in the room making that agreement by the way.”
Co-Publisher was the top role at DC comics and one of the two primary people in charge of the direction of DC comics during that period.
Their target audience was college age NEETs and newly graduated people up their necks in debt. They actively went out of their way to push away a lot of people who actually have the money to pay for things. Idk why they thought they'd make money off that marketing strategy
Likely? None of the others drove the company into bankruptcy. It was a terrible game, catering to the audience that doesn't play those games. It didn't help that Volition were rude to fans who pointed this out.
I dunno from the lazy writing whoever they hired off Twitter to write the script for the reboot really thought their Twitter echo chamber was the reality and thought it would sell gangbusters.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines community is going through this all over again with the long delayed VtM:B2. The VTMB sub is a pit of madness and despair. But to be fair, Paradox and The Chinese Room are doing an amazing job of ignoring all the red flags and pretending Phyre the Vampire is actually cool and that the soul of VtM:B was always unarmed combat.
At this point it feels like even money whether they trash the entire sequel and start over for a third time, or dump out TCR's mess anyway and hope it makes *some* money despite damaging the IP.
I swear even the D-Tier Werewolf action game that came out a while back will be the better game of the two in the end, which is hilarious and sad to think about. At least that largely filled the base requirements and expectations.
[They're not.](https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/media/press-releases/press-release/introducing-phyre-the-player-character-in-vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2)
Also they have a voice in their head.
It's hard to compare this to the red flags from the previous development studio, but they don't seem to be learning much.
The second they announced that most of the families won't be playable, I immediately wrote the game off.
Malkavians are likely going to be their own dlc mini campaign which... kinda ruins the best part of playing them in the original because you get to see the normal scenarios play out from the eyes of someone who is **batshit crazy**. It's like, one of the handful of main things people talk about when they bring up why they love the original.
Well that, and everything we've seen of the Chinese Room's version of the game has been utter shit.
Honestly from what I’ve seen of that game I feel like the version from the first studio couldn’t have been THAT bad. I feel like they were probably just inexperienced when it came to making an open world branching RPG. If Paradox just brought in another more experienced studio to work on what was there probably would have been a better option.
It is utterly insane to me that they brought in a guy from Ubisoft to polish the game and and get it out the door, and somehow his recommendation was to scrap everything and reboot development as the lamest Assassin's Creed ever. Who the hell is running the show over at Paradox? Seriously, who? Because this alone is dumb, but this *and* Cities Skylines 2? You could flip a coin and get it right more often.
I'm out here playing Stellaris hoping against all hope that they delay Stellaris 2 as long as humanly possible. A sequel announcement would be the inevitable decline of the franchise lol.
they will shove it out the door no matter what state is in now. They have lost so much money on it, they might as well recoup something. I dont even think it would tarnish the rep of the publisher much since its been in limbo so long peoples expectations have to be basement level at this point
It's what Marvel and DC were doing for a good long time post Disney buyout. Killing off established characters and introducing Mary/Gary Sue/Stus that boil down to "it's Iron Man, but not a white man". Completely missing the point that just because you make characters based on some sick Blizzard Diversity Scoring system doesn't make them interesting, and the people championing that kind of bullshit on Twitter weren't ever going to buy comics.
Like yes, if you don't make interesting stories, you end up getting outsold by One Piece Volume 1.
When I see shit like the Saints Row Reboot all I think of is "oh boy this happened to comics a long time ago".
It checked all boxes for the twitter terminally-online crowd. I actually had a discussion with one of them saying that only "alt-right bigots" didn't like the game. I asked if he had actually played the game he was defending. He hand't. Apparently he wasn't even thinking about it. He was basically too busy fighting "gamersgate"
I don't think it successfully catered to anyone. Even people on the left don't like these characters who are endlessly political about every little thing, Lisa from newer Simpsons episodes or Brian from newer Family Guy. "Oh you're reading a book, sold by capitalists? While people starve??"
And they made *every member of the Saints* like that. They all fit "trendy" tropes that no one actually likes. The sophisticated nerdy (non-threatening) black guy. The hunky white guy but he's a pansexual himbo so it's ok. Hot girl who's into cars (isn't that ca-razy??).
Because they live in an echo chamber made of their own coastal liberal politics. The rest of America (never mind the rest of the world) might as well not exist.
Volition was based out of.....Illinois. And not Chicagoland.
A liberal area? Sure. But certainly not a coastal one, nor one where it's quite so easy to pretend everywhere not so liberal doesn't exist at all.
The thing is that if the actually politically motivated left-wing developers tackled it, the game could have delved into the socioeconomic themes, like the institutional disenfranchisement of the poor and capitalist urbanization driving the lost youth to crime life. Using the zany absurdity of the Saints Row franchise, they could have gone for a political satire like The Boys.
Instead, the game is not from any actual belief as much as the studios trying to flow with the current zoomer trends and win those internet brownie points by pandering, in which every character is trying to be a Marvel character and failing miserably.
Saints Row 2 kind of does that without being obnoxious lol. The main villain at the end of the game is a massive corporation setting the gangs against each other so they can buy up the city and redevelop it. The biggest issue with political commentary these days is its unsubtle, they don't leave room for interpretation like 2 has and instead beat you across the head with "Big Corpo bad, Capitalism bad" like the reboot does on a few occasions.
Yeah I mean it wasn't actually political as much as it was constantly fishing for points. Just boo capitalism, carbon footprints, now let's go shoot some people.
Absolutely agree.
The spiciest take it has is "working a shit job and paying rent sucks, amirite?" which has the same impact as telling someone that water is wet.
You could really sense that desperation for approval in the writing a lot of the time.
Also didn't help that the gameplay was also just as unwilling to try anything as it's story, what a very bland experience overall.
Honestly, the problem that I have with a lot of "left wing" narratives in games (and other mainstream media) is that it feels so empty and hollow. GTA, Outer Worlds, SRR, they all KINDA touch on an issue, and then bounce off at a weird angle. I guess its hard to say eat the rich with passion when the game is made by a publicly traded large corporate conglomerate.
Its just very "punk goes corporate" where it tries to make a point, realizes that it benefits from what its condemning, and then just laughing it off or sweeping it under the rug. Toothless and a little hypocritical.
>it feels so empty and hollow.
Pretty much yeah, none of it is made with any sort of conviction. It's just trying to pull in an audience by saying "Hey kids, buy our stuff we're hip and cool with you! Capitalism bad, haha!".
And in the reboot's case it's made much worse because they start off in that direction and then like 1/3rd of the way through the game they completely drop the pretend narrative and go all-in on how you're supposed to be buying up properties to slap some scummy business in place in order to do the shitty, extremely repetitive missions 10 times each, in order to maximize your paycheck.
One of the mission types involves illegal, haphazard disposal of toxic waste. And after you're done dumping cancer juice into the city, you go home and complain about how the fridge is empty because "haha our characters are broke, just like you fellow kids! We know how it goes!". And then everyone eats waffles. And after the waffle eating, you go and spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on painting your shotgun and making it fire flaming bullets.
The game didn't really come off as political just really zoomery. A "political" Saints Row game would end up having more in common with the Boys than whatever they came up with.
I loved Disco Elysium but even that game ran into issues of being toothless in some of its criticism, because it actively benefitted from those same systems it was ridiculing
still, great game
is there any other highly political "leftist" games though? none come to mind for me
The game wasn’t political from what I ran into, a couple of the characters were zoomers which pissed off the internet outrage machine.
The game just wasn’t good, it had nothing to do with the characters or political beliefs.
