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