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
In my dreams, Hideo Kojima, the old Castlevania people, the fired senior writers at BioWare, and now, the old gods of Volition when it was good, are quietly building a studio together somewhere. With Mick Gordon and Jeremy Soule running OSTs.
That’s entirely unconfirmed hearsay. He’s also been in this industry since FF6, working with a heck of a lot of people, so it would very much be sudden and unusual.
Volition died a long time ago. It started in 2017 with Agents of Mayhem. Saints Row: The Third Remastered and Saints Row IV: Re-Elected Edition continue the fall. SR 2022 finished the job.
They made good games in the past. But we’re talking about the past not now.
This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.
It wasn’t published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic’s offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.
Just because the studio shut down doesn’t necessarily mean they lost their jobs. Often (especially for a giant publisher like Embracer), talent gets moved to other studios since it’s easier and cheaper than hiring new people.
But when you’re part of a smaller studio, you have creative control and freedom you don’t get when you’re a cog in someone else’s machine. People who go into this industry typically are looking for that more than just a salary, especially since other non-game jobs usually pay better. Although, idk what Volition was like internally, so maybe it sucked to work there.
I think they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2. It’s fun fooling around and being wacky in a game that has realism to it but when the game is built solely around being wacky it’s just boring.
I don’t agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don’t want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it’s own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.
SR3 was the top game for me. SR4 was a bit too much, but SR3 felt like it hit that sweet spot of goofiness, insanity, and just enough realism for me to keep me invested in the world
SR 1 and 2 were the best because they were like GTA, I don’t consider it a bad thing. 3 and 4 were a bit boring for me because Steelport was one of the dullest cities I’ve ever seen in a game.
From Wikipedia: In November 2022, Embracer Group stated that Saints Row “did not meet the full expectations and left the fanbase partially polarized”, but financially “performed in line with management expectations in the quarter.”
The piles of money were as high as we expected, but really we wanted them to be higher
More like "We don’t want to say it was only that game… "
Though actually with it a year later, I would say their follow up effort wasn’t amazing them… which makes more sense. They probably were going through Pre-prod on “saints row too” or what ever it was going to be. And Embracer didn’t want to continue.
Sales are typically not going to be followed up by refunds in a meaningful way, however poor public reception will hurt the sales of the next iteration.
The sales were ok but the consensus is that the game is shit, or ” the udders are dry, time to slaughter the cow"
Volition has been a long standing company with a slew of awesome games. They did a ton with THQ like 20 years ago that were amazing.
Summoner is one of my favorite games to date. It didn’t age well, but the story was amazing.
The descent games were intense as well.
I couldn’t find it on their wiki page, but I’m pretty sure they had a hand in loads of wrestling games in the late 90’s early 2000’s. WWF no mercy, smack down 1-4 as well.
As for saints row, I beat 1-3. The storyline to the first was unmatched by any GTA storyline. It was a shame to see them slink away from the original due to ridicule of being a “GTA clone.” The story was compelling, the voice acting outside of johnny gat was decent. The multiplayer experience offered far more than anything GTA had at the time. The best we got for GTA was in 2008 when they released their free roam multiplayer with GTA 4. By then saints row 2 had full coop.
Case and point. You’re either too young to know this developer in their prime, too retarded to recognize the loss of a good developer (albeit they haven’t put out much in the last few years), or both.
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
My perception of Saints Row isn’t that they did something wrong or changed in a bad direction, but to the contrary, the type of humour and “amusement” the game relied on didn’t age particularly well, it comes from the age of le random, LMFAO and similar content.
Yup. There’s a lot of dumb moaning about how it “went woke” and that it changed too much, but having played it, it’s biggest flaw (imo) was that it didn’t change enough. It tried to integrate humor and story that peaked in the late 2000s and mash it together with a “modern” setting and cast. And it didn’t help that the gameplay felt as aged as the humor. All in all, it was too medium for it’s own good, taking too few risks and not changing enough for a franchise that made it’s mark pushing the envelope.
Add comment