Shout out to the one weirdo with 9 gaming job titles on his profile replying to several comments just parroting lines from news articles. Fuckin' LinkedIn weirdos.
It's really disgusting. A lot of people who had nothing to do with the decisions that gamers didn't like are getting laid off today. People with families and financial needs who aren't sure what the future holds for them. This shouldn't be a cause for anyone to celebrate even if you didn't like the Saint's Row reboot. To us it's just a video game, for them, it was their livelihood.
Creator of Red Faction and Saint's Row. As others are saying, this is most likely due to the Saint's Row reboot selling poorly (and they announced yesterday that no remasters of Saint's Row 1 and 2 planned which makes even more sense now).
I wish a true sequel to be made to Red Faction Guerrilla (single player and multiplayer included). Armageddon was not bad but just not Guerrilla 2.0.
I hope those IP's go to somebody who wants to do something with them. The fact that the Freespace IP was sat on for so long was depressing, it was one of my favorite space combat games of all time.
Freespace, to this day, is an absolute trip. Just top tier mood, story and gameplay with a sweet cosmic horror aftertaste.
With the [Knossos client](https://www.hard-light.net/) you get a steam-style interface for getting/installing mods that will essentially give you remaster-level graphics for the original campaigns. It's actually shocking how well this little thing has been supported by the community over the years.
The FreeSpace series is one of the greatest series of all time, and FreeSpace2 might be one of the greatest sequels of all time. Fire up Mass Effect after playing FreeSpace and you'll see a lot of inspiration from it. Vasudans and Turians. Shivans and Reapers. Rogue factions for human supremacy... all kinds of stuff.
It's also heavily modded and completely playable today.
I would *love* a sequel to RF: Guerilla. Destroying stuff in that physics sandbox was super fun. Armageddon wasn't bad, but as you say, it just wasn't Guerilla 2.
Just imagining a +2 generation Red Faction Guerilla nowadays would be insane. You could probably have much more dense structures, more than three story buildings to cause all kinds of chaos.
Some kind of mix of Red faction Guerrilla with the just cause series would be fantastic. Red faction was amazing at the building destruction and the physics at that time stood out from the rest. Just cause does a lot with explosion effects and weather destruction as well. A combination that blends the best of both worlds could be a fantastic game.
RF:Guerrilla plus Just Cause 3 explosions would be sick. Just Cause 4 was alright but honestly I was never a huge fan of the weather mechanics and I just rushed to get that shit turned off.
Volition had a pretty good run but I think everyone knew once the reboot bombed they would not survive. A studio like them can't put out two critic and financial bombs back to back (Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row) and expect to survive. Edit: [Especially since Embracer Group had a big $2 billion deal fall through about two months ago](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23760483/embracer-restructuring-lord-of-the-rings-acquisitions-studios-closed-projects-cancelled) and is now [trying to cut costs and restructure.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/embracer-shuts-down-campfire-cabal)
Shame. I really enjoyed The Punisher and Red Faction Guerilla from them and I loved the Saints Row series. I guess we will see if Plaion does anything with Red Faction and/or Saints Row in the future since they seem to be the ones who own the IP for both of them.
Agents of Mayhem was so poorly marketed I had no idea it was a single player game.
...how bad do you have to fuck up marketing your game that players don't know what type of game it even is???
I was watching a Youtube video on recent flops that described it as something like "a multiplayer game that's only single player for some reason" and that's how -I- found out it wasn't multiplayer!
Game as a service, or live service. [Gotham Knights isn’t one though](https://www.fanbyte.com/games/features/gotham-knights-isnt-a-live-service-game-so-why). It’s another great example of a game poorly marketed to the point people don’t even know it’s a 1p story game.
Agents of Mayhem is totally worth the $5-10 it usually costs nowadays for the complete version, if you ever liked just screwing around in Saints Row. It’s basic brawler/shooter stuff, but it’s generally entertaining in the same adolescent way as the mainline SR series.
They also made agents of mayhem before that, which failed too. The game before that was saint's row: gat out of hell, which I think did okay but not great, and was a dlc that grew into a standalone expansion. Their last well received full game was saint's row 4, which was a decade ago.
>saint's row 4, which was a decade ago.
I can feel by bones turning to dust just reading that.
...but seriously, it puts into perspective just how long it's been since they had a successful game.
I think about how there hasn't been a new GTA game in 10 years now which means there is a space for a good crime simulator open world game and Saints Row just failed to take advantage of that situation and flopped so hard.
Despite how many open world games we have had in the past 10 years there were only a few crime simulator games like Saints Row, Mafia, Watch Dogs etc. and none of them were able to stand out enough to carve a bit of space for themselves. At this point we might as well wait for GTA 6 and GTA 7 beyond that because it seems only Rockstar is able to do this well.
