Saints Row Team Thrown Under the Bus: 'They Didn't Know What They Were Building'

After the first 2 games it was like a way worse version of GTA Online but every game.

I honestly understand what this guys saying, though his choice of words is poor. Saber split from embracer who were just throwing everything at the wall and killing whatever didn’t stick. My issue with saints row is that it felt like a mish mash of many games like GTA, but not in a good way. I was reminded of the horrible smartphone copycats of GTA, but this was full price.

I get it, but there is no way I’m defending his words here. He’s talking like someone who generally hasn’t had much human interaction.

The new saints row was truly horrible. Everything about it was bad, the characters, the setting, and the gameplay. Really ashame because I really enjoyed the previous entries with 2 and 4 being my favorites. A remake of 2 would have been better received. Really ashame that there's not gta competition anymore.

You can just tell this guy has no empathy whatsoever.

Honestly respect him for saying it like it is. We coddle the devs in the industry too much. We say "Make the games you want" but then they don't suffer any consequences for failure in doing so.

Also remember before Saints Row Volition made Agents of Mayhem which was another disaster. They had enough opportunities to get their act together. It isn't unfair unlike what WB did with Monolith Software

I liked the new Saints Row game but let's be honest none of them were ever going to win lots of accolades. I know that type of person though, probably quite clever but has zero social skills and no empathy.

"They were so expensive for what they were" that is harsh! But probably true.

The guy sounds arrogant, but he managed to save Saber from the demonic claws of Embracer.

Raise your hands if you played the first 2 OG Saint's Row and said exactly this when they showed the "reboot" of Saint's Row?

Saints Row has two distinct camp of players, the OG Saint's Row camp (who played and loved 1 & 2), and the NG Saint's Row camp (who played and loved 3 & 4). There are maybe some stragglers here and there that loves a mix and match between these 4 titles, but either way, those were the distribution of Saint's Row gamers.

When the reboot was announced, they somehow managed to alienate every single gamers on those two camps (I honestly have no idea how their target for the game was). I still remember how the trailer and the announcement was received and yet this company and CEO dismissed our concern due to hubris.

Yet here we are, watching this overpaid piece of shuits (pun definitely intended) preaching the same thing everyone been saying on this game years before they get into this realization. What a clown...

He is 100% right about everything he said. The devs at Volition made that awful game and should be held accountable. I know it isn’t popular to put the blame on devs and rather the publisher but sometimes it is true, and becoming more and more frequent. So many of the biggest flops in recent years are games in which the devs had full creative control because the publisher had complete faith in them. People thought Suicide Squad was messed up due to WB’s meddling but it turned out WB let Rocksteady do whatever they wanted for 7 years of development! Just because someone becomes a game developer does not mean they are a good one.

Also the ever ballooning budgets for games need to be put in check otherwise the industry will collapse. Developers need to stop spending so much time and resources on minuscule details nobody is going to notice in the name of artistic integrity. Do you really need to model and animate all the pores and hair on characters’ skin in the game? It feels that developers begin to waste development time doing busy work just to keep games in development longer. This guy may have been blunt but he speaks the truth.

He sounds like a pleasure to work with.

Saints Row I was cool. Saints Row 2 as great. Everything since has been hot garbage! Or should I say, liquid 💩 (If you know, you know…)

I loved SR 1 and 2 - and thought they were better than GTAs offerings.

SR3 was Good.

SR4 was ... different (though I loved the Transformers references near the end "one shall stand, one shall fall...")

SR Reboot gets a lot of flack it doesn't deserve - including quite a lot from people who never actually played it. It was a good game - as good as 3, but not as good as 1 & 2 imo, and was really funny in parts - though the supporting cast could have done with a bit of extra work in some cases.

They tried to make a game for the modern audience. Perhaps they didn't exactly know who the modern audience is supposed to be. Does such an audience even exist at this point?

It was not fun, if it's not fun why play it?

Saints Row 2 is the best
Saints Row 3 is second

IMO they should’ve just did a remake of saints row 2 instead of doing a saints row 3 remaster🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

No, they made a crap game and got fired for losing the company money.

