'Commercial Success'

 Never heard of her

There goes Volition

Pour one out

Volition's punishment.

Almost

Consequences for one's actions are rarely a concept we see explored and highlighted outside of school life, wherein it's the be-all end-all of life discussions. Because in the real world that's not entirely true, or only part of the truth, or a straight up lie altogether. Actions can sometimes never be traced to a direct causal link and who can honestly say whether or not their downturn in life is a direct result of their own negligence or a general slippery slope maybe somewhat helped along by their own actions. It's a murky and misty mire to try and tread across where there's no real right route. Except if you happen to be a company called Volition. Because in their case; Saints Row absolutely was the reason that their company is soon having the reigns around it's independence tightened.

 

This news comes from the lips of horrible Lovecraftian amalgamation monster 'Embracer Group' as they recently turned around and cut Volition's independence. Which is quite stark because I didn't even know Embracer Group owned them. Who else does Embracer Group own? Do they own me, and I just don't know it? If so, I'd really like to start getting some cheques in the mail any day now, Embracer Senpai; maybe then I'd stop laying dirt on your companies name! Embracer has decreed that Volition to be rolled under the wing of the producer Gearbox- wait, Embracer own Gearbox as well? I thought that was Epic Games! (Wait- actually now I come to think of it I just collate those two company founders as the same person because they're both equally childish. Now I remember...)

And how can we be sure that this is the victim of the recently released Saints Row Reboot game? I mean, what if this is simply because of the terrible losses of- let me check... The last game they made before that was 2017's Agents of Mayhem? Hmm... yeah I can't really see a scapegoat for them on this one. But the punishment doesn't seem to quite fit the crime, at least; not how Deep Silver seemed to describe the reception of Saints Row.  Listen to the word of 'corporate' and all you would hear, time and time again, was how the game is absolute not a failure. They said that, whilst the game was 'divisive' critically, the commercial sales proved more than enough to break even- oh wait, now I can see the subtle hints that this game didn't perform well... huh, funny I didn't notice that until this very moment...

Still, it's a little bit screwed up for your boss to ensure you that everything is going totally fine only for your entire department to be kicked out from their purview and under the eyes of another wobbly supposedly comedic video game company within the space of a few months. (Does this mean that the several chunks of menu options in the remake that were locked away for DLC will remain forever greyed out? No, apparently Deep Silver get to handle that stuff by themselves) Heck, there were members of the Volition team that themselves felt the need to bitterly stand up to the criticism of their work as self-appointed Twitter warriors. I can understand the passion, which makes sense when your very competence is challenged on a public forum; but perhaps those individuals would have ended up feeling a bit less worthless if they hadn't fought against perceptions of their game for month only for the bosses boss to agree with the haters and strip away all autonomy your studio had for the crime of delivering a truly atrocious game.

Which is not to say that I think Saints Row Reboot wasn't bad enough to destroy the franchise. If anything, the reboot's desperate attempts to strip away the identity of Saints Row to appeal to some imaginary mass market of Saints fans that were only waiting for the game to become less crude before they could really fall in love with the franchise, just highlighted how much the series was played out and empty. Honestly, Saints Row struggled to find itself years before the Reboot came around, this was just the shuddering final nail in that coffin. And since Volition's only other franchise has been itself awol for the past eleven years; I guess that made it a nail in Volition's coffin at the same time. As twisted as it sounds, this was probably a long time coming.

But does this mean the death of Saints Row and Volition? Not necessarily. The company still exists under the producing management of Gearbox, so there might be a chance for a surprise resurgence some years down the line if Gearbox can be tricked into financing such a thing. Although the scant Saints Row Reboot fans may have to come to terms with the sobering reality that it might be with yet another reboot to the brand. Afterall, pissing off the fanbase with a low quality game is one thing, but doing that and just about making a profit at the same time is pretty much a carnal sin of commercial work. The next time Saints Row sees the light of day we'll be in a different age and it'll carry the Gearbox badge and probably their cringe as well. The real question is whether or not that Gearbox logo will mean the game will be better or worse... after New Tales from the Borderlands, that's anyone's guess... (At least it might play better.)

Until that magical day, however, I suppose all we can do is look back on the demented life of the Saints Row franchise and try to remember the good in what it was. This was supposed to be the bold new face of the franchise and it was just awful. Unfortunately it was too awful to be continued, which is a bit of a shame because I was kind of hoping they'd go crazy and make this a bi-yearly series of hilariously bad cringe games. But apparently the 'I know it's abjectly terrible but I'm a hipster so I'm going to play it anyway' crowd isn't nearly as big as it likes to pretend it is on Twitter. And considering Twitter is soon to be the way of the dodo; I guess it's not really tenable for Volition to hide behind those loud accounts as proof of their apparently broad market appeal.