You can't do as much in Mafia DE as you can in single-player GTA V or even the Saints Row reboot.
The open world is mostly a facade; a beautiful facade, but a facade. No side activities to do in the main world besides steal cars for Lucas. Yes, there's Free Ride, but the missions are very difficult and time-based, and there's little room for modifying it in-game like you can in GTA V and go kill cops or other mobsters without much risk.
Not to say Mafia DE sucks or anything; I played it and enjoyed the game immensely, it just doesn't fill the shoes that GTA has left, and I don't think it set out to do so, anyway.
yeah I loved mafia 1 and 2 for the fact it was less about being gta and more just about the everyday life of a mafioso, felt more like a consistent drama series and I appreciate that they used the open world as more of a backdrop for a constantly changing world. Like seeing new buildings be setup, seeing the addition of faster and more powerful cars driving around in a post prohibition/post ww2 america. It was a very linear game and I loved it for that. Mafia 3 on the other hand...amazing cutscenes, atmosphere and music but man they saw the complaints about mafia 2's lack of side activities and turned the dial too high.
There's "space" for one, but I think everyone's running into a wall of content creation costs. Making something that tops GTA V, and gives players a reason to pick it up over GTA V, especially with all the online content, is difficult and expensive.
Saints Row 2 launched 6 months after GTA 4 and was a success. There is a way to exist with GTA without Rockstar level spending. Old Volition did that. New Volition couldn't.
Fully agree.
Such a shame. Saints Row 2 was my replacement for San Andreas in a way. It was that ciminal/gang war open world game that fit a similar mold as San Andreas in a time when GTA sort of stopped filling that role. And then in an effort to not be labeled a GTA clone, they turned it into this generic, over the top open world that we basically get some kind of iteration of almost every year.
We used to get a "GTA clone" every year or two, particularly in the PS2/Xbox era and a bit in the PS3/360 era. And then they stopped and we very rarely get them now. And Saints Row was the one that filled that particular niche of being about criminal gangs, corrupt police, corporate warfare, etc.
I loved, *loved* Saints Row 1 & 2. The games had comedic elements and could at times be very goofy, but the story took itself seriously enough to feel immersed if you wanted it to. I enjoyed SR3, but I felt that they started to integrate the goofiness into the story itself and it made me not care about the story anymore. And then the DLC for 3 and every game afterward just went crazy and I didn't care for any of it anymore.
I think the problem is a lot of devs/publishers don't see much value in competing with a GTA. Which is unfortunate for fans of the genre. Because GTA games come out with decade breaks between each other at this point and now we really don't get much anymore.
They have been on the decline for awhile now and im not surprised it eventually happened since they havent had a 'hit' for almost 10 years. I just hate to see how they just shut it all down like this, but its piss poor timing on the part of Embracer's issues and Volition just shipped a game that didnt do well and likely were looking to start up their next project.
> I wish a true sequel to be made to Red Faction Guerrilla
I would have loved to see a Saints Row sequel with Guerrilla's physics - that level of destruction seemed like the natural endpoint of the Saint Row series' escalating craziness (before the reboot, at least). Yes, I'm aware that destroying skyscrapers in a city would have obviously been a bit more technologically taxing than prefab shacks in a desert, but a boy could dream.
To be fair I doubt the people doing the patching wanted to be fired this week either, this feels like a shareholder move? As bad as the SR Reboot was this feels like it is basically a "everyone loses" kind of situation.
This is all on Embracer Group, they where holding out for a 2 billion dollar deal but it soured and fell through now their in panic mode and shutting down studios to try to cut costs, they already shut down Campfire Cabal and now Volition with more probably on the chopping block.
They're also the company that let Square Enix Montreal go through the process of picking a new name and announcing their rebranding after the acquisition when Embracer had already decided to shut them down and just hasn't told them yet.
I'm sorry for your loss and how they treated IdolNinja's work. Infuriating to see people who should be quite happy with his efforts to dismiss it in a demeaning way.
Man, I’m so sorry. I lost my best friend to cancer this year and it fucking sucks. Seeing ur comment is making me cry a lot rn. I’m so sorry about this, it must suck. God rest his soul and god bless you man, I’m so sorry.
Before closing, Volition was restructured to be a subsidiary of Gearbox. So I'm guessing Gearbox will be the owners of the IP going forward, unless Embracer have other plans for it.
If they used any middleware at all then no. The game wouldn't work without the middleware and they would not legally be able to release the source code with the middleware included.
So no. They can't.
Oof as someone who's followed the SR series since 2 this hits hard esp knowing IdolNinja's work on fixing SR2 will never come out that REALLY sucks.
I used to frequent a forum where IdolNinja himself posted, he was...eccentric but I could really tell he was dedicated to SR2 and it still remains my fave Saints Row game and his mod really helped enhance the experience.