I'm just sad and happy Saints Row is dead. Sucks because it was one of my favorite franchises, but good so these devs can't ruin it any further.

I absolutely loved Saints Row 1 and 2 when they came out. 1 filled the GTA gap brilliantly, and 2 tightened the formula and had a really fun story with great humour. 3 was ok, I appreciated it more in 2020 than I did in 2013 or whenever I played it. I played 4 back to back, 100% both, and 4 was so awfully bad. Still had humour but it was extremely unfocussed and lazy - it was literally do a generic mission, go to spaceship hub, talk to someone, do another mission. Maybe the others were like that too and I can't put my finger right on it, but something changed with 4 and it rightly made me worry about the reboot (which I'm yet to play).

And I don't mind repetitive or "bad" games! But it really just felt like a massive drop in consistency

Well that's why you have higher ups that oversee everything and make sure a team is on the right path and is going to make something profitable. Where was the person overseeing this studio?

I know Volition didn't write themselves checks, who wrote the checks? The people at the top need to be held accountable and not just the ground devs who have little say and no power.

I finished the game (it was a solid 4/10, story and writing were abysmal, gameplay was average) and was considering going for the platinum seeing as I didn’t have much left to do. But I have a game breaking bug on my save. Whenever I now load my save, the game will crash after exactly 30 seconds without fail. So not going to play it all the way through again to get the last trophies. Haha.

Hate this, I swear I read an article shortly after their closure about Embracer/Deep Silver sending someone in/mandating that the SR Reboot take the "Woke" direction it did when Volition actually wanted to do more of what Saints Row was (can't remember if it was more SR1/2 or SR3/4 Style but it wasn't what they ultimately ended up releasing in the end)

Also doesn't help, and annoyed me, that Red Faction was sold off to THQ Nordic (now Embracer) whilst Volition and Saints Row where sold to Deep Silver. I believe Deep Silver wasn't under Embracer at the time but it is now, why not give Volition back their IP and maybe give them a stab at making that again? It definitely would've kept budgets tighter if that was an issue (RF Guerilla was the only Open World one. RF Armageddon, after RFG, went the linear Third Person Shooter route and the OG Red Faction 1/2 were linear FPS games... They could've had their own shooter with MP if they used their damn heads)

Basically the loss of Volition is a significant loss for the industry. They made tons of great games, established some pretty big and beloved IPs and were even instrumental in certain aspects within the industry:

They Popularized the "Six Degrees Of Movement " or full 360° Rotation gameplay/combat as well as created the first "True 3D" FPS with Decent.

They made the Summoner games on PS2 which were RPGs, not necessarily very good but continues to show the diversity of genres they could do as a studio.

The Destruction Tech of GeoMod in Red Faction and GeoMod 2.0 with Red Faction Guerilla later was AMAZING (you could argue the Destruction in RF1 specifically was pretty groundbreaking stuff, especially that early and on the PS2 too)

Also they made "The Punisher" game on PS2/XB/PC... Just thought that was cool, totally forgot about that 😅

Point is Volition is a storied company that has done a lot in (and I guess you could say for? 🤷‍♂️) the games industry at large... They should've never been shutdown. Embracer should've given all their IP back, let them making something else WITHOUT interfering (again, given the context of that article/statement I remember seeing... If it was true of course. I dunno but I'll believe the studio with 30+ YEARS of history over bloody dodgy Embracer 😒) or at the very least sold them, along with ALL their IPs, to someone else instead of just shutting them down. (Yeah this particular closure hit me hard and I'm still pissed about it obviously 😅)

Enjoyed Saints Row 1, really liked 2, after that it went downhill. SR 3 had some decent parts to it but it also started the bad direction 4 would take the series. The reboot was somehow even worse.

They forgot the first and most fundamental part of making a Saints Row game. Fun...

Every Saints Row game was a mess, but some of them were hot messes

They might have my sympathy if they shut up on Twitter X and didn't spend their time during the controversy insulting the old fans.