Of course I feel bad for Volition. I don't particularly love any one of their recent games, and have even fallen hard out of love with Saints Row 2 in recent years, but any developer stuck making one single game franchise for over a decade is unethical in my opinion. No artist wants to reiterate on the same themes they did before again and again, they want to change it up and keep things feeling fresh and interesting. Saints Row didn't even start as something unique and everytime it's tried to make itself into anything new the end product has veered closer to 'clueless' with every step. I know shifts of the status quo like this tend to lead to lay-offs; and that is one instance where I feel unabashedly bad. It is surprising I must say, the sheer stopping power of rank mediocrity. 

When developers make the wrong game

Whoops, I did it again!

Game development is never done in a vacuum. Unless you're Toby Fox, in which I case I can only assume you not only build games alone, but harvest your own home-grown food crops to stew in a naturally formed volcanic spring stove inside your hand built wooden log cabin home. There are numerous eyes, ears, voices and ideas that get sprinkled in the development dish in order to whip up that final finished product; ideas that will touch on everything from what sort of visual design standard fits best, how the implementation of this certain feature can be coded in a manner cohesive to systems around it and the ever-elusive; how can the cycle of fun in gameplay be extended over the length of our game? None of these are small questions, and all change the face of the product. Although the wrong fundamentals choice can actually be quite difficult to do when you've an entire team behind you for support. So if that's the case, how are entire AAA games being made so fundamentally wrong recently?

I ask because we've recently had the Superhero dud, Gotham Knights drop on our doorstep and, surprise surprise, the game isn't great. (Who could have possibly seen that coming?) And irrespective of that one technician complaining that the Xbox Series S was holding back the entire generation, this isn't a hardware problem as much as it's a conceptual one. (Unless the Series S grew sentience, crept into WB offices and personally recoded the game to be head-scracthingly badly conceived.) I think we all sort of knew this was going to be the case the very first moment we saw health bars above enemies and went "Uh oh; is this a live service?" Only for the team to turn around and promise it wasn't a live service, and then carry on talking about gear stats. Clearly a game that was born from the potent DNA of an incredible series that demonstrated exactly what a Batman-set superhero game needs to be wouldn't screw up the fundamentals; would it? 

But outside of story and dialogue, for which I heard wildly distinct perspectives, Gotham Knights focuses on everything it shouldn't and ends up being the wrong game it needed to be. Focus is put on the repetition of boring dynamic fights, (which are supposed to be the garnish on top of the world, not a gate to progression) the crafting system, (which lacks any ingenuity whatsoever) stats and level numbers (which clash with the superhero fantasy) and a horribly dumbed down fighting system. (Galling when fighting is literally the main way of interacting with the world.) Essentially they needed to make an action adventure game that expanded on the basics of what the Arkham series made and let several players enjoy that experience together; instead we got a live service skin stretched over an entirely single player game! All the downsides and concessions required to make it a live service, none of the benefits and positives. It's as if the team spent their years making the wrong game. 

And it's all very similar to how Marvel's Avengers turned out, only at least that game was designed to be a Live Service and actually was. But still, the resounding take away from the Avengers game was that it, too, was the wrong game. People of the time were hungry for a cinematic and linear high-quality narrative featuring the famous cast of the movies. Maybe the casting was a bit out-of-the-question, but the high-quality set-piece strewn exciting video game narrative could have been the slam dunk that the hopeful wanted. It would make sense. Popular Superhero games of the past, the Spiderman games, the Arkham games, Ultimate Alliance; all nailed that sense of overbloated comic-book scale narratives, empowering the user with small units they can crush with their flashy powers and impressive set-piece fights against huge roosters and familiar super villain faces to punctuate the excitement. The basic framework of a solid super hero game is actually fairly formulaic and straight forward.

Instead what we got was, yet again, a power levelling RPG system that made certain units annoying and unintuitive to fight against, strings of copy-paste cookie cutter 'smash the thing' missions that served only to pad out the run time as you grind for gear that is only good for taking on slightly harder variants of those same missions and, worst of all, a campaign which featured only three Super villains which the open world game recycled constantly. All that effort which could have gone into making the ultimate superhero team-up game instead went into calculating gear stat tables, designing grind EXP curves, setting up the players for endgame content that could be added onto, and basically doing all the things that don't improve the fantasy of being a superhero. And when you're making a superhero game, prioritizing the fantasy is a fundamental objective, any design decision that gets in the way of achieving that needs wrought-iron justification for it's existence and if you can't provide that; then maybe the game you're making isn't a superhero game!

And from a very different angle, we can look at another game which wasn't what it was supposed to be with the recent Saints Row Reboot. Now people who were fans of Saints Row would, in turn, be fans of the gangbanger fantasy, even as that vision got slowly watered down as the franchise went on. At the heart was always a focus on irreverent action and, arguably dated, scenes which attempt to depict the player character as the prototypical, cigar smoking gun-toting, embodiment of your pop culture 'badass'. Whether that image was pursued with straight-faced seriousness or ironically, that was pretty much the heart of Saints Row. 'The Playa' is a badass, and at times when they aren't being a badass they're not being true to themselves and need to go through a journey to remind themselves how to be a badass again. That is the moral peak that overrides all else; and within the fiction of the game world that alone makes them superior to the various colourful gangs and existential threats around them even if the Saints are just as murderous and destructive. The game doesn't even conceive of viewing the Saints performances as morally questionable, because the rule of cool is idolised by Saints Row.