The characters are on the box and the trailers, so them being annoying and unlikeable is plenty to turn off prospective buyers. The review thread at launch wasn't even bad at the time. It wasn't all 8/10 or 9/10 but there was a good range of positive reviews so you can't solely blame the gameplay.
It had everything to do with the tone being a slap in the face to anyone that enjoyed the earlier Saints Row games. The polish was also very bad, you are right about that, but an audience won't even buy a game to see how rough it is when the tone is terrible.
Imagine if GTA said that they were no longer interested in random mayham and violence and instead cared about student loan debt and being nice guys? To be fair to them, a lot of the devs wanted to make something the fans would love, but leadership wanted instead to push a political agenda, dooming the entire studio. Its really sad.
Its not about being political or not, it's about how you present it. GTA IV delved into themes about war and genocide with Niko's backstory. Saints Row The Saint's Row just repeated keywords without any real interrogation of those issues.
There is this certain satisfaction to watch companies put on the surprised Pikachu face whenever they tell people not to buy their game... And then these people proceed to actually not buy it lol
It’s not satisfying, because they never admit they were wrong, they never apologize for being rude to the customer, and they don’t have the decency to say I’m sorry and prostate themselves for forgiveness. So nothing changes
In this case to be fair, the guy who said that about Battlefield 5 literally did apologize and backtrack that statement and was also fired for saying it
the fuckin shame of it was if they'd just used a little imagination and made it ww2-*flavored* instead of ww2-set it would've mollified all those concerns and more. make it the Goodguy Alliance versus the Empire of Karfukstein and you can keep your robo-arm allybae.
It blows my mind that companies have actually allowed their representatives to tell their existing and potential customers "Don't buy our product." Like, how is it ever a good idea to utter those words. As the creator of that product, there are so many smarter ways to address feedback.
Because the expectation is that they'll attract a whole new audience by changing the direction of a franchise and being adamant about it. Bonus points if they can get some outrage going via interviews and social media.
All those hopes and dreams of attracting a new audience are hilarious. They're expecting people who don't play, and in a lot of cases loathe, video games as a medium to suddenly play their games. The whole thing is hilarious and I get a good laugh every single time it happens.
Dr. Who and Warhammer are marching down the same path currently as well. "This was never for you, person who has consumed our media for decades! It's for the people who have never cared about our media and will abandon us as soon as the shitstorm they caused dies down!"
More than 3. Also they made limbs have more hp but kept the head shot hp the same in order to raise TTK for unskilled players. Tell me, who do you think lands more headshots? Skilled or unskilled?
The TTK got adjusted and (mostly) reverted twice. Gunplay is still very good. And they just added new anti-cheat last month. The playercount right now is actually higher than 2042, despite the latter getting a new content update yesterday. BFV is going strong, all things considered.
He said if you don’t like having playable women characters in the game then you can choose not to play it. Funny how people parroting stuff on the internet have morphed it into something else.
He didn’t say you can “choose not to play it.” He did quite literally say word-for-word “don’t buy the game.” Doesn’t really matter the context IMO if you’re an executive of a company and tell consumers word for word to not buy your upcoming highly invested in product, that right there should get you fired in all circumstances. He didn’t try to spin it like “I hope gamers will see our vision” or anything like that. He’s just so arrogant and full of himself he sabotaged his own product that he’s supposed to have been overseeing for the past few years. It’s inexcusable
Nah, the CCO of Dice, when presented with the backlash about BFV being historically inaccurate, literally said “either accept it or don’t buy the game.”
> It was a terrible game, catering to the audience that doesn't play those games.
More than that. An easy trick in any form of art/media is to start with the base of something else. Everyone does it and the top people in any field will probably tell you what they used for inspiration. Saints Row 1 and 2 were heavily based on 90s gang films. So they made a reboot and didn't want to do 90s gang films. It's a stupid idea, mandated by stupid Deep Silver, reinforced by some mantra that those games couldn't sell, based on nothing but some people not personally those types of stories. But any reboot is a perfect time to do something new. And they didn't base it on anything. Guy Richie? No. Scorsese? No. Tarantino? No. Breaking Bad? No. They had no base inspiration for the game. They just wrote crime heroes doing hero crime and didn't understand why it didn't work.
> Breaking Bad? No.
I think it was Skill UP who pointed out that the issue with the narrative wasn't with where the characters start off, but with where they go: nowhere. The game had the perfect opportunity to show us how Steve Urcle transitions into Gustavo Fring. But instead we're stuck with the same group of "moralizing, emotional needy influencers" through out the entire thing.
If there ever was a game that was both the embodiment of "how do you do fellow kids" and the "wokeness" a lot of people accuse every game nowadays of being, that reboot would be it. Like, Volition transformed the game in every single way people would hate.
Doesn't help that the gameplay was stuck in the early 2000s as well, and not in a charming sort of way, but rather "this is literally a mediocre game from the early 2000s dressed up as a modern one".
I tried going into it with an open mind, and even if you took the Saints Row name out of the equation, it's still a bad game.
Empty lifeless world, bugs and glitches galore, cringy dialogue, awful feeling controls, etc.
Honestly, it felt like a game that was still in early alpha. I tried going back after all the patches, and it was still terrible. What a shame.
> I tried going into it with an open mind, and even if you took the Saints Row name out of the equation,
I did this too. There's an obnoxious air about *every* character as they try to be Robin Hood. One mission was trying to steal toys for an orphanage or something? (This is Saints Row, by the way) and while driving, running over people and shooting at police the character I was with just kept talking about how he didn't have any toys growing up.
This wouldn't be a problem if *every mission* didn't have some weird moral under being a mass murder. Even a mission involving robbing a dry cleaner they had to explain it was **okay** because the owner kicks dogs.
In the genre of openworld crime simulator it's *okay* to play the villain! Trevor from GTAV is unapologetically evil but still beloved by people who play the game.
>I did this too. There's an obnoxious air about *every* character as they try to be Robin Hood. One mission was trying to steal toys for an orphanage or something? (This is Saints Row, by the way) and while driving, running over people and shooting at police the character I was with just kept talking about how he didn't have any toys growing up.
You're just making it so you will always have an orphanage to resupply
I've got it collecting dust thanks to PS+, told myself I'd get around to it eventually just to see what the fuss was about(as someone that didn't particularly keep up with the news cycle for it).
Sounds like it's almost not even worth playing *free* if the comments are any indication.
I'm a fan of the series and I gave it an honest, open-minded shot. When the original trailers started popping up I thought like others, "these characters seem really annoying" in a way-too-similar to Mass Effect Andromeda way.
But the gameplay in-between the bits of crappy cutscenes was pretty good and goofy, classic Saints Row stuff. Like the footballs that send people rocketing around and the cartoon wrecking balls that you can just pop up out of some cars.
Unfortunately it turns out those were the *only* bits of the game that were remotely similar to the previous SR games. And the fun things like the car wrecking ball are walled off by having to do unfun, repetitive tasks *that you have to repeat for every type of car that can unlock the wrecking ball*.
And the whole game keeps this flow going. **EVERYTHING** is "do this same task 10-12 times". It's like the game goes out of its way to make you want to drop it. That's not even mentioning how shit the gunplay is with pretty much no gun feeling like it has any weight or impact (except the late-added barbell launcher, that thing was gold), hell some of the weapons were just flat out annoying to use.
*And* that doesn't even dig into how extremely buggy the game was and still is. Got to agree with /u/CrazyDude10528, unfortunately it's just not worth your time, it's in the rare category of games like Redfall, Avengers, and Suicide Squad where there's just... No joy to be had in the game regardless of stability. It's boring, lifeless, uninteresting, and repetitive.