Its a simple lesson and yet these devs keep on doing it.

Even what I've already played of SR22 and Agents of Mayhem only ever felt "inferior" to SR3/SE4 in its lack of motion aiming that the latter games' Switch ports spoiled me with, but that's pretty much the story of PS4's life. These are but two of the countless games that prove to exceed their fanbloid cred tenfold in practice. As for the business, it certainly needs to mature and stop bloating budgets, but not many market-conditioned studios and consumers would readily acknowledge the elephant in the room that these budgets get wasted on with the progressively elusive returns.

@wiiware SJS was an awesome Japanese dev who still got demolished, whereafter it took the remaining glorified skeleton crew several years to produce another work of the bygone tier.

". Despite the new faces, Saints Row is definitely still Saints Row "

no the hell its not, saints row died after 2 and this is coming from someone that loved 3

@LifeGirl it a two way street if players are going to attack devs the devs have the right to defend themselves from player abuse you can disagree with a game but the way gamers act today it pure abuse

With the Saints reboot they pandered to the whims of the Twitter mob, (who's only goal was to see Saints Row watered down to fit their world view, but not actually buy the game), and alienated their original fans in the process, even going as far as to attack said fanbase via social media.

I did buy the Saints reboot in the hope that it wasn't as bad as lead to believe, but unfortunately it was far worse. A dull game devoid of any of the irreverent charm that made the series with only the larping mission providing some genuine entertainment - and even that outstayed its welcome. I did compete the main story, but once done I uninstalled the game and have no desire to ever return.

@Yaycandy I don't know if I can fully agree with that statement since I really liked Saints Row 3 as well. I thought it a solid game overall unlike 4.

This game was so boring I genuinely fell asleep while driving to the house after introduction.

Saints row never became the GTA killer. And that’s what sunk it. Honestly the reboot was the same on theme as the other games with a more realistic (read:young) cast. I enjoyed it for what it was but considering I am not the target audience for GTA(or even saints row even though I have beaten everything after 3). But if the goat was to beat or match GTA, they were doomed from the start.

It's somewhat true with all these middling games we see these days. There are a LOT of devs that simply don't have a high skillset. Doesn't mean they deserve to lose their jobs but not every game should target AAA. If publishers weren't as greedy as they are, then maybe things like this won't happen and devs can grow, allowing for a higher spread of talent through the industry.

When you've got games like concord reportedly costing 400 million and then KCD2 costing 60 million , i kind of get where he's coming from.

I mean, he wasn't really lying, was he? The last Saints Row game that didn't drown in criticism was 2, and that was what, 2008? They had 15+ years to build off that, but instead we got downgrade after downgrade.

I'm never happy to see someone lose their job, but Volition kind of did themselves in with their output.

@lazarus11 that's mostly just wages though. The average household income in the Czech Republic is $11,700.

In the US it's $80,600 dollars. If it costs 7 times more to employ someone, the game is going to cost a lot more.

(Incidentally 60 million times 7 is 420 million).

Warhorse studios pays a senior artist $20,000 a year. No-one in the US is going to accept that.

That's why more and more game development is getting offshored to countries with lower wages.

SR 1 and 2 were good GTA clones with their own spin
SR 3 and 4 were good parodies of the genre and fun games to play.

Reboot tho? Game was just plain boring.

@Dalamar73
The one thing I'll be fair to the devs on, is that I don't think there was a large desire from anybody to see Saints Row return so they were basically in a no-win situation. The first two games are a couple of my favorite from the 360/PS3 era but 3 and 4 soured things enough that most people had moved on. Factor in that there were far better games to fill that open-world niche and it would've been cool to see Volition try and focus on something else. Instead, they bring SR back and, foolishly, decide to take it in a direction nobody was asking for and this is the end result. I have empathy, hate to see people lose their jobs, but the fact none of the veterans at that studio stepped in and said 'hey guys, maybe what we're doing, especially with this story, is a bad idea' pretty much sealed Volition's fate.