Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

As someone who loved their older games, this sucks; but as someone who has played their newer games, this was expected.

The remake was so boring that I uninstalled the game before I even finished the first mission.
- I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.
  
  It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.
- It was so boring I deleted my OS before the opening cutscene finished.
- SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.
- I didn't even bother buying it. The trailers looked so bad and then you'd have to wait for a Steam release. No thanks. When the first gameplay videos dropped it looked like absolute trash and really just rehashed all the repetitive content from the previous games, which was plentifully criticized to be a huge weakpoint of them already, with a lame story, idiotic characters and a boring map on top of it. It was just a rehash of all the bad, but I guess that's all they could pull off.

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I'm guessing, just great.

There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we're here.

Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.

Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone's dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying... That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations... that would be absolutely ghoulish.
- Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.
Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.
- And here I thought that tying game speed to CPU speed was a concept that died in the early 90s...
- SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.
- I recall a few games where I've had to limit the processor speed.
  
  The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either "The 11th Hour" or "The 7th Guest". It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.
  
  At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.

Damn, knowing this reboot was supposed to be the start of the new Saints Row franchise. It's depressing to just see it crumble down like this. I mean seriously in the broad scheme of things what happened here? It's like after SR4 they were all out of ideas.

Let's try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist ... and also he's now in hell.

Let's try being Overwatch!

Let's try starting from scratch!

Let's try permanently shutting down!

Probably just no more actually talented people where they were needed. Be it anything from devs to board of directors.
I'm one of the few who saw Saints Row 1&2 as a discount GTA clone and fell in love with Saints Row 3&4.

Honestly I don't know who the new Saints Row was for.
- I'd say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a "GTA clone" and into its own category.
  
  Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don't really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.
  
  3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.
  
  For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the "Johnny Gat is the GOAT" attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.
- SR1 was discount GTA, but SR2 was its own thing already.
  
  Huge and detailed world, infinite customisation options, and a story that balanced comedic relief with serious moments.
  
  It's a shame that the game is so buggy, because I'd replay it a lot more otherwise.
  
  In comparison, SR3 had a lot less content: smaller game world, much shorter story mode, less side quests.
I mean, SR4 was fun, but ideas seemed to be dwindling down already.
- A lot of the features in SR4 were DLC in SR3. I think they took the story as far as it can reasonably go. SR2 was the best.
This has more to do with Embracer Group's June announcement for upcoming large scale restructuring, layoffs, game cancelations, and studio closures than anything else. Embracer has even hit hard at studios that were profitable or had games in the pipeline that were expected to be a huge sales success.

As much as I love games, the industry is a tough place to work, and the layoff cycles are striking once again.
Truthfully Agents of Mayhem isn't Overwatch... Which is kind of the problem. It wasn't saints row, It wasn't a new game. It just kind of existed.
Saints Row 2022 took a very different direction than all of the previous games combined, and it wasn't a direction the die-hard fans of the series liked for the most part.

The same thing is gonna happen with the always-online likely DRM-filled freemium Skate 3 sequel called Skate. I can see that one end up flopping and that might kill off the series, and that makes me really sad. It makes me even more sad because it's the first Skate game in the series actually coming to the PC, and they're almost guaranteed to fuck it up. Corporate greed is killing gaming, modern gaming is shit for the most part.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.

And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a "I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it". It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.

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.

All of these games were garbage, good riddance imo.

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.
As Sterling likes to say (from memory, I'm paraphrasing) "Game publishers don't want to make money, they want to make *all *the money".

A profit is not enough anymore, got to aim for that infinite growth.
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"

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.

Epic was the least of the problems here.

SR2022 is free on PS+ next month and all the advice I've seen says "save your bandwidth and time".

Raise a glass to a fallen comrade, and maybe play Red Faction Guerrilla again, but the Volition of old was gone a long time ago.
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.

Well fuck, it's now 150% we ain't getting Freespace3 anymore.

Freespace 2 was such a great game.

I still want to know what lies past the second Knossos portal.
- If you haven't, play the mod campaign Derelict. Unfortunately it's the closest to FS3 that we'll ever get, Blue Planet aside...
- Volition dies.
  