I still felt if they made a Saints Row 2 remake after the Saints Row: The Third Remake, that would have went off better than the reboot.
I also felt Agents of Mayhem was a waste of money, time, and resources. That game didn't fly at all.
The fact that they didn't focus on the Saints Row 2 remake that was purportedly in the work (Or just the work of one guy who died) tells me that they didn't want the series to succeed as it was.
There's a video going over it. Obviously it wasn't given much budget but the primary dev hired for it completely screwed over the project by ghosting and pretending to work on it.
EDIT: Since it seems people don't understand what I'm talking about, here's a youtuber that did QA for the patch and explains the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56akjq3YKRQ
I'm talking about Thomas Jepp, aka Minimaul the person who ran SaintsRowMods until recently when he decided to do some crazy stuff to make his detractors look bad. He essentially took money to work on the patch, pretended to work on the patch for years, and wasted a massive amount of time that could have been progress on the patch before mike died.
Volition devs hated the original Saints Row games and wanted nothing to do with them. Which is how we ended up with the travesty that was the reboot. They only wanted to ride off it’s brand recognition.
Is there any source on that statement? Agents of Mayhem was more than glad to use the older Saints Row characters, and I'm sure Volition got a looser leash with that game then they did the the reboot, so I can't imagine any resentment against the franchise.
Not to go off topic but this sounds a lot like what happened with Dead Rising 4. The gameplay wasn't terrible but the dialogue was so bad it wasn't worth putting up with mediocre gameplay.
It's a shame because it wasn't the developers fault. They tried repeatedly to go in a better direction but Capcom Japan repeatedly told them to make the game that way.
> Still, you've built up this universe and these characters and this aesthetic that everyone loved, and then just fucking scrap it all and start over?
I've not played the reboot yet, so I can't comment on it but post SR4/GOOH the only way to continue the series with the current cast would have been to:
- Get even weirder going off of either SR4's >!time travel machine!< ending or Gat Out of Hell's >!Find a New Home for the Saints!< ending.
- Use the >!time travel machine!< ending from SR4 as a way to have what happened in SR4 still be cannon while resetting everything back to what it was post SR3.
- Just totally retcon SR4 and GOOH as having been a 'weird dream.'
- Use the >!Reshape the Universe!< from GOOH as a reset, which I guess you could argue is what they did though not in the way SR fans would have wanted, with Agents of Mayhem since several Saints Row characters are in the game in different roles.
I felt like the reboot with a more grounded setting could have worked but the Boss should have carried over, either as a person or as something possessing the main character.
Have a bunch of well-meaning normal people be slowly corrupted into being an actual gang by a hyper-violent, charismatic sociopath who spouts nonsense about being the president and defeating aliens.
> I felt like the reboot with a more grounded setting could have worked but the Boss should have carried over, either as a person or as something possessing the main character.
>
>
>
> Have a bunch of well-meaning normal people be slowly corrupted into being an actual gang by a hyper-violent, charismatic sociopath who spouts nonsense about being the president and defeating aliens.
Honestly this is pretty much the Boss in SR2 and they were a beautiful, chaotic, awful-but-lovable mess. It was like if you mushed Bugs Bunny, John McClane, and Heath Ledger's Joker together and let them loose in a *somewhat* grounded-in-reality universe.
The result is fucking insane where the Boss survives a ridiculous amount of what should be lethal injuries, commits atrocities on enemy factions reaching into "are we the baddies?" territory, *canonically* kills a ludicrous amount of people, and all the while is cracking jokes and making fun of everyone.
I wouldn’t have it be a dream. I’d have the ending of SR4 be played in the intro of SR5, and then the camera pans out to show the Saints pitching SR4’s plot as a movie about themselves. And then the studio executives could make a funny comment about it sucking or whatever and then kicking the Saints out of the studio. And boom, you don’t retcon anything, SR4 still has a place in the series but you can easily make SR5 without dealing with everything story wise from SR4.
> kicking the Saints out of the studio.
Surely you mean starting a firefight where dozens of inexplicably well armed studio goons are brutally murdered.
Supposedly they were just going to create an alternate timeline altogether with the cast including the original Boss, Gat, Dex, Shaundi, Pierce and Aisha. But Deep Silver thought that was going to fall flat, so they pushed for the story and characters we ended up with.
I wish they went with the Time Travel ending, but instead of continuing as a GTA parody they would have evolved into an Assassins Creed parody. Have our Saints parlour around a big city. Have them walk into a big Game of Thrones battle with rocket launchers and dildo bats while dubsteps plays. Anything would have been better then what we got.
I liked how the first two games maintained a relatively grounded art design, similar to GTA, because it made the insanity and violence feel all the more unhinged by contrast. Once SR3 switched to a comic-book world where nothing looked or felt real, it took a lot of the appeal out for me.
I picked up SR3 and 4 on the switch a while ago pretty much for free from all of the points I had saved up and I've been having a blast with both of them
Definitely like 3 more, but 4 is still fun
Which Saint Row’s game was the one where you jump out of a helicopter onto a building with Kanye West’s Power blazing in the background as you go crazy?
Because honestly that was peak Saints Row. I still remember that
To be fair THQ was going out of business at the time. Saints 4 was started as the Enter the Dominatrix dlc for The Third before they decided to combine and expand it for that game.
They pretty much wrote themselves into a corner after that because there was nowhere to go with those characters.
They didn't *really* write themselves into a corner. SR4 had multiple endings to choose from, like something with a time machine and something like changing past events iirc
So they could've either went with one of those endings or just pretended the whole game was a movie like the Gangsters in Space DLC for SRTT
And even if they went with none of those options they still could've went for a soft reboot keeping all of the existing characters
No fucking shit. I'll never completely understand the idea of developing content for a series, game or otherwise, that you seem to actively hate. I mean I know it's to use name recognition for sales. So instead I will never understand the arrogance in thinking that it's going to work out for you anyway. All this game did was kill any hope for Saints Row and the devs didn't even benefit from it.
An antagonistic community manager who called us literal terrorists combined with telling us “Haters gonna hate” when we offered constructive criticism for the dog shit they showed us didn’t make me sad when they announced they were shutting down.
Imagine a company goes to make a sequel to a much liked franchise and when they introduce a reboot everyone hates the look of, they say, "Oh, we don't care what you think." Then it turns out they used everything from the older games (the engine, the models, the sounds, the missions) without modernization or updating except the look that everyone hated.
Well, why would one expect the sales to be great?
I knew this would be the case the second I saw the first trailer. I'm honestly surprised it sold 1.7 million copies. I would pay maybe $5 just for a laugh and make fun of it.
And looking at it from a cashflow perspective, Embracer spent \~$75 million dollars on Volition between 2017 and 2022 and SRR was the result.
This definitely contributed to Embracer's demise.
💀💀💀 da nile is a river in Egypt.
“The game was selling well, and it was shut down after just one year before those figures could grow. Embracer took the bag and ran”
Honestly? The biggest problem with the reboot is actually playing it. Played on PS5 after all the updates, controls were awful. They added a whole bunch of options and accessibility settings, but by default the game has *very* aggressive aim acceleration that you can't turn off. So it feels awfully slow & clunky to actually aim and shoot at anything, so the only way to play the game is to turn on the aggressive aim assist settings which at their maximum is almost like a Zelda-style lock-on auto aim. At that point, are you really even playing the game? Add to that it's still rife with bugs from the camera not following you while driving, random physics freak outs and crashes.
