Saints Row 4

[melmer]

deus ex who? Cyberpunk what?

Fucking A. That thumbnail alone made my laugh out loud, how have I never played any of these games before. I am 100% getting this.

[melmer]

info n screens

[Twig]

I AM SO INTO THIS.

[tronhound]

I had no idea this was happening, thought the series might be over. I've only played Saints Row the Third but I loved every second.

[Codicier]

mwahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahaha this shall be mine!

 

on a more calm note: it's really nice to see a game teaser made of actual game-play footage, instead of a mix of CGI cut scenes & pre rendered bullshots.

[elmuerte]

sold!

 

I bought SR3 during a steam sale, and absolutely loved it, really looking forward to this one.

[Irishjohn]

sold!

 

I bought SR3 during a steam sale, and absolutely loved it, really looking forward to this one.

I bought SR3 during a Steam sale as well, and played a few minutes of it... I really need to go back and play that game.

[I_smell]

I bought Saints Row 3 on OnLive, and one day my monitor recalibrated in the middle of it, and now it displays only the bottom-right quarter of the screen, so I can't play it.

 

I think I've got lulz-fatigue right now so this really aint my cup o tea.

[TheLastBaron]

I got SR3 in the humble bundle, but haven't ever actually played it.  Is it fun by yourself?  I've always assumed that SR games were meant to be played co-op, but I could be wrong

[tronhound]

I got SR3 in the humble bundle, but haven't ever actually played it.  Is it fun by yourself?  I've always assumed that SR games were meant to be played co-op, but I could be wrong

 

I've only played single player, it was great. I didn't even know it had co-op.

[Niyeaux]

OP, you should really get into SR3 while you wait. It's super cheap these days.

[melmer]

Yeah, I should play it over the summer, sometime before GTA V Five 5 comes out in sept, I should be able to slot that in nicely. I recently picked up infamous 2 another sandbox jewel I missed the first time round.

Are we going to have a super barren summer for video games? The last of us in June, lord of shadows 2 is Oct :/ just checked the consoles release schedule, gulp, I think I better take up some other past times... I could learn how to pick locks, that would be a worth while skill

Ha! This come out late Aug a few weeks before GTA V perfect

[Tanukitsune]

Hmm, is it me or does the video make it looks like it might make fun of other sandbox games? It kinda looked like "Whatever you call the one with the guy with electric power" and "The one that's the same but with mutant blood powers".

 

Deep Silver? They made Risen 2, which will worry everybody else, but excites me! 

[Reyturner]

Hmm, is it me or does the video make it looks like it might make fun of other sandbox games?

Hey, your right. It's almost like they're making a Saint's Row game.

[Tanukitsune]

I never saw them as a parody before, just as goofy and insane... 

[Niyeaux]

I never saw them as a parody before, just as goofy and insane... 

That series has always had plenty of nods to other games and gaming tropes, even if it hasn't been outright parody of a specific game in the past. The silly zombie sequence in the last game, the part where you drive the cubic tank, etc.

[Tanukitsune]

Yeah, but I never noticed something like a "Rico Smellic"  saying how much he wants to stop being a criminal while mugging a granny or something sandbox specific.

 

Was the zombie game making fun of zombie games? I always thought it was jumping on the bandwagon. And which game does the septic tank one parody?

[Scratch]

I'm gonna be the cynic here and say it's more like Saint Row 3.5. Not that it really matters to me. I am still absolutely going to play it.

[TychoCelchuuu]

The "hold up we missed a letter" thing made me laugh. I played Saint's Row 3 for 30 minutes when it was free over a weekend and I found the gameplay kind of tedious - it was like a GTA game but with the crazy dialed way up and the soul dialed way down. The wacky narrative conceit/immature humor/etc. of the series doesn't bother me at all and I think I kind of enjoy all the parody and the batshit insane stuff, but if the core gameplay fundamentals in an open world game like this aren't pitch perfect it just ends up feeling like tedium to me in no time at all. GTA has a wonderful sense of place and a feeling of being there and exploring that can keep me going for hours, but Saints Row just felt empty in terms of engaging me, to the point where when it was dirt cheap in the THQ Going Out of Business Bundle I didn't even bother buying it.

[miffy495]

Yeah, it doesn't look like it changes much, and I believe it started life as an expansion pack back before THQ exploded, but I'm still completely in. Saints Row 3 remains one of my favourite sandbox games of all time. I'd say that the top five list probably goes (in no order, cause I don't wanna say any of these is better than any of the others) Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs, GTA: San Andreas, and Red Faction Guerilla. If you haven't played one of those, get on it. More of one of my favourite games? Yes please. When can I pre-order this? Maybe when this is done, Volition can start making a next-gen Red Faction open world game? Think of all the new ways they could make stuff go nuts...