Which is all to say that Saints Row Reboot isn't a Saints Row game. It might carry the name, emulate some of objectives and copy the gameplay, (badly) but it lacks that very important ingredient of Saint's Rows 'heart'. (Or any heart, by some critic's accounts.) For the Reboot, the Saints are driven by half-digested morals of anti-capitalism that are explored about as well as Star Wars dives into astrophysics, the protagonist's key principals are togetherness and loyalty to his friends, which is so empty-souled and basic you wonder if anyone was behind the keyboard writing this script at all, and that edge of the player's selfish desire being, even ironically, moralised above bare basic standards of decency is entirely, intentionally, absent. Just like with Ubisoft games, the protagonist has to be the good guy, even if that's in a strangled way, and that sanitation rubs off onto the wider open world itself in a plethora of bizarre and lazy 'censorships'. By trying to distance themselves from the abrasive past of Saints Row's presentation, the Reboot distanced itself from being a Saints Row game. Whatever lukewarm open world romp that Volition created, it wasn't Saints Row but something else entirely.

Making the wrong game is in some ways worse than making a bad or broken game. Because with a bad game at least one can recognise how you knew what was supposed to be created and simply failed on that execution, and a broken one can feasibly be fixed to one-day be great. But a 'wrong' game is symptomatic of a fundamental divide between what the concept of the game demands and the direction you sought to develop. The final product might work and function just fine, but the concept and gameplay will never slide together in that perfect synergy which forms a product that achieves it's vision. Essentially this blog is a treatise on exactly why effective and precise planning is, in many ways, the most important stage of video game development; because anything else that goes wrong can be rectified, but bad schematics underline everything. Always make sure you're making the right game, everybody.

So... Saints Row...

Haters gonna hate

Final Destination is a movie franchise run under the premise that a destined death fortold by fate gets waylaid by those destined to die getting a premature vision of their demise through some unexplored phenomena. Try as they might to save themselves, and occasionally even avoid the headsman's axe, there's no escaping the fate laid out for them. I'd like to think of what became of the Saints Row Reboot as a 'Final Destination' moment; where so many of the world had that vision of exactly what this game was before it launched,  and try as they might to warn the rest of the world that couldn't quite make it out, their troubles were written in the unchanging stars. From the moment they revealed the bold new direction of Saints Row; it seem Volition were destined for destruction, although just how far the final product ended up going off the rails is a damn surprise, even to me.

Remember that this is a game that was delayed nearly half a year into 2022 in order to make sure that the thing ran right. Well it seems we might be having a bit of a Cyberpunk 2077 flashback here because despite all that extra development time we have a shockingly broken game being sold for full retail price in the current market of gaming. I thought there were basic standards that games had to meet in order to be listed on storefronts; but apparently not considering that the Epic Games version of the game launched with a bug where the Exe sometimes doesn't load the game and you need to brute force try the launch again and again until the game accidentally lets you through. All things considered, that's probably a pretty dire warning as to what you can expect from Saints Row as a whole. (Even the game itself is trying its best to ward you away; maybe we should have heeded it's advice.)

And the bugs don't end there. You have glitching out character models, weird camera lock bugs where sometimes vehicles jolt the camera in super zoom until you get out the car and get back in again, civilian AI seems to have two modes: routine and run away, the latter of which sometimes has them run directly into walls or into the thing they're supposed to be fleeing from, there's at least one captured example of a UI text box with placeholder text, some reports of UI disappearing altogether for periods of time, NPCs that disappear into thin air right in front of you, traffic that pops into existence right in front of you, and just about everything short of CTDs. That doesn't mean there aren't any Crash to Desktop issues; I've just not heard about any of them yet. All of this evidences a game that, rather obviously, was not ready to drop at prime time and to such a degree that there's no way the team were not aware of this when they put it up on storefronts for that laughable price-tag. And it all should have been frighteningly obvious to whatever board was certifying gold status for the game. Maybe Volition pulled the old "Whoops, we accidentally sent you a month's old build" to get around scrutiny. (Funny how often devs screw up build versions that you'd think would be clearly labelled. We need to set up some sort of industry standard for this stuff.)

But of course, those are just the barriers to getting into the content that Saints Row Rebooted has to offer; but what about if you're mister 'lucky' himself, the man-with-the-plan, what if you have a flawless play session? Well... then you get enjoy one of the most dated, lacklustre, empty, and cringe-inducing open world games on offer yet. You experience that game that Saints Row 4 was shaping up to be, before the decision was made to scrap the direction the franchiser was headed and just do nonsensical space/super hero crap instead. Only even then, at least the series would have some semblance of the Saints Row charm to fall back on, for those that still get a kick out of the same things that Saints Row writers do. (I realised they were a bit beyond my generation when 4 threw a cameo from Roddy Piper into the game and just expected me to know who that was.) The name game is, quite simply, just bland. But if you're into bland, and judging by the copium IVs that half of the Saints Row Reddit are on that is a common desire for gamers today, then Volition have that milquetoast, vanilla flavoured, store brand, open world- just waiting for your purchase. 