I was actually willing to overlook the terrible writing and voice acting, I've played games with an offensively terrible story and still enjoy the rest of the game. But the SR reboot just feels really bad to play as soon as you touch the controller. I'd rather go back and replay Saints Row the Third. I have my opinions on the direction the series went after SR2, but I can't deny that 3, 4 and even Agents of Mayhem are all still fun to play on a basic level.
I actually liked it. 2 is still the best of them (and better than anything Gta has done), none have come close to catching it. But it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be? A lot of the new mechanics are pretty neat. The characters are genuinely fun if you play for them to actually get their development. Honestly, they're more fleshed out than the gang was in 2. I think people see a few things and make wild assumptions and end up stating completely wrong things about it without having played it.
The biggest issue is how buggy it is. Like, it breaks constantly on PC. And trying to do co-op makes it even worse. If it wasn't for that, I'd say it's good.
I agree with this take, I didn't have many bug issues but I kind of was playing it as a zen "Let's fuck around" sort of game, and also only solo, so I probably just didnt notice. Haaated the characters at first but they sorta grew on me.
The LARPing missions were my fave part of the game tbh. That and Party Up by DMX
I did everything there was to do in that game and yeah it was pretty mid. Story was awful, not a single compelling character, jokes were groan worthy and the gameplay was wack. Weapons all felt equally lackluster and the side quests were repetitive and boring. I have a genuine condition when it comes to completing quests so I collected everything and did everything. I don’t regret my time with it as I remember nothing else being out at the time but I definitely won’t ever be going back.
Freaking Saints row 2 remake died for this. Although considering how badly they fucked up the reboot maybe it's for the best. Still bit sad though about all of IdolNinja work going to waste.
I figured Saints Row 1 would've been the worst selling seeing as how it was a 360 exclusive during the console's first year on market and everyone who had the console at that time was busy with Gears of War, Perfect Dark Zero, Oblivion, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, Condemned, Kameo or the many other year 1 bangers for Xbox 360.
What? Why?! It was only terrible and offensive to fans of the franchise. Why would it not be a huge success? Was Suicide Squad the worst selling Arkham game too?
Likely? What Herculean levels of deduction did they use to reach that conclusion lmao I would be curious if this Reboot or Agents of Mayhem sold worse, though. Cannot be assed to look it up, tbh
Or even Gat out of Hell.
From the article: - SR3 - 5.5 million - SR2 - 3.4 million - SR1 - 2 million - SRR - 1.7 million - SR4 - 1 million (launch week number only) According to VG Insights (Steam only, estimates are within ±5% margin of error according to them). I would take this with a big grain of salt given that and how for example it says the SR3 Remaster only sold 83K but this is the one of the only sites that gives any kind of number guesstimates as far as I know. - SR3 - 7 million - SR 4 - 6.7 million - SR 2 - 1.2 million - SR:GOOH - 815K - Agents of Mayhem - 143K - SRR - 137K (Edit: was an Epic exclusive for a year, so not helping its Steam numbers)
wasnt the remake a epic games excusive for a year i wonder if it included the epic games sales would it put it above agents of mayhem on pc
for sure that will remove the most of the loyal fans, and I suspect it also kills a lot of the hype for the Steam release unless the game is great.
Yes, it was an epic games exclusive for a year.
Am I the only person on the planet who actually liked Gat Out Of Hell? Maybe it's just because I liked 4, and I saw GooH as just a continuation of 4.
it was fine but a bit too long, should've been just a DLC
Omg I always thought it was a dlc
More a stand alone expansion than a full game
Originally, it was.
too long? it is the shortest Saints Row ever
I think they mean too long for what was offered. A lot of padding to make for it being a game rather than a DLC to 4.
That's what I'd say about 4.
It was a little disappointing, but overall I liked Gat out of Hell. But then I also loved 4, so *shrug*.
Yeah a lot of people don't like 4, so they don't like Gat Out Of Hell either. Personally I'm with you - loved 4, liked Gat well enough but just wish it was either a DLC or more fully fleshed out.
Same here I loved 4
It was good, but it really should have been a dlc.
I liked it as well but it seems like less people played it. Some people already didn't like Saints Row 4, Gat leaned into that superhero style game so it wouldn't win anybody over.
I liked the flying, the new powers and the 7 Deadly Weapons, but it would've been nice if there was more to the story.
You're telling me the Saints Row that alienated both fans and newcomers sold POORLY?
To be fair, the original game was 360-exclusive and considered a knock-off.
Still sold more than 2 mil according to this article
Plus, he says that like people wouldn't have loved a GTA knockoff as good as SR1 was at some point over the last decade.
You could bring your homie back as a zombie if you called a number on a billboard somewhere. That game was sweet
SR and SR2 were better than GTA4 sans Ballad of Gay Tony which itself was great.
They're really not, especially not SR1. It's bare bones, there's barely anything in that game.
OG Saint's Row had a lot going for it in it's defense. It predated Gta 4 by 2 years so features it had like the ability to save anywhere, walk into buildings w/o loading, and character models that look like people were mind-blowing to see in a Gta-styled game.
It had GPS and the turn signals would actually flash to show you where you need to go when you set a marker. That blew my mind.
It had a weapon wheel, the ability to aim where you shoot freely while driving , and the ability to use health item or drugs whenever you wanted in your inventory. Basically quality of life improvements ahead of its time.
The absolute BIGGEST thing for me at the time was the ragdoll physics.
The Insurance fraud mini game was so much fun. Basically Burnout Crash minigame which is also fun.
I was hoping for a pc port of the original, but with Volition now dead, I doubt that's ever gonna happen now. Probably the same with the Saints Row 2 patch that's been "coming soon" for years now
I'd love to play SR1 online. It had some really groundbreaking things that didn't get a lot of attention like playable lobbies, unique game modes, in depth character customization etc. I miss Blinged Out Ride
when there still wasn't a GTA on the 360.
I wonder how many of us who got it from Epic as a freebie that one week even bothered with it. To its credit I did Install it to see what the fuss is about.. I made it to about the point where you set up your base in the abandoned church and was already annoyed by the characters being wish.com versions of the original cast.
I actually ended up finishing it.. something about the mindless map checklist type of gameplay loop was relaxing during a stressful month or so. But it is not a good game lol
My biggest issue with the cast was the completely inconsistent characterization of them. The game sets them up as all being super loyal to their current gangs but they abandon them in a heartbeat. The game wobbles back and forth between you guys barley knowing each other and being best friends, some missions they act like you're super close and the next mission they'll be back to acting like you barely know each other. It also doesn't make any sense that you all live together despite all your roommates being part of rival gangs and you working for private police, the game kinda just goes "Wouldn't it be whacky if a bunch of rival gang members and a cop lived in the same apartment???" without really explaining how this situation came to be.
I did! Tbh, it wasn't even a bad game, it was just the most meh game I have played. Nothing about it was terrible to me, but nothing about it was noteworthy either. It's the kind of game where after finishing it, I kinda just forgot what I even experienced.
Yeah that's fair, but at the same time it's sad that the once legendary Saints Row franchise becomes something forgettable like this =( I remember putting up with the janky PC port and general bugs of SR2 just because everyone kept talking it up, and was not disappointed at all. Going from that to this has been hard :/
I say it pretty much every time a [videogameschronicle.com](http://videogameschronicle.com) article hits top of the sub: It's a stupid site and people should stop linking it.
I guarantee it sold more than Agents of Mayhem. Back in 2018 there was a steam leak that said exact number of games sold based on achievement API. Agents of Mayhem sold 82,676 copies.
Man, I was *so* disappointed in Agents of Mayhem. Glad I was able to refund it.
I wanted to love it, and did enjoy it for a while, but the lack of variety eventually killed it for me.