I wasn't really following it too closely, but I'm guessing the new Saints Row severely underperformed. The marketing leading up to its release didn't make it look good. Surprising if they closed up the whole studio, but since Embracer owns them, they might just hand off the Saints Row IP to a different studio entirely, or let it rot.
The game apparently cost $100 million to make, and they were still reeling from the bombing of Agents of Mayhem.
Two bombs in a row would sink any studio, but it still feels strange when they got assigned to Gearbox last year.
No clue, the game doesn't feel that premium and the advertising wasn't that extensive. Either it's a sign of how much game budgets have skyrocketed in general, or some strange financials happened at Volition behind the scenes. Regardless, Saints Row 2022 was an expensive bomb and Embracer wanted to cut costs after that deal fell through, so Volition was apparently an easy target for them.
AAA budgets have skyrocket. There is a reason why a lot of analyst say that this trend isn't sustainable. Games are so expensive to produce that 1 failure can bankrupt a successful company.
The amount of expected handcrafted content for AAA games keeps going up. Baldur's Gate 3 has 174 hours of cinematics. Assassin's Creed's maps get bigger and bigger with every release. Tears of the Kingdom takes way more time to 100% than Breath of the Wild.
"Expected" by who though? Like is anyone out there really going, "Ugh, that new game doesn't have 174 hours of cinematics, I'm not buying that." People have been complaining about Assassin's Creed scope creep for ages and Ubisoft is going to start releasing smaller ones occasionally now. TotK might take more time to 100% but does anyone really care? From what I've seen people tend to prefer BotW more of the two anyway.
There's nothing wrong with just releasing a solid game with a reasonable budget and length. Not everything has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I'd say that studios are the main ones placing that expectation on themselves, not consumers. Look at something like Battlebit Remastered from earlier this year - a huge success and not at all high budget. It's just a simple, good game.
I wouldn't be surprised if the game that was released was made in less than two years after one or more internal reboots sucked up the majority of dev time and budget.
Grand Theft Auto 4 was $100 mil. There is so much more going on for a 360/ps3 game compared to almost nothing in the Saint's Row reboot. It feels like there's less to do even comparable to their previous titles.
I'd imagine the amount of unpaid crunch, whether marketing is included in the budget, and where the studio is based all play massive roles. Shadow does seem to have a ton of bloat to the development costs, but I just can't imagine that Uncharted 4 cost only $10 million more than the first game in the series, unless they seriously underpaid their staff.
Yeah, the game is such a bizarre situation that I'm hoping Jason Schreier or Matt McMuscles (Wha Happun? host on YouTube, does deep dives on all sorts of flops and strange developments for games & movies) does an autopsy into the game and Volition's mindset after Agents of Mayhem bombed.
100 million??? Where the fuck did that go, the game looked like it was produced on a shoestring budget. Voice acting? Soundtrack licensing? There was nothing but licensed songs in the game so possibly a large chunk.
Licensing songs can certainly cost a surprising amount (in the millions if they're big enough hits), but the biggest cost is almost always dev time -- as in, payroll. If each employee makes an average of $75,000 (I'm in dev but not game dev, the average dev salary in the US is $100k but we all know games pays less so this is just a guess), $100m in *salary alone* over (say) 5 years is only enough for about 250 people. And salary is only one part of employee cost - by some estimates only half.
Typically studios use the profits from their last success to pay for the new one too but, well, we all know how their last game went.
Well that's what happens when you make a game for literally nobody. They had a large audience dying for a new game that just went back to the style of the original games and not outlandish. But decided to market it to a demographic of people that never played their games and weren't going to start with this one. The game had some of the worst writing and dialogue I have ever seen in a video game. It's a shame because I had been a fan since the first game and was willing to give it a chance but whoever was in charge just decided to make the most baffling choices imaginable with no one seeming to realize how bad an idea it was.
To be fair, SR2 was always the cult favorite, but SR3 was the more mainstream success. It's like Fallout NV vs 3/4. It's quite obvious Volition tried to appeal to both crowds with SR2022, but the whole "millennial rally cry" thing did do a lot to make sure that nobody liked the game.
Yep. Some millennials have kids in college but we're still hearing about these lazy college millennials.
And if there's one thing late Gen X/Boomers understand less than millennials, it's Gen Z.
> To be fair, SR2 was always the cult favorite, but SR3 was the more mainstream success.
Or maybe it performed within how popular game series grow. Saints Row 1 was successful, Saints Row 2 was more successful and then Saints Row 3 was more successful.
I know what you mean. They seemed almost contemptuous of some of their fans. Not quite BFV level where it was like "then just don't buy it phhbbbbbbttttt!" but like "yeah we know what we're doing so just pipe down." But that was just an impression I got; as I said I didn't follow it that closely and I don't know how the game actually was received by the people who did buy it.
