The news that the new Saints Row will be a more grounded one, a game less offensive than previous entries in the franchise, has had mixed responses. While some are delighted that a series that had previously alienated them may become more welcoming, inevitably much of the reaction has been rooted in a fatigue complaining about “political correctness” or what you have. Except, that’s not the problem. The problem is that Saints Row it was a series that understood the extraordinarily silly video game they could be, where almost no one else does, and now it also seems to be returning to the sad norm.
In the following eight years SRIV came out, no doubt, the world has changed. While the 2013 game was released at the end of a time when outrageous / offensive comedy was big business, where your South Parks and yours Jackets they just spent the day, 2021 is a very different place. The offensive has become very politicized, reactions to it are heavily controlled by either extreme, and whether you view it as major progress or a suffocation of speech, no one can pretend that things are the same.
There is no doubt that trying to launch a game the way above Saints Rows it would be a totally different deal today. However, it approached its offensive content, which through the series went from the grotesque teenager to the often quite sophisticated (though very mature) satire, would still be greeted with much more noise and restraint than you are likely to want to face. any major developer. But, here’s the question: read my description of how Saints Row IV starts:
Saints Row IV it was a game that began with his character disarming a nuclear bomb when he fell to Earth and became president of the United States, with actor Keith David as vice president. However, moments later Earth is attacked by aliens, the White House was destroyed and you and your gang members are kidnapped and placed in a computer simulation of a sitcom in the 1950s. this, the Earth is made to fly and discovers that now it lives in a virtual reality, an alien recreation of Steelport, the scene of the city for Saints Row: the third. Oh, and now you have superpowers.
See what Saints Row led the game was no hilarious / revolting and offensive content, and it wasn’t an ironic post-ironic misogyny. It was like that ridiculous.
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When I finished SRIVAfter I finished laughing so hard at the gag of credit that I really had a headache, my main thought was, “I can’t wait to see how they get over this!”
A game in which you start as president of America and end as ruler of the galaxy. A game in which they hired Roddy Piper and Keith David to recreate their famous fight scene They live. A game in which the Earth is destroyed as an incidental detail, and where the main cast, with average control of the player, begins to sing gloriously to Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” on the radio. What would they do to do all this?
Interestingly, the thought was an echo of what followed after the release Saints Row: the third. How Polygon reported in 2013, Jim Boone, senior producer of Volition, spoke SRIV saying, “I have read all the reviews that have been made Saints Row 3 and they wondered if we could do anything more than that. So I guess it’s a challenge from that point of view: can we do something crazier? ”
Yes! It was like that! And boy did they meet him. That’s why my heart sank so much when I saw the same person (in the same dam) this week saying, “When you’re done Saints Row 4, you are the ruler of the galaxy. If you thought, “Where would we get it from?”, We’d go to hell and conquer it, right? So there is really no place to go. “
No! Of course there are! This is video games.
My argument here is not about whether you were disappointed that the Saints Row the series turned out to be so baffling that driving was irrelevant, where you were an almost omnipotent super-being, causing ridiculous destruction between scripted scripts that eviscerated rival games with clever satire (Massive effects receives this beating). My argument is that despite the extraordinary freedom that games offer, there are almost no other games that take advantage of it. Games are, in the vast majority of cases, so chaste.
Heck, Saints Row IV it starts with a sequence that many forget, because it is immediately followed by madness madness: a scene in which you are playing another stealth action game. The first thing you do SRIV it rushes from wall to wall, infiltrating a terrorist base in the Middle East. It’s as generic as … well, like most AAA games, and it does it perfectly. He’s so straightforward, so pious, and bewildered, and he does it for that not more too long, long enough to make you worry that this is not the game you expected. And after seconds, you’ll dismantle an atomic bomb in the air as it launches into Washington DC. It was Volition making that claim. “We can do the same boring shit as the rest. Look, we just did. And now we will not do it ”.
And when I looked this 2022 CGI trailer Saints Row, all he could think about was, “Now they will.”
It’s totally fair to say that Johnny Gat, Shaundi, Kenzie and the rest have spent the day. His plot arc (well, rather an exponential curve) had gone through certain places. Things became so goal that a Saints Row IV there is a scene in which Shaundi knows the version of herself Saints Row 2. So yes, we continue. But while I don’t have time for the scary ball bags lamenting their misinformed nonsense about the “awakened liberals,” because the new cast is … young, I do sympathize with the complaints that seem very, very generic.
Saints Row, for all its terrible beginnings (the original game was a blatant tear of GTA that when I confronted the developers about this at a preview event, they told me with straight faces that: “We consider GTA being a genre, not a game, and we’re making a game in that genre ”), has always been about excess. women serving burgers out of vans marked with the game’s “Freckle Bitches” tags, including the “Chicken Bazooms” and “Big Swallow” beats), but quickly turned into an excess of cheerful nonsense.
His characters were extravagant cartoons, huge personalities stored within a wonderfully diverse cast. Many … don’t seem to be like that. They could! Obviously, much of this is based on a CGI trailer with which Volition developers probably had minimal involvement. But it’s fair to say that it doesn’t really show the incredibly sharp writing and awesome interpretations for which the series became known. Instead, they are triple-stressed joke jokes. I was really surprised that none of them said, “There’s no way to see me at the big dance at 9,” before partying with them in front of a clock that said 9 p.m. Nickelodeon sitcom stuff.
The most recently published images feature these new types as “a set of characters you’ll want to invite into your living room every day.” I don’t want characters I would like to invite to my living room. Another developer says, “This reset allows us to add heart in a big way, and it does the the number one of this game ”. Nooooooo! Another: “They are one hundred percent relatable.” What is happening?!
From what we’ve seen about the game’s footage, things seem even quieter. Yes, shit explodes, cars are picked up by helicopters and blood comes out of people’s heads when they are shot. But this is any other game! It looks absolutely like any other open world game. If you had told me it was Ubisoft, I wouldn’t have blinked.
Yes, of couse Volition can make any game you want, any way you want. And yes, demoralizing, it seems terribly likely that making a game that looks like everyone else will help you sell it much better. But what bothers me is that Volition was the only team that seemed to want to see how big and ridiculous the games could be. And now they don’t look like it at all. Now they say things about how they can’t overcome the madness of their last game, so why even bother? But I think so. If anyone could, it was them.
Video games could be tan much more than they are. They could allow such absolute madness, such great nonsense. And yet almost everything that comes from the major studies is so prudent, so reserved. Excessiveness is lacking. That’s why I loved it Saints Row IV so much. It may be exactly what leaves you out of the game, and that’s great too. But I would say that those who face these inclinations are cared for more than adequately by this industry. Those who want things to become as huge and silly as you can imagine are pretty much less well served.
Absolutely everyone who cares about the new Saints Row going to be “awake” can fuck right away. The last two Saints Row the games were, in many ways, incredibly “awakened”, especially with their various casts (alongside Kenn Michael, Michael Clarke Duncan, Sumalee Montano and Danielle Nicolet, Cat, has been the voice of Cat, the main character who did not is a player in the series). Daniel Dae Kim from the beginning, in an industry that ignores all Asian roles). This is something very different. It’s about the loss of nonsense.
I want more nonsense in this industry. I am constantly baffled by his lack. And while I’m sure the new Saints Row it will have a part of it in there, it does not unequivocally pretend to coincide with what was lived before, let alone see to what extent they could take it.