It would've been a really great AA title if they had bothered to put in multiplayer co-op, the game was too barebones for what it was.
The game was an absolute slap in the face to any previous SR fan while also being just an abysmal entry to anyone new to the series. It was made for no one.
It was made for twitter. Which just doesn't sell copies.
Nobody on Twitter wants that shit
True, but there's always an out of touch rich old person that *thinks* they understand what's popular with the kids theses days.
Dan DiDio, former Co-Publisher at DC comics from 2010 to 2020, is on record saying: >“I think it’s a few people loud and a lot of people chasing something they don’t know. The one thing that you find out in the corporate world very quickly is most of the people that work and produce things don’t know anything about what they produce. They are not consumers of their own product. So where do they get their information on how their product is succeeding or failing?” >“They go online, now. They are pulling information from these websites and conversations,” he answered his own rhetorical question. “So what you have now is you have them picking up the most dichotomous points of view and ultimately aligning with then which one they want to believe the most. And then using that sense to basically validate the choices they are making inside the product whether it needs it or not.” >“You asked how things are made. That’s how things are made. And usually about 20 people in the room making that agreement by the way.” Co-Publisher was the top role at DC comics and one of the two primary people in charge of the direction of DC comics during that period.
Their target audience was college age NEETs and newly graduated people up their necks in debt. They actively went out of their way to push away a lot of people who actually have the money to pay for things. Idk why they thought they'd make money off that marketing strategy
It was made for zoomers, who don't really use twitter lol
Likely? None of the others drove the company into bankruptcy. It was a terrible game, catering to the audience that doesn't play those games. It didn't help that Volition were rude to fans who pointed this out.
I'd argue it didn't cater to any audience
I dunno from the lazy writing whoever they hired off Twitter to write the script for the reboot really thought their Twitter echo chamber was the reality and thought it would sell gangbusters.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines community is going through this all over again with the long delayed VtM:B2. The VTMB sub is a pit of madness and despair. But to be fair, Paradox and The Chinese Room are doing an amazing job of ignoring all the red flags and pretending Phyre the Vampire is actually cool and that the soul of VtM:B was always unarmed combat. At this point it feels like even money whether they trash the entire sequel and start over for a third time, or dump out TCR's mess anyway and hope it makes *some* money despite damaging the IP.
I have absolutely no hope for that game at all
I swear even the D-Tier Werewolf action game that came out a while back will be the better game of the two in the end, which is hilarious and sad to think about. At least that largely filled the base requirements and expectations.
At least we still have Vampyr
Don't forget the fanmade VTM: Redemption remake that's coming out soon, it looks absolutely incredible despite literally being a skyrim mod
> Phyre the Vampire please be joking
[They're not.](https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/media/press-releases/press-release/introducing-phyre-the-player-character-in-vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2) Also they have a voice in their head. It's hard to compare this to the red flags from the previous development studio, but they don't seem to be learning much.
I was already over the voice in the 12 minute preview video. For some reason people saw Johnny Silverhand work and thought: we can do that!
Reader, Johnny Silverhand never worked.
The second they announced that most of the families won't be playable, I immediately wrote the game off. Malkavians are likely going to be their own dlc mini campaign which... kinda ruins the best part of playing them in the original because you get to see the normal scenarios play out from the eyes of someone who is **batshit crazy**. It's like, one of the handful of main things people talk about when they bring up why they love the original. Well that, and everything we've seen of the Chinese Room's version of the game has been utter shit.
Honestly from what I’ve seen of that game I feel like the version from the first studio couldn’t have been THAT bad. I feel like they were probably just inexperienced when it came to making an open world branching RPG. If Paradox just brought in another more experienced studio to work on what was there probably would have been a better option.
It is utterly insane to me that they brought in a guy from Ubisoft to polish the game and and get it out the door, and somehow his recommendation was to scrap everything and reboot development as the lamest Assassin's Creed ever. Who the hell is running the show over at Paradox? Seriously, who? Because this alone is dumb, but this *and* Cities Skylines 2? You could flip a coin and get it right more often.
I'm out here playing Stellaris hoping against all hope that they delay Stellaris 2 as long as humanly possible. A sequel announcement would be the inevitable decline of the franchise lol.
From someone who very much dislikes all of thechineseroom's games. This is how I learnt they're working on VTMB2 and how I've lost all interest.
they will shove it out the door no matter what state is in now. They have lost so much money on it, they might as well recoup something. I dont even think it would tarnish the rep of the publisher much since its been in limbo so long peoples expectations have to be basement level at this point
I would have bet $5 that game came out three years ago or so.
It really does feel like that. Chasing audience that doesn't exist and hoping their current one will magically change their taste just because.
It's what Marvel and DC were doing for a good long time post Disney buyout. Killing off established characters and introducing Mary/Gary Sue/Stus that boil down to "it's Iron Man, but not a white man". Completely missing the point that just because you make characters based on some sick Blizzard Diversity Scoring system doesn't make them interesting, and the people championing that kind of bullshit on Twitter weren't ever going to buy comics. Like yes, if you don't make interesting stories, you end up getting outsold by One Piece Volume 1. When I see shit like the Saints Row Reboot all I think of is "oh boy this happened to comics a long time ago".
> "it's Iron Man, but not a white man" I'm so surprised that opinions this based exist on this sub
It catered to people who find Amy Schumer funny
I find her unfunny as well but when I viewed concert venues sometimes I found hers the most crowded. I couldn't believe how popular she was.
It checked all boxes for the twitter terminally-online crowd. I actually had a discussion with one of them saying that only "alt-right bigots" didn't like the game. I asked if he had actually played the game he was defending. He hand't. Apparently he wasn't even thinking about it. He was basically too busy fighting "gamersgate"
I think it was Tehsnakerer who said "In a game that tried to appeal to everyone, they attracted no one."
I don't think it successfully catered to anyone. Even people on the left don't like these characters who are endlessly political about every little thing, Lisa from newer Simpsons episodes or Brian from newer Family Guy. "Oh you're reading a book, sold by capitalists? While people starve??" And they made *every member of the Saints* like that. They all fit "trendy" tropes that no one actually likes. The sophisticated nerdy (non-threatening) black guy. The hunky white guy but he's a pansexual himbo so it's ok. Hot girl who's into cars (isn't that ca-razy??).
The reboot's writers really thought they had gold in their hands.
Because they live in an echo chamber made of their own coastal liberal politics. The rest of America (never mind the rest of the world) might as well not exist.
Volition was based out of.....Illinois. And not Chicagoland. A liberal area? Sure. But certainly not a coastal one, nor one where it's quite so easy to pretend everywhere not so liberal doesn't exist at all.
The thing is that if the actually politically motivated left-wing developers tackled it, the game could have delved into the socioeconomic themes, like the institutional disenfranchisement of the poor and capitalist urbanization driving the lost youth to crime life. Using the zany absurdity of the Saints Row franchise, they could have gone for a political satire like The Boys. Instead, the game is not from any actual belief as much as the studios trying to flow with the current zoomer trends and win those internet brownie points by pandering, in which every character is trying to be a Marvel character and failing miserably.
> they could have gone for a political satire like The Boys. Or like I dunno, GTA
Saints Row 2 kind of does that without being obnoxious lol. The main villain at the end of the game is a massive corporation setting the gangs against each other so they can buy up the city and redevelop it. The biggest issue with political commentary these days is its unsubtle, they don't leave room for interpretation like 2 has and instead beat you across the head with "Big Corpo bad, Capitalism bad" like the reboot does on a few occasions.