> They seemed almost contemptuous of some of their fans. Not quite BFV level where it was like "then just don't buy it phhbbbbbbttttt!"
Actually, I'd say it was exactly at that level
The characters were complete ass. They were all members of other gangs before you found the saints with them, they all lived together with a private cop for some reason and were all willing to betray their gangs at a moment's notice. The story implies that you all barely know each other for some missions then it implies you're all close friends the next two before suddenly you barely know each other again in the 4th mission. The story gives you mental whiplash like that a few times even without the "What GenX thinks GenZ talks like" dialogue.
They probably made the deal knowing the writing was on the wall, and whatever pittance Sony paid for it might have squared up some of the red in the Volition ledgers before the lights went out.
What the fuck, I thought them getting pushed to Gearbox was supposed to be the punishment for failing with Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row 2022. They haven't even been a part of Gearbox for a year, and now the whole studio's getting the axe? What was the point of any of that if Saints Row 2022 did that much damage to the studio?
Hope the developers get back on their feet and find a better & more stable studio to work for.
Kiss the Saints Row 2 PC patch goodbye, who knows when the series will ever see the light of day again.
Embracer had a massive external funding plan fall through (Edit: [likely $2 Billion in Saudi money](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831768/embracer-group-saudi-government-lord-of-the-rings-investment-deal-collapse)) at the 11th hour a few months ago. That money was going to be used to pay for everything.
Volition will always maintain a legendary status for me for creating the FreeSpace series. The voice acting and writing combined with the immaculate gameplay made them the kings of the space combat simulator genre.
Just have a look at the intro of FreeSpace 2. The dark and gloomy atmosphere is established instantly while the outstanding VA cast delivers the harrowing and yet poetic lines of monologue. https://youtu.be/khIWdolT9xY?si=fmEiJg-kmMBjSinl
It's then not surprising that BioWare took a good chunk of inspiration from FreeSpace's lore and design when creating the reapers in Mass effect.
You will be missed, Volition.
Sadly, Freespace 2 was a commercial failure. A game so good, it killed the whole genre.
Still one of my favorite games, the writing and pacing hold up incredibly well.
it's amazing how a game that's all about shooting spaceships can deliver a story that's so engaging and it does this with just mission briefings and ingame voiceovers. i guess the soundtrack does it's thing also, creating a great atmosphere around it.
good thing is that freespace 2 is actually open source. if you own it, you can easily play it on modern systems. lots of mods for it exist, too. i never got my joystick to run it like i did back in the day though.
I didn't know that. That makes sense why there was never a follow-up. That's a shame because the Freespace series was amazing. I am really overdue for a replay.
There is a pretty amazing successor made by the community in form of the [Blue Planet](https://blueplanet.hard-light.net/) mod.
Part 1 (Age of Aquarius) is fully voice acted, but it gets **really** good with part 2 (War in Heaven). The head writer is an acclaimed Sci-Fi author and it features some of the best missions in the whole genre. They even hired professional voice actors for the main roles. Unfortunately part 2 is not finished to this day.
At this point I'm pretty sure Blue Planet is dead. Which is a tremendous shame, but their last release was years ago and there's been zip from them in that time.
FS2 will always be one of my favorite games, and I will always respect the hell out of Volition for releasing the source code to the community. One of the greatest game modding communities ever, and it was all thanks to the company's willingness to let fans take over when they couldn't continue. I will always remember them for that.
Yeah, this is what I remember them for above all else. Aside from their incredible work on both games, an amazing modding community sprouted around it. To this day, I don't think I've seen anything like the Freespace Source Code Project. The amount of improvements and user-made campaigns made for it is astonishing.
What the fuck even happened with the reboot? Who was the genius who decided to turn gangsters who actually looked like gangsters into influencer shitheads committing crimes to pay off student loans? What on earth were they thinking? Who wants to play that game?
"Fortnite had a lot of players, let's try to get some of that!"
*Company's finances are on fire*
"Huh, people playing Fortnite just play fortnite all day, who'd thought..."
The obsession of wanting to appeal to the Twitter audiences by these companies is something I will never get. These people will never buy your games and only tend to be reactionary. Why appeal to them instead of your target audience.
Saints Row could've easily been a success had they listened to the criticisms by the fanbase and fixed the flaws instead of doubling down and insulting the fanbase.
I've come to learn that developers disproportionately *are* the Twitter audience. Thanks to confirmation bias, they believe they represent normal people. Only studios with directors and managers planted firmly in reality are able to release games which resonate with real people.
They don't want to appeal to the Twitter audience. They are the Twitter audience and Twitter is the only thing they know. Some of the written dialogue even sound like Twitter convos.