It's not just the fact that Saints Row has the ingenious idea of forcing it's side activity content into the main narrative progression so that you never have that 'go out and do your own thing' feeling you got back in Saints Row 2 where they told you to just go out and make some money and just left you to your own devices. Nor is it really the fact that even after all of these years the Volition team haven't had a single damn epiphany about a game-mode to add to the standard list. You've got 'Insurance Fraud', exactly as it's always been, bounties, bodyguard, chop shop (only with the whole car collection being a specific mission so that you don't have it be a metagame in usual play like GTA figured out is a more engaging way to do it since Vice City.) It's really the lack of even casual ways to interact with the world around you beside driving over dull and brain dead pedestrians. Why is this game even an open world? How can it justify that effort? It can't.

And beneath it all is this utterly bizarre sense that Saints Row is trying to 'clean up it's act' and become 'distance themselves from their problematic past'. What is meant by this is that the Volition developers made steps to try and erase the accusations of deeply offensive parts of Saints Rows past such as "homophobia, racism and sexual violence against women". And yes, you may have noticed how that list sounds like a questionable line-up of accusations if you've ever actually played those old games, and yes, I did steal that list off of 'DenOfGeek'. The truth is that Saints Row built itself off the ideals of irreverence in a very crude fashion telling jokes that appealed to shock factor above everything else, which made some of them more more flashy and prone to aging badly than more clever formed jokes might have. You can choose to try and twist this into some deeply offensive past to characterise a past of vicitmising that Saints Row had never been accused of in the moment, but that would be a little bad faith and an aggressive damnation of fans who charm in that silly 'chuck it all at the wall and see what sticks' approach.

The problem is that the Saints Row Reboot also falls for this bad faith assessment and aggressively tries to distance itself from the free-spirited, hope this shocking joke gets a laugh, past; whilst trying to slide itself into what feels like a watered down version of that exact same style of game making one wonder what the hell the team even wanted in the first place. For example, they've removed jokes like the car shop being called 'Rim Jobs', or the burger shop being called 'Freckle Bitches'. Two jokes that are literally only offensive to those who are sensitive to rude words, and Saints Row Reboot contains one mandatory section at the beginning where the player character swears for two minutes straight during a drive home. It's this tonal dissonance that alienates old fans and then fails to recapture them with a half hearted 'do-over' attempt that just feels pathetic and non-committal. Like slapping someone and telling them they're a vile scumbag because you two used to joke back in highschool, and then telling them half-forgotten badly told knock-off versions of those same old jokes desperately hoping they'll find them funny and be your friend again. That is the reason that even hardcore fans can't look past the bad writing or substandard gameplay like they used to. (Although to be fair, the fact that the gameplay literally hasn't changed since Saints Row 3 doesn't help their case much either.)

Dated, is the term throne around again and again but it's really just a part of a fascinatingly flawed whole. The game is broken and dated in a way that repels potential new fans, charmless and dismissive in a way that rejects old fans, and uninspired and bland in a way that utterly precludes all illusions of possible respect you might have for it. Some stragglers still definitely lift up their head and declare "I'm having fun with it" or, increadibly, "Don't knock it until you've played it!" To which I say, try playing literally any other game of it's genre or even previous games of the same series and you'll find your expectations of what a fun-time can be will be vastly expanded, and, the point of reviews is to be able to make informed decisions without wasting your money. No one should have to waste $60 to realise a game isn't worth that money. Plain and simply, Volition pooped the bed, and after a colossal screw up this bad, I can't possible imagine any publisher giving them the funding to attack this franchise again. So for the foreseeable future, Saints Row is dead. Killed in most pathetic and bland manner possible.

Our new Saints Row

 A game about Student Loan- playing the people's tune.

So the Saints Row games have certainly entered a very weird space in the most recent entries, and now even more so for this remake, reboot, thing we have ahead of us. Whilst most remakes are a celebratory time where fans are reminded and drawn to the classic games of yesteryear that they love and yearn for, Saints Row's newest game has sort of placed itself in an adversarial position to those originals games and now it sort of feels a bit odd getting excited using those old games in preparation for this new one. Of course that doesn't go to fully describe the player/game split that has ruptured in the time following the reveal of this remake, but I think it's a touch on why people are finding it so hard to get aboard that ever elusive hype train. What are we even waiting for?  A game that wants to distance itself from everything this series popularised, or which wants reframe all of it under a totally different approach? I genuinely don't know what we should be expecting, and that's more than a little because of heavily mixed messaging and utterly questionable team comments, and thus though I want to be excited for a new Saints Row that isn't going to be continuing the cursed Saints Row 4 plotline, I literally cannot track the path to that excitement. (But I'm still trying)