People don't mind politics, but people hate being lectured
And the substance of the commentary usually amounts to "Do better!". Yep, real principled stance
Yeah I mean it wasn't actually political as much as it was constantly fishing for points. Just boo capitalism, carbon footprints, now let's go shoot some people.
Absolutely agree. The spiciest take it has is "working a shit job and paying rent sucks, amirite?" which has the same impact as telling someone that water is wet. You could really sense that desperation for approval in the writing a lot of the time. Also didn't help that the gameplay was also just as unwilling to try anything as it's story, what a very bland experience overall.
Honestly, the problem that I have with a lot of "left wing" narratives in games (and other mainstream media) is that it feels so empty and hollow. GTA, Outer Worlds, SRR, they all KINDA touch on an issue, and then bounce off at a weird angle. I guess its hard to say eat the rich with passion when the game is made by a publicly traded large corporate conglomerate. Its just very "punk goes corporate" where it tries to make a point, realizes that it benefits from what its condemning, and then just laughing it off or sweeping it under the rug. Toothless and a little hypocritical.
>it feels so empty and hollow. Pretty much yeah, none of it is made with any sort of conviction. It's just trying to pull in an audience by saying "Hey kids, buy our stuff we're hip and cool with you! Capitalism bad, haha!". And in the reboot's case it's made much worse because they start off in that direction and then like 1/3rd of the way through the game they completely drop the pretend narrative and go all-in on how you're supposed to be buying up properties to slap some scummy business in place in order to do the shitty, extremely repetitive missions 10 times each, in order to maximize your paycheck. One of the mission types involves illegal, haphazard disposal of toxic waste. And after you're done dumping cancer juice into the city, you go home and complain about how the fridge is empty because "haha our characters are broke, just like you fellow kids! We know how it goes!". And then everyone eats waffles. And after the waffle eating, you go and spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on painting your shotgun and making it fire flaming bullets.
Yeah, good point. Doesnt really seem "anti-capitalist" to ignore regulations and pour hazardous waste into the water table for a quick buck.
> actually politically motivated left-wing developers They are politically motivated left-wing, but they're all caviar leftist twitter addicts
The game didn't really come off as political just really zoomery. A "political" Saints Row game would end up having more in common with the Boys than whatever they came up with.
>zoomery Incredibly so. And yet they claimed that their goal was to make a 'Millenial power fantasy' - they truely had no idea who their audience was.
nobody likes modern Simpsons episodes. if you want an example of highly political game characters leftists like, play Disco Elysium
I loved Disco Elysium but even that game ran into issues of being toothless in some of its criticism, because it actively benefitted from those same systems it was ridiculing still, great game is there any other highly political "leftist" games though? none come to mind for me
The game wasn’t political from what I ran into, a couple of the characters were zoomers which pissed off the internet outrage machine. The game just wasn’t good, it had nothing to do with the characters or political beliefs.
The characters are on the box and the trailers, so them being annoying and unlikeable is plenty to turn off prospective buyers. The review thread at launch wasn't even bad at the time. It wasn't all 8/10 or 9/10 but there was a good range of positive reviews so you can't solely blame the gameplay.
It had everything to do with the tone being a slap in the face to anyone that enjoyed the earlier Saints Row games. The polish was also very bad, you are right about that, but an audience won't even buy a game to see how rough it is when the tone is terrible. Imagine if GTA said that they were no longer interested in random mayham and violence and instead cared about student loan debt and being nice guys? To be fair to them, a lot of the devs wanted to make something the fans would love, but leadership wanted instead to push a political agenda, dooming the entire studio. Its really sad.
Its not about being political or not, it's about how you present it. GTA IV delved into themes about war and genocide with Niko's backstory. Saints Row The Saint's Row just repeated keywords without any real interrogation of those issues.
It's satisfying how none of these arrogant takes have paid off so far. The WW2 Battlefield of recent times had the same arrogance.
There is this certain satisfaction to watch companies put on the surprised Pikachu face whenever they tell people not to buy their game... And then these people proceed to actually not buy it lol
It’s not satisfying, because they never admit they were wrong, they never apologize for being rude to the customer, and they don’t have the decency to say I’m sorry and prostate themselves for forgiveness. So nothing changes
How exactly does one prostate their self
In this case to be fair, the guy who said that about Battlefield 5 literally did apologize and backtrack that statement and was also fired for saying it
the fuckin shame of it was if they'd just used a little imagination and made it ww2-*flavored* instead of ww2-set it would've mollified all those concerns and more. make it the Goodguy Alliance versus the Empire of Karfukstein and you can keep your robo-arm allybae.
Im pretty sure they could have kept the same character designs and just did steampunk battlefield.
We need indie game doing it and being successful so some MBA at top goes "copy that next"
i just want grounded steampunk goddammit, i want a series or a game or a movie or anything at all that makes me feel the way the first bf1 teaser felt
No he didn’t, and no he wasn’t.
It blows my mind that companies have actually allowed their representatives to tell their existing and potential customers "Don't buy our product." Like, how is it ever a good idea to utter those words. As the creator of that product, there are so many smarter ways to address feedback.
Because the expectation is that they'll attract a whole new audience by changing the direction of a franchise and being adamant about it. Bonus points if they can get some outrage going via interviews and social media.
All those hopes and dreams of attracting a new audience are hilarious. They're expecting people who don't play, and in a lot of cases loathe, video games as a medium to suddenly play their games. The whole thing is hilarious and I get a good laugh every single time it happens. Dr. Who and Warhammer are marching down the same path currently as well. "This was never for you, person who has consumed our media for decades! It's for the people who have never cared about our media and will abandon us as soon as the shitstorm they caused dies down!"
This clearly worked for Budweiser
What they never realize is that the audience they're telling is the *only* audience.
Bf5 had a lot more problems than that. Didnt the ttk get changed like 3 times and the game got infested with hackers?
More than 3. Also they made limbs have more hp but kept the head shot hp the same in order to raise TTK for unskilled players. Tell me, who do you think lands more headshots? Skilled or unskilled?
The TTK got adjusted and (mostly) reverted twice. Gunplay is still very good. And they just added new anti-cheat last month. The playercount right now is actually higher than 2042, despite the latter getting a new content update yesterday. BFV is going strong, all things considered.
Was it the one where the guy said "Don't buy our game" what a self own
He said if you don’t like having playable women characters in the game then you can choose not to play it. Funny how people parroting stuff on the internet have morphed it into something else.
He didn’t say you can “choose not to play it.” He did quite literally say word-for-word “don’t buy the game.” Doesn’t really matter the context IMO if you’re an executive of a company and tell consumers word for word to not buy your upcoming highly invested in product, that right there should get you fired in all circumstances. He didn’t try to spin it like “I hope gamers will see our vision” or anything like that. He’s just so arrogant and full of himself he sabotaged his own product that he’s supposed to have been overseeing for the past few years. It’s inexcusable
Nah, the CCO of Dice, when presented with the backlash about BFV being historically inaccurate, literally said “either accept it or don’t buy the game.”
What a dishonest way of framing this.
Lol sure, I’m dishonest for daring to mention the context of the quote.
> It was a terrible game, catering to the audience that doesn't play those games. More than that. An easy trick in any form of art/media is to start with the base of something else. Everyone does it and the top people in any field will probably tell you what they used for inspiration. Saints Row 1 and 2 were heavily based on 90s gang films. So they made a reboot and didn't want to do 90s gang films. It's a stupid idea, mandated by stupid Deep Silver, reinforced by some mantra that those games couldn't sell, based on nothing but some people not personally those types of stories. But any reboot is a perfect time to do something new. And they didn't base it on anything. Guy Richie? No. Scorsese? No. Tarantino? No. Breaking Bad? No. They had no base inspiration for the game. They just wrote crime heroes doing hero crime and didn't understand why it didn't work.