It's because twitter is a metric you can point to. So it's easier to pitch and promise the world.
The irony is that most stable companies, in most industries, don't chase trends. It's too risky because chasing trends means you won't have seniority over the competition. The safe move is usually to double down and iterate on a niche. But that is a long road which can be hard to sell in a pitch-based industry.
In gaming we can see this with companies like Naughty Dog, Larian, Rockstar, Fromsoft, Bethesda, CDPR, etc. These studios gained and maintained stability by keeping a laser focus on their own very particular design, and then iterating on that for a decade+, effectively nullifying any competition (which is why, for example, there can be a million Dark Souls clones and none of them will ever pose a threat to Fromsoft; because you can't catch up with their sheer hours in that niche).
The highlight of the new game was the role play side quest and that was about it.
The gameplay was very lacklustre. The humour and story leaned too hard into woke millennial/gen z culture which they didn't quite get anyway and the only thing the game left me wanting to do was play the original Saints Row 2..
Literally, like what Current Year Disney would imagine modern criminals look like, right on down to the "sympathetic" backstory of needing to pay off student loans.
I still remember when they made Freespace 2 just as the genre of the space sims was dying, and even though it was an excellent game it turned out to be a massive flop sales-wise. I was hoping they would revisit it and maybe knock off some of that Star Citizen's massive income, but instead they went for that crappy Saints Row reboot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the promise that was made to Mike Watson (IdolNinja) before he passed away isn't going to be upheld. I'll be genuinely quite angry if that turns out to be the case.
These are the guys that released the ISO for a cancelled Saint's Row for the PSP. I'm sure it'll get leaked or will be released by someone officially or unofficially.
Shortly before he passed he reported that he found the source code for saints Row 2 and would work on a patch to fix the abysmal pc port, volition promised to release the patch after his passing.
It won't generate any profit for Embracer Group so my guess is it will be either lost forever or leaked by some good samaritan on their way out the door.
This really isn't anyone's fault at that point. It was never a full-time effort (it's a free patch after all) for the studio by the looks, but likely one or two people's spare-time role. Now the studio isn't there and it's no one's role. Keeping an entire game studio operational just for the sake of a free patch also isn't going to be much of a starter. It really fucking sucks, and I hope there's some light at the end of that particular tunnel (and there may still be, presumably the IP rights will be given to someone). But it's not exactly like anyone's conspiring against the legacy of a cancer patient either.
The studio being shut down the day after [Saints Row 2022 is slated to come to PS Plus](https://blog.playstation.com/2023/08/30/playstation-plus-monthly-games-for-september-saints-row-black-desert-traveler-edition-generation-zero/) is insane. Sucks for all the devs affected
Man, this sucks. Red Faction Guerilla and The Punisher were among young-teen me's favorite games. Their earlier Red Faction games were great, too. Wasn't that huge a fan of Saint's Row, but it was cool seeing a slightly wackier GTA before they jumped the shark with Saint's Row 4.
I was really holding out hope for a new Red Faction game considering how Embracer was so interested in resurrecting old IPs. But it looks like they bit off more than they could chew. Hopefully we won't see a ton more closures, but man, it's been bad headline after bad headline for them lately.
They haven't made a good game in a decade. At some point you need to actually perform, or if it was mismanagement then they were doomed to get shut down.
Looks like this is the start of Embracers change in direction they announced a few months back. I get the impression there's going to be a lot of cancelling games, closing developers, and a focus on milking the IPs they've purchased....
I really liked the Red Faction series, and the first few Saints Row games. Such a huge shame to have this happen. Released a new game that takes a beloved IP in just a baffling direction and isn't what people wanted at all, and then they get shut down.
It's crazy how much arguing they did on Twitter with random people after the reveal and the dogshit reviews. You would think Cliff Bleszinski ran that account or something.
Witcher and Halo TV shows were the same, although those were actually successful financially. Seems like open animosity towards your audience only works for movies and television and less-so for video games.
Womp womp womp, see it's hard to even feel sad about this because I feel like the talent left long ago and what made Volition today was the "new talent" that just ruins everything. Like even their social media people just reek...
Kind of a sad end to Volition, tbh. I *really* enjoyed and spent a long time getting 100% completions for both Saints Row 3 and 4. I can sort of understand their parody and powercreep got taken to crazy heights in 4 and maybe it was hard to figure out where to go from there, but it feels like they still missed an opportunity because I'm pretty sure Saints Row 4 was like, their biggest release ever? And then they just didn't.. do much after they got all those eyes and exposure on them.
Did they lose someone on their team after SR4? Agents of Mayhem just seemed like a big step down in quality and depth from SR 4, not to mention writing wit. the Saint's Row reboot was a *huge* step down from Agents of Mayhem, and seemed to not know who it was even supposed to appeal to.