 

EDIT: And to Tycho's complaint, part of what made SR3 so great for me was the tangible progression of your character. When something didn't "feel" quite right, it was usually just an upgrade or two away from being there for me. It gave purpose to doing all the stupid side stuff, and really gave me something to work towards aside from just seeing the next setpiece. While the setpieces were rad, knowing that with a new upgrade or two I'd be able to make my own setpieces was better. That's where the co-op came in as well. I loved it when the game got super cheap earlier this year, because it meant that I could re-install it and take my maxed-out character into the cities of friends who were just starting out. "Yeah, that mission was good. Wanna get to the next one in my flying saucer? Or should we take the exploding ball of yarn that crushes cars like paper? Tell you what, why don't you set me on fire and I'll run there naked." So good.

[elmuerte]

"Enter The Dominatrix" was planned to be a huge DLC (aiming for $30), but they decided to add more content and release it as a full game.

But the deep silver PR blurp sounds weird:

"That expansion was canceled and elements of it were rolled into Saints Row 4," a spokesperson for publisher Deep Silver tells Joystiq. "There will be a director's cut of Enter the Dominatrix released as DLC when SR4 comes out."

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/15/saints-row-4-release-date-august-20/

[TychoCelchuuu]

EDIT: And to Tycho's complaint, part of what made SR3 so great for me was the tangible progression of your character. When something didn't "feel" quite right, it was usually just an upgrade or two away from being there for me. It gave purpose to doing all the stupid side stuff, and really gave me something to work towards aside from just seeing the next setpiece. While the setpieces were rad, knowing that with a new upgrade or two I'd be able to make my own setpieces was better. That's where the co-op came in as well. I loved it when the game got super cheap earlier this year, because it meant that I could re-install it and take my maxed-out character into the cities of friends who were just starting out. "Yeah, that mission was good. Wanna get to the next one in my flying saucer? Or should we take the exploding ball of yarn that crushes cars like paper? Tell you what, why don't you set me on fire and I'll run there naked." So good.

That's definitely a fair way to make a good game, but it's not a way to make a game I enjoy. I want games to be intrinsically rewarding because their base mechanics are something I enjoy, rather than extrinsically rewarding in the sense that they continually throw up goals for me to meet. The part of my brain that gets reptilian satisfaction from constant low-grade stimulation of the reward response center is basically dead after having grown up on games like Diablo. Every time Chris Remo talks about Torchlight II or Diablo III on the podcast, I agree with him: I'm sure it's a brilliant game, but that part of my life is gone. Rolling the "will this be a good item" slot machine every time I kill a boss and watching the "just this much more XP until the next level" bar fill up in small increments every minute while I'm playing is no longer something I can derive satisfaction from. At best it's boring - at worst it feels like a tangible drain on my life, like I can feel every productive minute of my existence swirling down the endless drain of mediocre-to-acceptable gameplay that keeps me enraptured only by exploiting my least favorite parts of human psychology.

So when I hear you say something like "well, Saints Row makes your character feel 'off' but that's okay because you can play a bit more and it will get incrementally better" it just looks like a massive series of small slopes I have to climb to get to the fun part, whereas Grand Theft Auto games are so famously fun from the first moment that lots of people never touch the story except to open up parts of the city, and then when it's all open they never bother to finish the rest. I don't want to play a game where the goal is to upgrade myself to get to the fun part. I want to play a game that is the fun part.

Even the set-pieces didn't draw me in to Saint's Row. Again, I appreciate the setup and everything, but it just didn't feel as fun to play, moment to moment, as GTA does. Skydiving from a plane and shooting people while cars fly by can only be as engaging as the shooting mechanics are.

[elmuerte]

You're entitled to your opinion. But you're wrong

[youmeyou]

The shooting mechanics were actually what made me bounce off of SR so hard. So much of the early game was spent slogging through unsatisfying, awkward gunfights that I quickly (ok it was 10 hours but I was hung over, couldn't move, and was constantly pausing to take naps) grew tired of it and uninstalled. I'm also not really a fan of the game's aesthetic. It's got the same graphic fidelity as GTA, maybe more, but it still feels oddly sloppy - stuck in a middle ground between photographic and cartoonish.

 

The SR4 trailer gives me Crackdown vibes though, which may completely shut down all of my previously stated opinions.

[Twig]

Wait, what. Saints Row The Third and Grand Theft Auto 4 both start you off on the same foot, basically. The only difference is SR3 gives you all kinds of insane toys to play with - both in terms of wacky guns and cars and weirdo character skills - as you progress through the game, while GTA4... gives you some new guns, and eventually a helicopter.

 

I literally can't even begin to understand how someone would think GTA games are "so famously fun from the first moment" where SR games are not. GTA wins in atmosphere - SORT OF, as it's mostly just a different kind of atmosphere - but that's... that's pretty much it, until you get into the story. At which point the games diverge enormously.

 

And while SR3's shooting mechanics may not be perfect, GTA4's are the same, if not worse.