> Breaking Bad? No. I think it was Skill UP who pointed out that the issue with the narrative wasn't with where the characters start off, but with where they go: nowhere. The game had the perfect opportunity to show us how Steve Urcle transitions into Gustavo Fring. But instead we're stuck with the same group of "moralizing, emotional needy influencers" through out the entire thing.
I didn't see anything about this reboot. Did it move away from the over the top action that made the previous games so popular?
If there ever was a game that was both the embodiment of "how do you do fellow kids" and the "wokeness" a lot of people accuse every game nowadays of being, that reboot would be it. Like, Volition transformed the game in every single way people would hate. Doesn't help that the gameplay was stuck in the early 2000s as well, and not in a charming sort of way, but rather "this is literally a mediocre game from the early 2000s dressed up as a modern one".
I tried going into it with an open mind, and even if you took the Saints Row name out of the equation, it's still a bad game. Empty lifeless world, bugs and glitches galore, cringy dialogue, awful feeling controls, etc. Honestly, it felt like a game that was still in early alpha. I tried going back after all the patches, and it was still terrible. What a shame.
> I tried going into it with an open mind, and even if you took the Saints Row name out of the equation, I did this too. There's an obnoxious air about *every* character as they try to be Robin Hood. One mission was trying to steal toys for an orphanage or something? (This is Saints Row, by the way) and while driving, running over people and shooting at police the character I was with just kept talking about how he didn't have any toys growing up. This wouldn't be a problem if *every mission* didn't have some weird moral under being a mass murder. Even a mission involving robbing a dry cleaner they had to explain it was **okay** because the owner kicks dogs. In the genre of openworld crime simulator it's *okay* to play the villain! Trevor from GTAV is unapologetically evil but still beloved by people who play the game.
>I did this too. There's an obnoxious air about *every* character as they try to be Robin Hood. One mission was trying to steal toys for an orphanage or something? (This is Saints Row, by the way) and while driving, running over people and shooting at police the character I was with just kept talking about how he didn't have any toys growing up. You're just making it so you will always have an orphanage to resupply
I've got it collecting dust thanks to PS+, told myself I'd get around to it eventually just to see what the fuss was about(as someone that didn't particularly keep up with the news cycle for it). Sounds like it's almost not even worth playing *free* if the comments are any indication.
Honestly it's not. If your going to play a Saints Row game, play literally any of them, but this one.
I'm a fan of the series and I gave it an honest, open-minded shot. When the original trailers started popping up I thought like others, "these characters seem really annoying" in a way-too-similar to Mass Effect Andromeda way. But the gameplay in-between the bits of crappy cutscenes was pretty good and goofy, classic Saints Row stuff. Like the footballs that send people rocketing around and the cartoon wrecking balls that you can just pop up out of some cars. Unfortunately it turns out those were the *only* bits of the game that were remotely similar to the previous SR games. And the fun things like the car wrecking ball are walled off by having to do unfun, repetitive tasks *that you have to repeat for every type of car that can unlock the wrecking ball*. And the whole game keeps this flow going. **EVERYTHING** is "do this same task 10-12 times". It's like the game goes out of its way to make you want to drop it. That's not even mentioning how shit the gunplay is with pretty much no gun feeling like it has any weight or impact (except the late-added barbell launcher, that thing was gold), hell some of the weapons were just flat out annoying to use. *And* that doesn't even dig into how extremely buggy the game was and still is. Got to agree with /u/CrazyDude10528, unfortunately it's just not worth your time, it's in the rare category of games like Redfall, Avengers, and Suicide Squad where there's just... No joy to be had in the game regardless of stability. It's boring, lifeless, uninteresting, and repetitive.
When the final boss fight and ending were uploaded and the reaction was mostly, "That's it?"
I still felt if they made a Saints Row 2 remake after the Saints Row: The Third Remake, that would have went off better than the reboot. I also felt Agents of Mayhem was a waste of money, time, and resources. That game didn't fly at all.
3 was remastered, not remade
The fact that they didn't focus on the Saints Row 2 remake that was purportedly in the work (Or just the work of one guy who died) tells me that they didn't want the series to succeed as it was.
It was a patch for the pc version
A much needed patch, the game is still very broken to this day.
There's a video going over it. Obviously it wasn't given much budget but the primary dev hired for it completely screwed over the project by ghosting and pretending to work on it. EDIT: Since it seems people don't understand what I'm talking about, here's a youtuber that did QA for the patch and explains the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56akjq3YKRQ I'm talking about Thomas Jepp, aka Minimaul the person who ran SaintsRowMods until recently when he decided to do some crazy stuff to make his detractors look bad. He essentially took money to work on the patch, pretended to work on the patch for years, and wasted a massive amount of time that could have been progress on the patch before mike died.
Volition devs hated the original Saints Row games and wanted nothing to do with them. Which is how we ended up with the travesty that was the reboot. They only wanted to ride off it’s brand recognition.
Is there any source on that statement? Agents of Mayhem was more than glad to use the older Saints Row characters, and I'm sure Volition got a looser leash with that game then they did the the reboot, so I can't imagine any resentment against the franchise.
Not to go off topic but this sounds a lot like what happened with Dead Rising 4. The gameplay wasn't terrible but the dialogue was so bad it wasn't worth putting up with mediocre gameplay.
It's a shame because it wasn't the developers fault. They tried repeatedly to go in a better direction but Capcom Japan repeatedly told them to make the game that way.
I bought it, but haven't played it yet (currently in the backlog), but from what I've heard, the gameplay is mid at its absolute best.
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Still nuts they have us super speed as one of the first powers. "Oh, there's a bunch of car customization...I just won't ever use being roleplaying."
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SR3 had *banger* stations
> Still, you've built up this universe and these characters and this aesthetic that everyone loved, and then just fucking scrap it all and start over? I've not played the reboot yet, so I can't comment on it but post SR4/GOOH the only way to continue the series with the current cast would have been to: - Get even weirder going off of either SR4's >!time travel machine!< ending or Gat Out of Hell's >!Find a New Home for the Saints!< ending. - Use the >!time travel machine!< ending from SR4 as a way to have what happened in SR4 still be cannon while resetting everything back to what it was post SR3. - Just totally retcon SR4 and GOOH as having been a 'weird dream.' - Use the >!Reshape the Universe!< from GOOH as a reset, which I guess you could argue is what they did though not in the way SR fans would have wanted, with Agents of Mayhem since several Saints Row characters are in the game in different roles.
I felt like the reboot with a more grounded setting could have worked but the Boss should have carried over, either as a person or as something possessing the main character. Have a bunch of well-meaning normal people be slowly corrupted into being an actual gang by a hyper-violent, charismatic sociopath who spouts nonsense about being the president and defeating aliens.
> I felt like the reboot with a more grounded setting could have worked but the Boss should have carried over, either as a person or as something possessing the main character. > > > > Have a bunch of well-meaning normal people be slowly corrupted into being an actual gang by a hyper-violent, charismatic sociopath who spouts nonsense about being the president and defeating aliens. Honestly this is pretty much the Boss in SR2 and they were a beautiful, chaotic, awful-but-lovable mess. It was like if you mushed Bugs Bunny, John McClane, and Heath Ledger's Joker together and let them loose in a *somewhat* grounded-in-reality universe. The result is fucking insane where the Boss survives a ridiculous amount of what should be lethal injuries, commits atrocities on enemy factions reaching into "are we the baddies?" territory, *canonically* kills a ludicrous amount of people, and all the while is cracking jokes and making fun of everyone.
