Saints Row 4

[Codicier]

Enter the Dominatrix is out... rather disappointing.

 

It's certainly not a tour de force by any means but i did enjoy it.

It's a bit of a let down if you were hoping for more fun superpower stuff to do, but it did have some great dialogue, and nice character moments.

It reminded me more of good episode of a sitcom than anything else, and while the little musical beat they had at the end may not have bettered the use of aerosmith in the SR4 it still made me laugh.

[Brannigan]

yea the end bit was pretty great.

[toblix]

Maybe this is half-off or half off on Steam.

[UltimateHurl]

I bought this in the half-off daily deal, it's quite a bit of fun. More of the same from Saints Row 3, but with an added element of "we thought superpowers would be fun".

[arccos1]

SR4 really is the best Matrix game available. I bought it half off and am very pleased with it so far. I hated how weak the character was in the previous ones, so this is perfect for me.

[elmuerte]

Standalone thingy coming out soon. This is one of the trailers

It's what #GamerGate wanted all along

[Dewar]

Eh, I had my fill of Saint's Row 4 already. For me the series lost something when it shifted from a GTA knockoff to a Infamous knockoff.

[Architecture]

Um.

 

Is the entire game a musical?

[juv3nal]

If it were, that would be the first thing about it that has me vaguely interested.

[twmac]

Eh, I had my fill of Saint's Row 4 already. For me the series lost something when it shifted from a GTA knockoff to a Infamous knockoff.

 

That's Crackdown knock-off to you.

 

That said, not sure that I can get excited about this as Gat is the least interesting character in the game

[Griddlelol]

People care about Gat? Did they choose him just to get a stupid pun?

[malkav11]

People care about Gat? Did they choose him just to get a stupid pun?

 

Yes, people care about Gat. A lot of people were really pissed when he was killed offscreen and virtually unremarked in Saints Row III. I know the first time I realized he was supposed to be dead was the funeral mission. And his return was an advertised feature of one of the DLCs (turns out, not really) and a big moment in IV.

 

And FWIW, I think the superpower stuff in IV feels much more like Prototype than either Crackdown or Infamous, orb collection aside.

[elmuerte]

Um.

 

Is the entire game a musical?

 

I don't think is. Just this segment... or maybe this segment is even just promotional material.

[Griddlelol]

Yes, people care about Gat.

 

I guess I'm not one of those. Mainly because I only cared about SR when 3 hit. SR3 just blows the previous 2 games out the water in my opinion, and Gat was no where to be seen in that. 

 

I didn't realise people cared about the story of SR that much either. It's so ridiculous...

[malkav11]

You really ought to try 2 again. 3 was a huge letdown in comparison, as funny and over the top as the missions were. 2 is kind of technically shonky and not quite as wacky, but it had an enormous amount of love put into it and it makes for a much stronger overall package. For example, there's no purpose to this, really, but there are activity nodes all over SR2 where if you let your Boss idle near one, they'll walk over and start doing something ambient in the gameworld. Tons of different stuff. All over the world. Nothing like that in either 3 or 4. And that's just one example. It also has way more side activities, and many of its most creative and amusing activities have never returned to the series. Instead, 3 quite reliably picked some of the worst ones, like Escort, to revive. Its pedestrians do a wide variety of things and will even commit crimes on their own. There's really nothing like that in the later games. Etc.

 

1 was soulless and boring, though, so you're only half wrong.

[Merus]

I remember people saying at the time that Saints Row 2 took their soulless GTA game and stuffed it so full of goofy fun that if they kept that up they'd have a hit on their hands, and Volition took copious notes. Hence why SR3 and 4 resemble GTA so little these days.

 

I suspect when they decided to make the character generator they also took notes from people saying how progressive and flexible it is. I imagine they just wanted to make a flexible character creator - Volition has always struck me as a develop that prefers to put as much control in players' hands as possible - but when they saw how people responded to your character always being treated with respect, they figured they were onto a good thing.

