melmer

Saints Row 4

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I think that saying that you did everything in 30 hours is a pretty good time investment though. I did the same in SR3 (not including the DLCs), and was amazed that I spent 30 hours in a game without getting bored. In the past 5 days, I've fully embraced that I'm on my last week of break before school starts by pumping 20 hours into the game. I'm at around 80% completion, but is that bad? Hell no. The fact that I've PLAYED this game for 20 hours and want to keep going is a huge anomaly in video games for me. The only other games that do this kind of thing have been RPGs, Just Cause 2, and the previous Saint's Row games. I'd like to 100% the game over labour day weekend, and the fact that I can is a plus for me, not a minus. It's not Skyrim, but do you really want it to be?

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Yeah, SR3 was the same way. I did almost everything in about 30 hours, and that included a fair bit of goofing around with whatever.

:tup: that's perfect for a parody sand box game in my eyes. Makes me feel a whole lot better about starting it. Otherwise I would've been wincing placing the disk in the tray.

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I've never played a GTA title, so I suppose I was expecting something lengthier for a sandbox game. Granted, it went out of its way to make certain time sinks way easy. After you unlock the skill that displays all collectibles on your phone's map, collecting everything is as simple as jumping in a helicopter and flying to each one. Something that could take hours got boiled down to one or two. I also didn't mention that the 30 hours included all DLC.

 

And that's not a bad thing, really. It seems that many games overstay their welcome rather than leave you wanting more. It fully succeeds in that regard.

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I just beat it. The humor and sense of timing in the game made it well worth the while, but I found myself sorta missing the vehicle stuff. I didn't find the new transversal stuff as fun as everyone else, but so much else about the game was awesome that it didn't bother me that much. I clocked in at around 24 hours with 85% completion.

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Yeah, because SR4 is basically built on top of SR3 and I played that recently I found that I didn't spend as much time with the customization options. But I found that the super powers are exactly what I felt was missing from SR3 which had a really slow ramp up before you felt really powerful. 

 

Also, because this is driving me crazy and I have to ask everyone, at the very end of the game...

 

...where everyone is doing a "soul train line" dance, the choreography of that whole scene looks very familiar to me. I've been trying to figure out if it's from some movie or somewhere else and just can't place it.

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Couple of hours in. This game is super dumb and super fun! I couldn't get into Saints Row the Third* at all, but this is great.

 

 

* I got the game practically for free, and had serious problems committing to it. 

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I loved Saints Row the Third. I've only played a bit of SR4, but something isn't capturing me like the third did. I find the controls and camera a lot more janky with the new super hero systems, the effects for conveying the digital world are good, but a bit nauseous and the colour palette of a persistently dark world is just not doing it for me.

 

With that said, the missions are awesome, I love the concept of being the president, Keith David is the man, and once I got to the more open version of the game where it sort of turns into

Mass Effect

I thought that idea was pretty hilarious.

 

I'm enjoying going through this ride, but wished the game play was tighter, right now it feels like a janky mod.

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I loved the shit out of this game. I finished it last night (the night before all my free time disappears!) with 99% completion. I'm missing exactly one challenge. The one for flying an alien vehicle a ridiculously long distance. I have less than 10% of the distance covered. Thinking about just getting in a ship, flying to the top of the map, and going back and forth on autopilot for a few hours while I play my 3DS or do some grading or something in order to rack up that last 1% just for the ability to say I did it. SR4 is awesome, particularly the rescue and loyalty missions. Great stuff. Loved pretty much every minute.

 

 

...Oh, and my playtime is about 26 hours for 99% for those who were wondering about game length. Also, I bought the season pass. I know that SR3's DLC wasn't hugely well received, but I liked it, so whatever.

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I finished it last night and although I am not willing to go to the levels of insanity that Miffy did, I enjoyed it.

 

There were several little digs the game made from a mechanics perspective that definitely made me chuckle. The other thing that struck me was how much more savvy the game was about its roots and the mistakes that lay therein. The Shaundi loyalty mission is a good example of them shrugging off a few female tropes and the writing really reflects that. Certainly, it is still dumb in places but it knows when it is being dumb and sends that up.