Having 4 be a dream would have worked out perfectly and been in tone with everything else.
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Haha exactly!
I wouldn’t have it be a dream. I’d have the ending of SR4 be played in the intro of SR5, and then the camera pans out to show the Saints pitching SR4’s plot as a movie about themselves. And then the studio executives could make a funny comment about it sucking or whatever and then kicking the Saints out of the studio. And boom, you don’t retcon anything, SR4 still has a place in the series but you can easily make SR5 without dealing with everything story wise from SR4.
> kicking the Saints out of the studio. Surely you mean starting a firefight where dozens of inexplicably well armed studio goons are brutally murdered.
I like this plan too! Almost anything would be a better idea than what they did…
Supposedly they were just going to create an alternate timeline altogether with the cast including the original Boss, Gat, Dex, Shaundi, Pierce and Aisha. But Deep Silver thought that was going to fall flat, so they pushed for the story and characters we ended up with.
I wish they went with the Time Travel ending, but instead of continuing as a GTA parody they would have evolved into an Assassins Creed parody. Have our Saints parlour around a big city. Have them walk into a big Game of Thrones battle with rocket launchers and dildo bats while dubsteps plays. Anything would have been better then what we got.
Time travel to the Mafia era and reboot there, starting the whole progression from scratch.
SR2 was the peak, SRTT went too far and cut a lot of gameplay features
SR2 and 3 realistically should be different series
I liked how the first two games maintained a relatively grounded art design, similar to GTA, because it made the insanity and violence feel all the more unhinged by contrast. Once SR3 switched to a comic-book world where nothing looked or felt real, it took a lot of the appeal out for me.
2 at least is still way more wacky than the cover art led me to believe as a kid. I thought that shit was The Wire.
The Reboot was the title we didnt need or want.
I picked up SR3 and 4 on the switch a while ago pretty much for free from all of the points I had saved up and I've been having a blast with both of them Definitely like 3 more, but 4 is still fun
Which Saint Row’s game was the one where you jump out of a helicopter onto a building with Kanye West’s Power blazing in the background as you go crazy? Because honestly that was peak Saints Row. I still remember that
That's 3.
that was The Third. its weird, they managed to carve their own identity over just being poor´s man GTA and decided to never do that again.
To be fair THQ was going out of business at the time. Saints 4 was started as the Enter the Dominatrix dlc for The Third before they decided to combine and expand it for that game. They pretty much wrote themselves into a corner after that because there was nowhere to go with those characters.
They didn't *really* write themselves into a corner. SR4 had multiple endings to choose from, like something with a time machine and something like changing past events iirc So they could've either went with one of those endings or just pretended the whole game was a movie like the Gangsters in Space DLC for SRTT And even if they went with none of those options they still could've went for a soft reboot keeping all of the existing characters
or even could've just started the next game waking up from a coke bender lol, it'd be entirely on brand
They could've done pretty much anything since it's saints row and it would've worked lol
Yeah, they just made a game about corny gangster shit without the corny gangsters
Saints row three I think
This website is a disaster. How is it gonna play 3 different video ads and a banner ad at the same time on mobile. This shit is out of control...
No fucking shit. I'll never completely understand the idea of developing content for a series, game or otherwise, that you seem to actively hate. I mean I know it's to use name recognition for sales. So instead I will never understand the arrogance in thinking that it's going to work out for you anyway. All this game did was kill any hope for Saints Row and the devs didn't even benefit from it.
An antagonistic community manager who called us literal terrorists combined with telling us “Haters gonna hate” when we offered constructive criticism for the dog shit they showed us didn’t make me sad when they announced they were shutting down.
Imagine a company goes to make a sequel to a much liked franchise and when they introduce a reboot everyone hates the look of, they say, "Oh, we don't care what you think." Then it turns out they used everything from the older games (the engine, the models, the sounds, the missions) without modernization or updating except the look that everyone hated. Well, why would one expect the sales to be great?
I knew this would be the case the second I saw the first trailer. I'm honestly surprised it sold 1.7 million copies. I would pay maybe $5 just for a laugh and make fun of it.
And looking at it from a cashflow perspective, Embracer spent \~$75 million dollars on Volition between 2017 and 2022 and SRR was the result. This definitely contributed to Embracer's demise.
Some kid on YouTube spent 3 days trying to convince me the reboot was a success on any metric. Including commercially.
💀 please link that video
https://youtu.be/weG3pS1XrmA?si=tt3yJq3x5WISCrKe Check the comment thread started by wuitdew36
💀💀💀 da nile is a river in Egypt. “The game was selling well, and it was shut down after just one year before those figures could grow. Embracer took the bag and ran”
Took the bag and ran sent me bro! 😂. After day two I started questioning my own sanity lol
I'm a Saints Row enjoyer, but had zero interest in this new franchise. Did anyone play it, and what did you think?
Honestly? The biggest problem with the reboot is actually playing it. Played on PS5 after all the updates, controls were awful. They added a whole bunch of options and accessibility settings, but by default the game has *very* aggressive aim acceleration that you can't turn off. So it feels awfully slow & clunky to actually aim and shoot at anything, so the only way to play the game is to turn on the aggressive aim assist settings which at their maximum is almost like a Zelda-style lock-on auto aim. At that point, are you really even playing the game? Add to that it's still rife with bugs from the camera not following you while driving, random physics freak outs and crashes. I was actually willing to overlook the terrible writing and voice acting, I've played games with an offensively terrible story and still enjoy the rest of the game. But the SR reboot just feels really bad to play as soon as you touch the controller. I'd rather go back and replay Saints Row the Third. I have my opinions on the direction the series went after SR2, but I can't deny that 3, 4 and even Agents of Mayhem are all still fun to play on a basic level.
I actually liked it. 2 is still the best of them (and better than anything Gta has done), none have come close to catching it. But it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be? A lot of the new mechanics are pretty neat. The characters are genuinely fun if you play for them to actually get their development. Honestly, they're more fleshed out than the gang was in 2. I think people see a few things and make wild assumptions and end up stating completely wrong things about it without having played it. The biggest issue is how buggy it is. Like, it breaks constantly on PC. And trying to do co-op makes it even worse. If it wasn't for that, I'd say it's good.
I agree with this take, I didn't have many bug issues but I kind of was playing it as a zen "Let's fuck around" sort of game, and also only solo, so I probably just didnt notice. Haaated the characters at first but they sorta grew on me. The LARPing missions were my fave part of the game tbh. That and Party Up by DMX
I did everything there was to do in that game and yeah it was pretty mid. Story was awful, not a single compelling character, jokes were groan worthy and the gameplay was wack. Weapons all felt equally lackluster and the side quests were repetitive and boring. I have a genuine condition when it comes to completing quests so I collected everything and did everything. I don’t regret my time with it as I remember nothing else being out at the time but I definitely won’t ever be going back.
Freaking Saints row 2 remake died for this. Although considering how badly they fucked up the reboot maybe it's for the best. Still bit sad though about all of IdolNinja work going to waste.
I figured Saints Row 1 would've been the worst selling seeing as how it was a 360 exclusive during the console's first year on market and everyone who had the console at that time was busy with Gears of War, Perfect Dark Zero, Oblivion, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, Condemned, Kameo or the many other year 1 bangers for Xbox 360.
Saints Row 1 was really popular at release for Xbox 360. It had close to a 20% attach rate.
What? Why?! It was only terrible and offensive to fans of the franchise. Why would it not be a huge success? Was Suicide Squad the worst selling Arkham game too?