During the Game Awards we got ourselves a much more sensible gameplay presentation of what this game will look like, which was so much more welcome than that abominable cinematic from the first reveal and it builds upon those snippets of game that we saw during the interview sections of marketing. Is it going to magically bring things back to the gritty street gang aesthetic from Saints Row 1? No- but personally I don't particularly care about that because I think that Saints Row 1 was a mediocre GTA clone and Saints Row 2 was a perfected version of that formula, but that still wouldn't fly in today's world. We've just moved on so much in design meta, in fact I feel like we're reaching a point in the gaming industry where people are growing sick and tired with half assed open world games in general. A lot of Saints Row games probably clock into the quality scale at just above 'half assed', but that doesn't make them any less of the problem with these incessant and ill thought-out genre games.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm looking for this Saints Row remake to actually take a big step in revolutionising itself from it's predecessors, and that means more than just forsaking those previous game's tone in favour of whatever the hell this new game is trying to be. (Funny? Is that what it is? Saints Row has always been super hit or miss in that regard) Key areas of improvement are all easy to label, but unfortunately are the hardest parts of the game to get right. The game world has been terrible ever since we lost Stillwater, base your world on a real city to capture some of that heart and intent to the overall city design, which was totally absent in Steelport. The gameplay has always been floaty, which for a series as action heavy as Saints Row feels like a nigh on crime. And there could be some effort put into exploration beyond late game icon chasing. (Don't be Ubisoft, guys.) Everything else Saints Row does great, we'll just have to see if they've managed to pick up any of that previous slack sufficiently.

The gameplay trailer from the Awards show certainly did have a pizazz to it that I was looking for, but evidently it still hasn't resolved my nagging concerns seeing as how I'm still voicing them. Santo Illeso is very pretty looking in my opinion, although I have noticed that there so far hasn't been a single piece of footage where we see action taking place in a predominately metropolitan part of the city. The desert red-rock aesthetic appears to be everywhere and it takes away from the overpowering and typically domineering atmosphere of a real-life city. What they've captured, oddly, is the aura of a town, basked by the world around it, instead of a city jutting up in stubborn defiance of nature. It's not a look I hate, but it's already making every scene feel samey, and if I can't get out of one environment I've grown bored of in order to spend some time in another: how long will it be before this entire gameworld starts to feel stale?

Gameinformer were kind enough to post some actual mission gameplay for the Saints Row Remake/ Reboot/ Sequel as well, so we can get a sense of what the game is like when the entire screen isn't nauseously throbbing to the beat of an ill-advised backing track. (Yeah I think trailer aesthetic people need to seriously be told to stop more often.) Right away from watching the footage I can tell that something in the gameplay has changed from how Saints Row has played in the past, and it's a change that I'm liking the look of. Driving is the easiest to judge without getting my hands on the thing, and it looks more satisfying and robust to the point where, unless I'm very much mistaken, it could be that resistance and weight will actually exist in this universe! (Starkly different from earlier games.) Of course this clearly isn't exactly Forza level car physics and cars are still bouncy enough for this to remain a shameless action game (actually, I worry that the cars are perhaps a shade too bouncy) but basic foundations look solid for game that at least drives better. 

Gunplay is another area of noticeable improvement, although that's going to be much more a case of "I can tell how good it is until I play it", but I say that I notice some definite improvement with the utmost shock because I was near certain that Volition would leave this part of the game high and dry. Gunplay looks fine right now, with a sort of snap over-the-shoulder perspective introduced in order to fit a slightly more in your face and grounded moveset. Enemies have health bars now, but they don't appear to be garishly large and feels more like a visualisation of enemies about as tough as they were in previous entries. (Which raises the question of why one even needs health bars at all, but I'm guessing the armoured enemies from the Ultor/STAG stand-in faction are going to justify that with robot mecs or something else similarly contrived) The player moves with an agile spped to them and though there doesn't appear to be an inbuilt cover system to the game or any of the other typical trappings of your best third person shooters, I could still imagine a world wherein a big fire fight might actually be a solid and enjoyable experience and not a bullet hell groan fest like in the past. There's even a very rudimentary fist fighting mechanic in the game that I imagine will be misbegotten and a waste of development time as well as a lighting system which is a tad too aggressive for indoor locations, as evidenced in the way that it makes the inside nigh-on blinding. (I wasn't expecting RDR2 level systems in play here, I can deal with some jank.)

With everything that the game has shown itself to be in the marketing material, I'm becoming fairly set on my assessment that the Saints Row Remake is glowing up as a solid b-tier game; and that's totally fine. I feel that somewhere along the way Saints Row of the past got a little too into itself and tried to use pure spectacle to suck all the air out of room from other big names games, (that and tons of shock factor, of course) and thus the games started to come across a little tryhard some of the time. (Not as tryhard as Sunset Overdrive, but you can see in Saints Row sapling that would grow up to become Sunset) So far this iteration seems comfortable in it's skin and what it wants to do, and what it wants is to be a game that'll be fun to kill some time and screw about in. Is it going to revolutionise the industry or reignite the golden age of Saints? Probably not, but as long as it does what it needs to do right, then it doesn't need to blow us away with any of that other stuff.