[elmuerte]

SR2 was more like San Andreas where SR3 was more like Vice City. I'm a Vice City guy.

[thefncrow]

Another voice for going back to look at SR2. Some of the story stuff is really questionable (including a mission where your objective text might as well be "fridge the bad guy's girlfriend"), but there's a ton of great touches in that game.

SR3 refines a lot of what SR2 did, but it kinda does it by removing some of the charm of SR2 to make the game more standard and take those experiences from weird little environmental stuff and exposing them to more users by putting them in the critical path.

My big example of this is singalongs. SR3 and SR4 had their missions that feature singalongs on the way to some mission, but these stem from the songalongs in SR2 that were basically just random occurrences and based on which voice you picked. They never happened at any specific time in the game, they just had a chance to happen when you were listening to something on the radio that your player voice had singalong content for.

Someone found that the song with the most singalong content was A-Ha - Take On Me and assembled all of it to put together a video where all 6 voices sang along, and you could see where some voices had some lines but not others. Volition seemed to notice this video, since SR3 and 4 have had moments in the credits where they do the same, but it's less interesting because it's just 6 voices all singing every lyric.

SR2 also had a complex clothing system that let you play with layers, which let you create some really complex designs.

SR3 may still be the better game, but SR2 has so many amazing touches that were lost in the transition and seem highly unlikely to return. It's just sad.

[malkav11]

One of the things that makes SR2's story interesting to me, although I can absolutely see why people would find it not to their taste, is that SR2's boss is really, clearly and no bones about it, a murderous sociopath. It's often masked by humor and a playful style, but it's there and it sometimes comes out in pretty appalling ways. This is not someone you're supposed to idolize, I don't think, and although the other gang leaders aren't particularly nice people either, the Boss is responsible for a whole lot of the chaos and bloodshed that goes down. SR3 and 4 go full on into "you're just this wacky fun loving guy/gal" mode and while it's funny I'm not sure it's nearly as interesting.

[Griddlelol]

To me SR3 was supremely better than SR2. I don't even remember playing SR2 it left so little impression on me. I actually remember characters and specific missions from 3 that I thought were hilarious or just plain fun. 

For me the series really started to stand out in 3, but then again, by the time 2 was out I had lost all interest in GTA and games of that ilk. GTA 5 was a massive flop for me too despite being incredibly popular with journalists and people I know.

[twmac]

One of the things that makes SR2's story interesting to me, although I can absolutely see why people would find it not to their taste, is that SR2's boss is really, clearly and no bones about it, a murderous sociopath. It's often masked by humor and a playful style, but it's there and it sometimes comes out in pretty appalling ways. This is not someone you're supposed to idolize, I don't think, and although the other gang leaders aren't particularly nice people either, the Boss is responsible for a whole lot of the chaos and bloodshed that goes down. SR3 and 4 go full on into "you're just this wacky fun loving guy/gal" mode and while it's funny I'm not sure it's nearly as interesting.

 

I have to disagree, I found the main character to be a complete sociopath. It was just the whole world was now also insane so their actions end up looking in place with the insane world.

[malkav11]

I have to disagree, I found the main character to be a complete sociopath. It was just the whole world was now also insane so their actions end up looking in place with the insane world.

 

You mean in the later games? Yes, they're still a complete sociopath, but they're a sociopath in the way a lot of Video game protagonists are. It isn't really a thing narratively.

[Reyturner]

(S)He's more of a puckish rogue.

[twmac]

Really? The entire vibe I got from them is that they have no moral compass whatsoever. They have no qualms aligning themselves with pimps, murderers, whoever, just to be able to follow their own self serving goals.

 

Their posse treats them like a lovable rogue but the game seems to always  be giving a sideways glance at you going 'this person is mental'.

 

The fact that a mutant behemoth Russian, who is a cold-blooded killer, happens to be the most likable character in Saints Row The Third was enough of an indication of that.