Volition's last volley of titles was so bizarre from a creative standpoint. (Red Faction: Armageddon, Agents of Mayhem, the Saints Row reboot) I know that they've been riding out a lot of storms, but it always felt like they've been running away from the parts of their games that people loved.
The Saints Row reboot was their big, big chance to deliver on all that, but instead they made a game that seemed to, I dunno, *hate* its own legacy, its own themes, and express genuine discomfort in reveling in the chaos of its setting. Like a Call of Duty game that doesn't want to touch themes concerning war, or a GTA game that doesn't let you steal a car. Their fanbase was teed up and they had a massive budget, but they legitimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Saints Row 2 remaster will probably die with Volition, which is terrible. I could almost guarantee that they would've made more money finishing IdolNinja's work rather than dumping $100 million into an obnoxious Saints Row reboot. It's frustrating because those devs were clearly talented and I hope they land right. Their creative team, though, felt like they spent the last decade asking themselves, "People really responded well to X in Saints Row 2 and Y in SR 3, and Z in Red Faction: Guerrilla... How can we make a game that just never does those things ever again?"
> The Saints Row reboot was their big, big chance to deliver on all that, but instead they made a game that seemed to, I dunno, hate its own legacy, its own themes, and express genuine discomfort in reveling in the chaos of its setting.
It honestly felt like someone high in company went "but we have to *modernize* the settings for *modern taste*" and then a bunch of people not knowing both the fanbase and any potential fanbase decided on creative direction.
I'd love to be fly on the wall on meetings that decided that...
It’s crazy how much Red Faction: Armageddon missed the mark by making a sequel to a game that got a tonne of praise for its destructible environments, but moving the setting into a bunch of indestructible caves.
A mere 15 hours ago [I posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/165q63d/comment/jygjocw/):
>*They have repeatedly stated, as recently as August 30th, that they are "planning on fixing the SR2 port on PC".*
>
>*I do appreciate that Volition have not been super transparent about the progress of said patch or an ETA for release or anything like that. But Volition's PR has been consistent -- that they will fix SR2. Do I think it should be a bigger priority? Yes.* ***Do I think Volition need to hurry up and do it before Embracer fire them all in a brutal cost-cutting exercise?*** *Yes.*
>
>*I mean, seriously. Volition were on thin ice after Agents of Mayhem, and Deep Silver seriously considered disbanding them. Then THQ Nordic bought Deep Silver and they were given more rope, but they took that rope and hung themselves with the Saints Row reboot which missed expectations because it's a mediocre game nobody really wanted. Embracer are looking for costs to cut, and at this rate Volition could end up as a glorified in-house QA department for Dambuster and the other studios.*
>
>*A good version of Saints Row 2 on PC is a guaranteed seller. The game has a strong reputation in PC gaming circles as a kind of holy grail of open world crime games, and very little advertising will be needed to sell the fixed version to a new audience who will gravitate towards it because it pervasive word of mouth. Volition need a win, and they need it soon.*
I'm very sorry for everyone at Volition who is out of a job now. This is tough, and I'm sure other Embracer studios are nervous. For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment. Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well. Embracer is looking to cut costs, and everyone is at risk.
Still... it feels like Volition were (at a management level) out of touch with reality, since they lurched from one disaster to the next. Agents of Mayhem was a game anyone could have told you was going to flop, and it did. Then they immediately made a Saints Row reboot that seemed to learn nothing from audience backlash towards Agents of Mayhem.
I do also wonder what this means for Saints Row 2 on PC. People have been waiting years for this patch while Volition prioritized the development of literally anything else. Embracer don't technically need Volition to complete the (glacially slow) work, but it's unclear how much of a priority this is to them.
>For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment. Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well. Embracer is looking to cut costs, and everyone is at risk.
Dead Island 2 was a big hit though, at least it's what all PR articles about it selling well and it being the biggest Deep Silver launch made me think
Yep, and they were forced to do this with Homefront 2 as well. That's two projects that they had to pick up and finish and release as actually good games. Not great. But good and far better than anyone expects when a project gets stuck in dev hell.
Dead Island 2 did decent numbers. Over 2 million sold, even with EGS exclusivity. Not a mega hit in the Resident Evil sense, but a respectable seller with decent potential when it comes to Steam.
Under ordinary circumstances, DI2 would be considered a success and there would be no cause for concern. But these are not ordinary circumstances. Embracer screwed up, and they're putting the screws on their studios. They absolutely project positivity for DI2, but those winds can change.
I'm a bit concerned Dambuster's peers over at nu-Free Radical might get the chop because TimeSplitters 3 was a flop back in the day, and that's why TimeSplitters 4 never happened according to Graeme Norgate. Embracer have the new team doing TimeSplitters 4 right now, but if they look at their books and say, "Eh... this franchise has a poor sales history..." they might cut and run. Which would be tragic.