 

The combat has vastly improved with the introduction of powers, instead of every fight being 'run in kill, then run away to revive yourself' the powers allow comabt to flow, plus the health drops mean that you can really indulge in the carnage. It all makes sense and it is just surprising how many things they fixed that I never realised were broken in the first place.

 

Great job all round.

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Just finished last night (nowhere near 100% though). If you think about it, sure, there are a ton of flaws (even just in comparison to the last one), but in the moment, the feeling of gliding around like a superhero makes all that stuff go away. I've played crackdown, protoype and both infamouses and I'd say SRIV does the movement better.

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Hmm, I guess I was missing something, everyone else seems to love the movement stuff. Maybe my machine just wasn't cutting it but I had a really hard time controlling it.

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Finished tonight, and i think the most obvious compliment to may at this point is that i'll be diving back in to 100% the challenges.

 

 

Hmm, I guess I was missing something, everyone else seems to love the movement stuff. Maybe my machine just wasn't cutting it but I had a really hard time controlling it.

 

It can be a little jerky sometimes, when huge amount of enemies but overall I've found its much like any platform game & that when you get a feel for the rhythm of it it starts to flow naturally.

That said I'm absolutely hopeless at the insurance fraud activity which feels like it should be a lot more fun than it is.

 

Also I absolutely love the tornado power up for your super run speed, I happily just run from location to location sometimes to get to use it.

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That said I'm absolutely hopeless at the insurance fraud activity which feels like it should be a lot more fun than it is.

If you build up a head of steam with the super run before ragdolling into a car, it's possible to have enough momentum that you can bounce around nearly indefinitely. I've done more than $1million without stopping on a good run. I'd say it's WAY easier than it was in SR3 where you had to do things like pick a spot on the highway so there'd be more cars etc. Totally unecessary here as with a decent initial fling, you can cartwheel clear across the other side of town/turn corners in mid ragdoll while still keeping enough momentum to keep going etc.

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You have to manually trigger ragdoll mode, though (MB2 on a mouse, probably one of the triggers on a gamepad). Superjumping way up and then activating ragdoll also works wonders. It's waaaay more fun than it's been in any previous SR, where I found the concept funny and the execution really frustrating and unfun.

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If you build up a head of steam with the super run before ragdolling into a car, it's possible to have enough momentum that you can bounce around nearly indefinitely. I've done more than $1million without stopping on a good run. I'd say it's WAY easier than it was in SR3 where you had to do things like pick a spot on the highway so there'd be more cars etc. Totally unecessary here as with a decent initial fling, you can cartwheel clear across the other side of town/turn corners in mid ragdoll while still keeping enough momentum to keep going etc.

 

Except once you have the tornado ability, the cars get knocked out of the way instead.

 

Edit: I didn't think about trying the super jump out, that might have worked better.

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Except once you have the tornado ability, the cars get knocked out of the way instead.

 

Edit: I didn't think about trying the super jump out, that might have worked better.

 

Cars only get knocked out of your wake (i.e. behind/beside you). You do knock a car away in front of you if you're still pressing the dash button when you hit it, so you need to let go of that at the same time as (or a split second before) you hit the ragdoll button and make contact.

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It's a little better but I still don't like the insurance fraud activity. It would be more fun if you were pinballing around with lots of collisions. But here you're mostly just cartwheeling down the road at high speed hoping to hit something to make your score go up. And I still found it was better to ignore where it sends you and just go on the highway for the higher density of cars.

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It's a little better but I still don't like the insurance fraud activity. It would be more fun if you were pinballing around with lots of collisions. But here you're mostly just cartwheeling down the road at high speed hoping to hit something to make your score go up. And I still found it was better to ignore where it sends you and just go on the highway for the higher density of cars.

 

+1 

 

I think you've hit the nail on the head about the problem, the optimal way to do it is basically to utterly ignore the games advice and just get up speed & bounce around the city. The same is true of the TK Mayhem activities where i just ended up grabbing one of the balls then run around using it to bump into pedestrians and traffic using super speed.