Although on a personal level all of this does reignite this nagging question of 'do we need this game to exist?' I mean honestly, why does this remake need to even be launched, what are Volition going to say with this game that hasn't been said with past entries? I ask because to be honest, I think I'd rather something with a bit more legs to spread out and be new got worked on. I don't know, I just don't feel a special spark off this game, and certainly can't justify this being the sort of title I'll mark on the calendar and rub my hands waiting for. It just sort of feels like Watch_Dogs without the hacking, but then Saints Row does always seem to have this charm which has filled up that hollow space in past games before, so maybe that intangible and elusive boon will flare up to win this title some points once again. Or this will come out as the incredibly average middle of the road game it seems destined to be. Welcome back to the Row, I guess.

Oh, THIS is Saints Row

 Now that's what I'm talking about

See, now this is why I said I wasn't going to write this game off straight away. That reveal was the pits, true, but that just leaves Volition with nowhere to go but up and a good way to start that process is by giving us actual gameplay! (Why wasn't the gameplay the reveal instead of the bad trailer? That's anyone's guess) It seems that emotions are still very raw when it comes to Saints Row, where the temperature hasn't quite set and the outrage hasn't touched every corner of coverage just yet; and so from where I'm sitting I think that this in-depth little snippet we've had gifted to us, though presented in a style I vehemently despise, could hold the remedy for a lot of what ails this game's early advertising. That identity crisis issue- well, it hasn't be resolved as such, but it has been elucidated upon us. Overall, if you watched that mess of CG crap and said "I have no idea what this game even is", watch this footage and you'll know. They covered mostly all of it.

But here I am claiming to know the secrets of the Saints Row universe; I know what this new game is, do I? Then how about I put my money where my mouth is, to quote one of my favourite picks from the Saints Row 2 soundtrack. It's Watch_Dogs 2; they are trying to create Watch_Dogs 2 in the Saints Row world, it's blatant, it's kinda style-less; but that is what they're trying to do. But what do I mean by that? Well, Watch_Dogs 2 basically broke itself down into a story of 'faux relatable' but highly marketable young adults fighting the 'corrupt powers that be' and proving how 'punky' and 'unique' they were through pretty cookie-cutter characteristics, such as being funny/quirky and wearing a digital mask all the time, being techy and... gosh that really was all there was to that character honestly, or being the leader person who then doesn't become the leader because of a contrived and non-sensical story beat that makes the player character the leader. (I won't pout. Some people liked the WD2 cast.) Well, substitute 'fighting the powers' to 'starting a criminal empire', and you've pretty much got what this game is going for. Teens shoved at the forefront of a story that wants to ride some 'relatable edge' that'll lay the weight of the narrative all on the characters and how strong they resonate with the audience.

And at face value you might think, "A character driven Saints Row? What are they thinking?", to which I would remind you that character has always been at the heart of Saints Row, (well, always since II) and it's one of the few shining beacons of this series. Johnny Gat, Peirce Washington, Shaundi back when she was cool- these characters were the solvent holding together all the wanton chaos and carnage, and following their personalities was almost as much of a draw for these games as shooting people to death with Dubstep guns. In fact, I'd argue that these games ended up becoming too character focused, to the point where the dynamics between teammates almost felt like they were devolving into dysfunctional sit-com territory; and I'm talking about before Saints Row IV where they intentionally leaned into that style of characterisation in order to sell a joke. (Everything about Saints Row IV was designed to land jokes. Not least of all the game itself.)

So coming back to a character heavy approach to presenting the new Saints Row world is nostalgic, even if this new cast have somehow managed to make me hate them all in less than 2 days. Okay, so maybe hate is a strong term, when I think about the searing disdain I feel towards Pillars of Eternity's Durance I remember the true meaning of hated; but I'm still not jiving with this new crew off the bat. They seem equal parts exaggerated and understated, in who they are trying to portray and how they are designed. A design philosophy that can totally work when pulled off correctly, don't get me wrong, but when it's not done right it just feels vapid. Take shirtless guy, we've been given a name I just don't care to remember it. He's the really 'out there' one who's a little bit wacky and crazy, and get this, he want's to be a TV chef. (Wild!) But in the clips we've seen of him so far this has been realised as him telling the odd lifeless cooking quip (I've already heard 2. Neither elicited a reaction) and wearing a silly mask. And he's shirtless. (I guess that counts as personality) And sure, these are just the previews, but I'm already noting that these characters aren't jumping out the screen to me, and if this is going to be all about character... well, I'm worried.