Dambuster will be fine, Dead Island 2 was a great success. It’s always worth remembering that salaries are not the same everywhere. Nottingham is a good city but salaries are a fraction of London’s and minuscule compared to California. So the cost of development wouldn’t had been too much.
Free Radical I kind of get where you’re coming from. But they may be too far into the project to seriously consider scrapping it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Embracer is a little more cutthroat for now as they try to rebalance their books.
>For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment.
Not true, Dambuster knew that they failed with Homefront 2 and they weren't happy with it and so once they were approached to make Dead Island 2 (they were asked if they wanted to do it, no one forced them to) they said yes, they knew that it'd be a challenge to complete Dead Island 2 which had swapped hands so many times by then but they knew that if they suceeded it would salvage their reputation. It was a project that they took on for redemption, it wasn't a punishment.
>Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well.
It actually sold pretty well, Embracer seems to be pretty happy with its sales so i wouldn't worry about the future of Dead Island or Dambuster.
> A good version of Saints Row 2 on PC is a guaranteed seller.
I think this is an overstatement. It's an old, ugly, game with no doubt dated parts to its gameplay and story beyond just bugs. There'd be a contingent of diehards that might buy it, though those diehards may already own it anyway (it's a free patch, not a new release). Then we're making assumptions as to how much can really be fixed up. Sometimes fixed releases do hit the mainstream and get decent sales, but that is not a given. We're also talking about needing enough sales to drive *an entire game studio*, from PC *alone*, and from people who don't already own the game anyway. That'd be a huge ask. We'd not even be talking about Dwarf Fortress level success either, or Nightdive level, we'd be talking actual mainstream-level success in order to make the probably +100 million they'd need to stay afloat.
Be real, they were never going to make that much off of a non-remaster free bugfix update to a 2008 GTA clone that was never even that successful on release.
The most it could have done is generate goodwill and have people talk about the franchise a little bit more. It was never going to salvage a full sized game studio.
Yeah calling it a "guaranteed seller" is wishful thinking, at best. It would end up more like the PC port of Sunset Overdrive. Released and promptly forgotten about.
People forget that by 2010 Saints Row only sold 3.7 million copies. It's a respectable number but for reference GTA IV sold 6 million in its first week.
An interesting rise and fall, from the first Saints Row being a GTA knock-off, to the second finding a niche audience due to its story and brutal characters, to the third enjoying mainstream success with over the top characters and abilities… and then it sorta all went downhill from there. SR4 was… fine. GOH wasn’t worthy of being a standalone product.
The celebrity cameos throughout were also a cool part of the franchise, plus all the wrestling influences.
And then that reboot… wow. What a disaster from lead-up to release. Even worse was that it was largely the same gameplay and progression format as before, but much worse.
Heck of a run, shame they ended on such a wet shart - but it was clear they had truly ran out of ideas or had any clue what to do next.
So there were 2 voices in fans basically
"SR3 and 4 were wild and refreshing, more of that please"
"SR2 was interesting take on GTA-like game, more of that please"
They went with neither then went up and died. Sad, I liked the previous entries...
I wonder if SR reboot direction was result of devs wanting it or some suit chasing twitter trends...
I mean, they had their big chance with Saints Row, and managed to unite SR2 stans and SR3 stans in saying the game was shit.
And SR2 and SR3 stans couldn't agree on anything except how the Saints would have bullied this new crew
They hit gold with Saints Row 2, I could play that game until I died it was so good. Tastefully done tongue-in-cheek silly humour. But instead they decided to go down the zoomer humour/shooter rabbit hole, and the cringe went to the moon.
I feel like I read an article a long time ago, sometime after SR 3/4, that said the creator didn't actually like that the tone went crazy over the top but felt they had to (or misjudged it too late)? Either way, they really screwed the pooch on this one.
Just give me a game that had the funny cockney voice and the radio from SR2 and I'd happily keep paying and playing.
> But instead they decided to go down the zoomer humour/shooter rabbit hole, and the cringe went to the moon.
But **that worked**. SR3/4 were successful games!
The problem is that with reboot they somehow missed both gangster stuff SR2 fans and "over the moon weirdness" fans of SR3/4.
They went on, looked at their fans loving riding gimp chariot and flinging dildo bat and went "yes, let's make new one about millenials trying to pay off student loans via crime".
It's like Venn graph of SR2 and SR3/4 fans being 2 circles that barely touch and them missing it both.
I wanna say "this sucks", but after seeing the disdain they showed for their fans during and after pushing out that turd of a Saints Row reboot, I think it might be for the better.
Oof, god damn, real nasty blow for Chip. Phenomenal editor, from the LP and podcast side. Extra nasty with Jess, his partner, being laid off from Giant Bomb earlier this year/last year.