 

I think when i comes down to it, the problem with both of those activities normally is that there is not enough target density to really make them fun, the game is at its best when your in a environment where pretty much everywhere you look there's something to smash, or shoot.

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OMG!

Saints of Rage, the Johnny Gat rescue mission.

This is an absolute marvel, the eye for detail in this special mission is amazing.

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The most impressive thing about that mission to me is that...

 

It doesn't matter how you customized your character, it's still rendered and animated perfectly in that 2D style. I imagine that section took a lot of work.

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Yeah, I meant it was a lot of work for the graphics programmers. Some of the artwork and animation must be custom too since it's different from the rest of the game.

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Well I'm just about to beat this, which I intend to today, and while I really love the humor, the traversal, many of the story missions, and the general feel, the tone of the writing, and so many of the characters and their interactions, I'm having trouble with the 'open world' aspect of the game. 

 

It doesn't do what I really want with an open world game; have lots of systems that result in interesting, unexpected interactions. It takes a page from its own history, and feels most like Assassin's Creed, to me; lots of distinct little 'activities' to complete, but not much in the way of things just happening out in the world. Gang interactions, say, like Zin troopers taking over a store, shoving pedestrians into a van and trundling them through the city to a prison/slaughterhouse, a kidnapping thing that just happens sometimes. Pedestrians suddenly getting strange powers and wreaking havoc, huge car chases between Zin and civilians, random happenings all over. Marches, protests, cars glitching out and climbing walls, buildings turning into huge character models, more and more and more. 

 

Not much of that happens, that I saw, and it doesn't seem like they want it to. They want a world where all that 'content interaction' is rigidly codified into a game/contest/activity. It makes sure you see it, sure, but it doesn't offer what I want from an open world: Grenades rolling down hills, random firefights with random enemies, emergent weird madness and fun. 

 

Stalker does this well, Skyrim to an extent, Far Cry 2 wonderfully. But now that I'm thinking back on the others in the Saint's Row series, they're fun and funny and brash and iconoclastic, but they don't seem interested in systemic worlds with lots of interesting things going on. More like convincing backdrops for goofy, codified activities. 

 

And don't get me wrong; some of the activities are quite fun. But when they're bound off like they are in these little discrete bubbles (instances?), they're not...right to me. They don't take advantage of what I love from an open world, and don't spring from a player decision to interact with the world in an impulsive, off the cuff manner; they're discrete chunks of content I found myself engaging in more out of a box-ticking mentality than any sense of emergent fun or, most importantly, play. 

 

As goofy and as interesting as this game is, as much of a slap in the face to traditional games and game activities, the designers still haven't done much to encourage good ol' fashioned play in this world. It's codified, challenge-mode, score-chasing box-ticking, and it doesn't scratch the itch I'M looking for in an open world game. 

 

That said, there's a lot to be said for running up walls and 'making your own fun', and they've provided some tools for that, but I never really found myself doing that. Failure of imagination? Certainly, to an extent. But there's also not a lot of support for 'making your own fun'; most of the activites and content falls inside those instances I mentioned before. So you can definitely zoom around and cause havoc, but there's not much more going on than that. Get some Notoriety by going nuts for a bit, run around and fight for a while, hope something unique happens. Freezing and Stomping and Death From Aboving is all well and good, but there's not much else going on. I'm definitely glad for an open world superhero game that's funny and sorta wonderfully mad, but it does enough things so damn well, that I can't help be disappointed by what it doesn't do, too.

 

And hell, I may have missed some things. There's a Genki person-launcher in III? More? Has anyone found particularly wonderful tools for creating emergent, systemic madness?

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I think the problem is that Steelport was designed for SR3. When you're driving around you're forced to interact with the dynamic world more. In SR4 Steelport is mostly just a platforming level for collecting orbs and at any time you can just super leap and fly away from any given situation.

 

But I'd still agree that in both games most of the focus is on the missions and activities and not the open world as much. I think the point of the open world in these games is more to just evoke a sense of player freedom than to have emergent interactions.

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