At least the city looks sick. One of the standouts of the developer update was their bragging about this new city of theirs, Santo Ileso, a southwestern redrock valley that is quite unlike anything we've seen from the Saints Row brand before. The team have stood up and called this a part of their bold new step away from the past games, new characters, new city. (You know, as if the Original Saints Row games didn't already switch the city up once) They've even had their main voice actor brag about how this is the best city yet which- well, yeah. Stilwater was kind of nice, and I liked the suburban vibe of some of it, but Steelport is one of my least favourite open world cities ever. It's garish, ugly and lacks any heart whatsoever, describing my disdain is near impossible, I just hated Steelport. Topping those two ain't no great feat of ingenuity. Yet still I think this new city looks very open, bustling with character and it simply glimmers under this engine of theirs.

The looks are, I think, going to be the most divisive part of this game, in regards to the art direction. Personally I have no problem with the 'simulate realism' style of art direction, but I'm sure there are some series veterans out there that are mourning the subtly exaggerated features and colours, which grew almost cartoonish as the series became more wild. At least in this direction change the staff are making no effort to move away from their customisability, which has always been a standout of this series for it's sheer range and diversity. However, I will implore the team shut up about how the 'way you take over the city' will be customisable, implying that our final Santo Ileso will resemble our own personal taste. Nice try, V, but I fell for that before during the Saints Row The Third marketing and I won't easily do so again; you're just going to give me a drop-down menu of different clothes for my gang-members to wear, aren't you?

What has been touched on the least, but what I'm most intrigued by, are the small tweaks to the gameplay that seem apparent this time around. Saints Row has never been the most solid in it's moment-to-moment action and combat, wherein all actions typically feel floaty and gunplay lacks any impact. One might call this a natural symptom of making a third person shooter, but I would refer the gunplay of modern GTA, Max Payne, or even the original Watch_Dogs. It can be better, and I think that would make the actual core gameplay loop a lot more fun to stick with. I've heard that Agents of Mayhem (I looked up the name) did some improvements to the combat gameplay just in order to sell it's concept better, and so I hope the team have leaned into that craft even more for this reboot. For what I've seen so far, this looks like it might be the case. I mean there is a roll now! It's way too fast and moves too far to be considered a roll with any impact or weight to it; but it's some sort of tactical movement. (Wait, was there a roll in the old series? Now I'm forgetting things. And I'm too lazy to download one quickly and check)

"Humour, over the top and Badass" are the pillars which one developer coined during this interview, his own attempt at providing a unique selling point. Now of course, calling that an approach unique to Saints Row is simply laughable; just look at Borderlands, modern DOOM, old Duke Nukem, oh and Yakuza! (Seriously, Volition; Yakuza beat you at your own game any day of the week.) But at least they have some direction they want to shoot for and a belief, skewered though it may be, that they're set to be trail blazers. Right now I'm seeing Saints Row as a reverse Starfield for me, in that the more I learn about it the more excited I get. I'm perhaps not there to jump on the game yet, which is worrying considering how soon the game is to launch, but I'm feeling it's rhythm rock my joints a little. My advice from here, learn how to take criticism. It's kinda galling for this game about being 'badass' and 'edgy' to be made by people turning around and calling everyone "Haters" for not loving the reveal trailer. (Still, this is shaping up to perhaps be an alright game.)

Saints Row, huh?

 You look... different

I didn't sign up to the Gamescon event the very second it dropped this time around, not after the nearly 2 hour snorefest that was the Mircosoft event. (Why are manufacturers even getting their own events now at Gamescon anyway? Why does every gaming event have to be E3?) I was a little busy too, but I did manage to catch up about halfway through the thing. I tuned into someone else watching the gamescon stream (as I always like to get a feel of the sort of vibe these game reveals are getting right off the bat) and witnessed a man half bored out of his mind lazily acknowledging a barrage of room-temperature reveal trailers. I'd heard that today would be the big reveal date and in fact the original stream even listed it in the title, so I wasn't sure if I'd missed the announcement yet or if the big one was upcoming. My questions were answered when, said streamer, just happened to reply to a comment and say "Huh? What games have we seen so far? Umm... there was the new Saints Row, I guess." So that was how I was treated to the perception surrounding this new game, no excitement, no disappointment, just bland acknowledgment. And after I saw the trailer I can kind of understand that sentiment too well.

First of all let me take you right back to another game which I remembered just now, one that echoes this situation quite a bit. Do any of ya'll remember DMC? Wait, I should call it by it's proper title: DMC: Devil May Cry. I'm talking about the game which announced itself as Devil May Cry 5, and was poised to reboot the Devil May Cry franchise, only to rub everyone the wrong way out of the gate, to the point where Capcom literally undid the reboot and made the proper Devil May Cry V their next DMC universe game. That game did seemingly everything wrong in the marketing department, it removed all recognisable characters and imagery, skewered the tone and slapped a boring title at fans expecting them to go along with it without being teased into the affair. Of course, that original trailer would be what fans would end up looking back on fondly as characterisation deteriorated severely by the time of release, but the relationship between fan and game started rocky and was so off a cliff by launch that the game still gets looked on as some sort of abomination upon man, whether that be fair criticism or not. I did not lay this story down here for no reason.