  Literally the only thought that goes through my head :(
  
  Need to finish war in heaven, the difficulty spikes a few times.
Embracer still owns all the IP. It may still happen if they think it's financially viable!
- Embracer is currently the one killing half the companies they acquired a year ago. If embracer is even around a year from now it's far more likely that they are selling ips rather than developing them
- Don't give me hope...
- I think Interplay still owns Freespace. They still exist, apparently.
Between this and it now becoming clear how limited the space exploration is in Starfield, it's a bad day for space sim fans.
Yes indeed, fuck saints row, this is the real loss.

Ah well. We'll always have the fact that the freespace community was the first community which got pissed of by the great Derek whatshisname. That was fun.

And Fortunately we've hard light productions.

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

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.

Similar to Borderlands in a way, the humor was of it's time and didn't age gracefully.
- I don't really remember borderlands 1&2 terribly well, was it "random" humor from the 00s-early 10s?
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.

This is a long time coming, but they'll always be the studio that made Freespace 2, the 6DoF combat sim GOAT

Good luck, Alpha...

And another studio hits the dust. So long! We hardly knew yee. At least be grateful you haven't ended up in the Call of Duty mines, like Raven.

Be grateful they don't have jobs?
- 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
they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2

And yet their successful games were SR3 and SR4, when the games could stand on their own instead of needing to tag along with GTA for publicity.
- 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.

30 year old studio. That's quite sad. Another victim of hyper capitalism.

Another victim of arrogance perhaps. Before the game even released fans told them that’s not what they want and they said “fuck you, you don’t understand shit” and proceeded to make one of the most uninteresting video games on the planet.
- If Embracer Group wasn't frantically trying to right the ship, Volition would've been left alone. This is on the gratuitously large capitalist conglomerate that's bought up every studio it could.
- So basically capitalism
Damn hyper capitalism. THQ should have kept funneling money to a company that couldn’t make a game people wanted.
Sir, this is Lemmy.world. lemmygrad.ml is that way.

I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.

They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn't do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn't anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.

I honestly think gamer's expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn't meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it's even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.

The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you've essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.

Saint's Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play "death tag". We didn't even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said "hey, we have a structured way you can do this" and we had a blast.

Saint's Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.

Saint's Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that's really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.

Red Faction: Guerrilla will always be my favourite game of theirs.

So many good memories in the multiplayer. 🥲

I mean, I could see this coming.

Saints Row reboot at least had an interesting setting and played okay. But it was let down by awful writing and a lack of scope.

It didnt have all the features of even Saints Row 2. The plot seemed to pander to millennials in a very "how do you do fellow kids" kinda way. Some of the gameplay was repetitive and boring and it had a few bugs.

With a different writing team and another year in development, it could have been a huge success, but they didnt so it wasn't. RIP Volition.

how do you do fellow kids

That's it! I couldn't figure out why, a SR fan, had zero interest in their latest release.

It's because that trailer was oozing with "fellow kids" energy.

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
- Same for me. ;_;
I remember driving around with the crew, singing "What I Got." Good times.

I hope someone picks up their IPs. I want a good current gen Saints Row.

They were owned by THQ Nordic so I assume they'll retain the rights.
- Got it, thank you!

They had a lot of hits. Descent was revolutionary.

They had absolutely 1 thing to do:

Remake Saints Row 2.

And they continued to ignore what everyone wanted.

I never played 1 or 2, but 2 is the one I wanted remastered and yeah, they couldn't even manage to remake the one folks wanted huge facepalm

I think everyone was kinda expecting it but it's still sad to see 😥

RIP to a company that made my favorite game series (SR2-4)

We have to remember that it's the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.

They won't.

You don't understand, it's not the companies that make everything suck, it's the management, modern software management crushes the beauty out of both the work and the design, and passionate visionaries are displaced for marketing droids with PowerPoint slides about dlc monetization through nfts.

That's sad, but not unexpected. The studio had pretty massive layoffs a few years ago I think when their Overwatch clone didn't sell well. And this Saints Row reboot didn't do well either.

Hope all the good people here find some work, one of my favorite LPers worked there and he's a good guy. Sucks he and others have been jerked around twice like this.

No FreeSpace games?

F in the chat

is starfield that bad?

Good to see. Glad to see low effort developers finally getting there comeuppance

Volition were a good studio. It's basically saying Naughty Dog is a low effort studio.
- What a terrible comparison? How are they even close to the same thing?
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 removed to recognize the loss of a good developer (albeit they haven't put out much in the last few years), or both.