- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
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Between this and it now becoming clear how limited the space exploration is in Starfield, it’s a bad day for space sim fans.
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.
City Unleashed: Crime Revolt
Default (GPT-3.5)
User Create the plot for a game similar to the first four Saints Row games
ChatGPT Title: “City Unleashed”
Plot: In the sprawling metropolis of Havencross, crime syndicates have taken control, leaving the city in chaos. You play as a street-smart vigilante who rises to power in order to reclaim the city from the clutches of these criminal organizations. As you build your own crew and establish dominance, you’ll face off against rival gangs, corrupt officials, and powerful crime lords.
Starting as a small-time crook with a personal vendetta, you’ll complete daring heists, engage in intense street races, and execute audacious stunts to earn respect and resources. Your actions catch the attention of an underground resistance that seeks to topple the syndicates. They offer you support, guidance, and a chance to reshape Havencross.
The game offers an open-world environment, allowing you to explore the sprawling city, engage in a variety of activities, and make choices that influence the narrative. Customization plays a significant role, not only in terms of your character’s appearance but also in building your gang’s identity, from outfits to vehicles to hideouts.
Throughout the game, you’ll encounter memorable characters, each with their own motivations and backstories. As you forge alliances and rivalries, the balance of power in the city shifts dynamically. The story takes unexpected turns as you uncover the dark secrets behind the syndicates’ rise to power and their connections to influential figures in the city.
With a blend of over-the-top action, humor, and engaging storytelling, “City Unleashed” captures the essence of the first four Saints Row games, delivering a high-octane, open-world experience filled with outrageous missions, explosive combat, and a dynamic environment that reacts to your choices.
ChatGPT did way better.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
- Create other games worth mention.
- Have memorable characters.
- Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
- Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
- Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
- Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
It was so boring I deleted my OS before the opening cutscene finished.
It was so boring I tossed my tower out a window before I even purchased it.
It was so boring I rebooted the simulation before it was even announced. Unfortunately, things don’t seem to have gone any better this time around.
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.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
SR2 just felt like the crazy Vice City sequel that Rockstar refused to give me at the time.
San Andreas, GTA4 felt too serious. SR3 and 4 felt too silly, to the point of turning into Crackdown.
GTA5 felt back on track though, and that’s probably mostly down to Trevor. You can cause utter mayhem without breaking character.
3 struck the perfect balance for me, it was like playing an action movie that didn’t take itself too seriously while still maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. 4 fully jumped the shark for me and was hard to enjoy.
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.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
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.
He was known as IdolNinja on the internet
He passed away mid 2021 but had been convalescing for a while before that as far as I know
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…
Pfft-- Japanese devs are still doing this stupid shit nowadays. It’s no wonder their in-house PC ports are usually hit or miss.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
I mean just looking at Elden Ring here:
- The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
- Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
- Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
- Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
- The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
- The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!
Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.
Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.
Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.
Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.
I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.
Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).
I play a lot of games on Gamepass so I am basically just renting it.
Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
Bold of you to assume anything wil ever change with their total lack of QA.
I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.
Haven’t played any Japanese games recently?
Nope. It’s been years.
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.
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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.
Buy up everything and WHOOPS we spent too much close down everything!
Fucking bullshit.
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.
The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.
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Wise words
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…
There’s a wing commander mod that’s megadope as well. FS2 is one of the few story games I can go through just again and again.
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.
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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.
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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
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Ehhh, maybe not with Jeremy Soule.
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Oh, his music is great, but…
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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.
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.