'Saints Row' immediately does its darndest not to resemble what Saints Row was in all but the most perfunctory way; to the point where many people shared the same misconception that this was a Watch_Dogs game before the title reveal. How badly do you need to screw the vibe of the game until it's this unrecognisable to fans? This badly, apparently. Although, to play devil's advocate, this is sort of the point. 'Old School' Saints fans had been whining for a while about how the embarrassing decent of this franchise into absurdity didn't build on the game we all loved, Saints Row 2. 2 famously juggled jokes with drama, made you laugh in order to make you care, and tried to retain some sort of realism in it's world. Saints Row 3 kind of tried the same thing, but it veered a little to far into the crazy train which Saints 4 then drove off a cliff. Yet there were still fans in the backseat when that train burned, so my question is; did Saint's Row ever have a chance nailing the announcement of a Reboot?

I mean think about it, really do; what the heck are the team even rebooting? The largely mediocre GTA clone of Saints Row 1? The 'We can do GTA but more fun' of Saints Row 2? The 'Screw GTA, we have Dildo Bats' of Saints Row 3? Or the 'references are funny right? RIGHT?' of Saints Row 4? (I never played 'Gat out of Hell' or that other game I care about so little I refuse to look up it's name) All these games have their fans (Actually, Saints 1 probably doesn't) and no one game rightly represented all of what Saints Row was. (despite what the independent fandoms claim) So who the heck would a Reboot be appealing to? Which part of the fans do the team want to cater for? I think, upon reflection, that they've tried to appease all of them- which only begs to question why this needed to be a reboot at all. (According to Gat out of Hell's synopsis the events of Saints IV was already retconned; why not just make this the next sequel?)

To back up my wild assumption as to the developer's intentions, I call to the witness stand; that trailer which everyone pretty much hated. First of all, it's all CGI and tells you utterly nothing about the game is question, bad start. Secondly, the trailer doesn't take place in Steelport but an entirely new city, thank god. Thirdly, the trailer seems confused as to what it's even going for. It shows a very grounded beginning scene of typical gangster-types in some sort of deal that turned sour, (Very 2) then there's some flat jokes and talk about how this whole 'criminal thing' is working like a business startup, which is something parroted in the game's official description so presumably that's a genuine element of the aesthetic. (very Saints Row 3) Then the trailer devolves into a stupid over-the-top chase through the city with one car driving backwards off rooftops and... I don't know, this sounds like it should be cool but I just don't care. Oh, and there's a weird shirtless guys who stole Wrench from Watch_Dogs mask with the digital expressions things. (Firmly IV) So the styles kind of clash and this game consequently doesn't firmly fit the vibe of any game before it.

That's... fine actually. The whole point of a Reboot is to try new things and Saints Row has demonstrated before how it's never been married to one style of aesthetic, storytelling or even the laws of reality themselves. But there's something even more that's pushing past the general scepticism that usually accompanies a Reboot, something that leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth regardless. Oh yeah! The game doesn't show off the fact that it's Saints Row at any time! (Besides a shot of a Cactus vaguely in the shape of a Fleur De Lis) The characters don't wear purple, not a single character from the old games is present, the zaniness doesn't shine with the puerile idiocy of Saints Row, beyond the title screen at the end- which has a different design from the old series- there's no indication that this is a Saints Row game. Which is a problem, isn't it? Even if this is a reboot, shouldn't there be some representation of what made the original special present in your trailer? Else why even make a game under this property at all?

And the fans felt this void, clearly, given their guttural rejection of this game in a practically unanimous fashion. In less than a day of this being up fans are throwing mud at this game with the same ferocity they did back when DMC was announced, maybe spurred on by the fact that still the only gameplay we've seen is a brief tease that refuses to hold on a scene for more than 1 second. (Why not spend more time developing that and not the CGI waste-of-time?) Things are so dire that the Saints Row Twitter has had to bat down false phantoms that are arising from the chaos; like the claim that there would be no customisable character in this game. (Of course there is, no god would be so cruel as to force players to play as one of those plywood boards from the trailer.) At the very least I'll say that I don't think PR for this game will get nearly as bad as DMC's did. (NinjaTheory really have a lot of unaddressed skeletons in their closet from that mess)

So what of this new Saints Row, and more importantly, does it have any potential? Well, I'll say for one that the little snippet of gameplay looked pretty cool to me. The game looks like it's going in a completely different design direction than the franchise was originally headed for, but the whole 'realistic design direction' approach isn't exactly inspired. It's hard to say, I'd have to see more. Which is the key here. If we could see the game, then there would less space for people to stew over what a crappy announcement that was. I know someone in this company understands that blindingly obvious fact, I just need them to speak up more during board meetings. I'm not about to write this one off just yet, but I do have to formerly acknowledge and record this announcement, for the ledger, as a swing and a miss. I'm sorry team, they can't all go your way.