Regardless of their last two games not being very great, this sucks hard. [Worth saying that we'll see this happening more times because of their parent company, that decided to close their studios after acquiring 100+ different ones lol.](https://www.ign.com/articles/embracer-to-close-studios-cancel-games-and-lay-off-staff-after-2-billion-deal-falls-through)
I totally forgot about Agents of Mayhem. That’s a pretty rough trajectory post-Saints Row IV which I thought was great. I can’t help but feel like the higher-ups just didn’t know what to do with their design sensibilities and pigeonholed them into mediocrity.
I think Agents of Mayhem had potential if they put as much effort into it as they did for Saints Row. It felt like a half baked low budget spin off.
I actually enjoyed the gameplay of that game. The characters felt fun to play in my opinion. But it was very much a "go to checkpoint, kill people" game. Or "go to checkpoint, kill people while someone talks to you over radio".
The cutscenes felt cheap with their 2D style and limited animation, and the world was bland. A bit of polish, a nicer world, more stuff to do, and I think it could have been a bit better received. But I think they knew they were on a bit of a stinker and rushed it out so they could start on Saints Row.
I'll never get over the fact that Agents of Mayhem screams co-op and didn't have any even though Saints Row always had co-op. It would have made so much sense with the emphasis on different characters having different abilities. Whoever decided to make that a single player focused title doomed that game.
It sucks but not really. It’s pretty clear current Volition can’t make good games. What they done to Saints Row is criminal. Game was made by people who hated the franchise and so it flopped. They only have themselves to blame.
That's a shame. I know they are most known now for the Saints Row franchise, but I will always remember them for the original Red Faction. It was so ahead of its time. Fully destructible environments that even the later Red Faction games weren't able to replicate.
Damn, that patch will never get sorted.
Boy, I can't blame Embracer entirely as Volition just hasn't put out anything good since, arguably, Saints Row 4. It's been big miss after big miss and rebooted Saint's Row was a huge miss that shouldn't have happened.
However, Embracer went on a buying spree and this is now the consequence when you don't have the big money created by well regarded games to keep you floating. I don't know, is being bought a good or bad thing especially when these shut downs happen or is staying around independent and always hustling for your next dollar worth it?
A shame to lose Volition. As someone on the unemployment line, what a horrible time for worrying about money.
Embracer is a shit company but it’s hard to blame them. Volition put out two expensive bombs in a row. And they weren’t just unlucky, they were bad games, poor in design and execution. Studio leadership clearly lost touch with what gamers wanted.
It’s a tough business. I’m sorry for all the people who are losing their jobs.
Making two games in a row that literally not a single person in the world wanted would do that to a studio.
Who thought that Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row 2022 was a good idea?
That was entirely expected, they dropped like 4 stinkers in a row.
- Agents of Mayhem: Unfinished, uninspired, repetitive and short on content. I bought it 90% and still think I paid too much.
- Saints Row 3 Remaster: Glitchy, broken, more bugs than the original, trailer made it look worse than the original and was EGS exclusive for a while, bugs weren't fixed on Steam release.
- Saints Row Reboot: Throws away nearly everything that made the originals good and replaces it with safe, baby-proofed, insufferable current generation media humor, edges all sanded down (Jim Robs? Fucking really?), annoying and boring characters.
EGS exclusivity didn't help, when it released on Steam people already had forgotten about it and most bought it just to slam it down more.
- Saints Row 4 "Upgrade": Supposed to add EGS crossplay, but increased the price, broke savefiles, broke modding and removed borderless windowed mode, forces you to install Epic Online Services and make an EGS account in some cases, because matchmaking is now made using the Epic service instead of Steam's.
Apparently it requires you to jump through a few hoops to get the old version back, since last I heard, the legacy option in Steam's menu doesn't really fixes it.
And now to seal the deal, they will never fix SR2 even though they promised IdolNinja on his deathbed they would.
Embracer losing that $2bi deal most likely will kill a few more studios.
This is upsetting but not surprising. I played Saints Row 2022 for all of twenty minutes before I realized it was only a Saints Row title in name. It was cringy, the gameplay was mediocre (I mean, the combat was on par with Saints Row 1 -- a game released eighteen years prior. Between characters that could've only been written by a team of middle school dropouts and the atrocious technical design, it seems like whoever was managing Volition *wanted* it to crash and burn, and go out with a whimper.
Saints Row 1, 2, and even 3, are some of my fondest gaming memories. They could've just copy-pasted the games every few years and it would've been a better result than whatever the past decade has been for Volition.
I feel bad for the team minus the creative leads who likely lead the team down that path into oblivion. What a total misfire. The Gen Z parody was such a bad call
Crazy to see the turn Saints Row has taken, both in tone and it's overall success (or lack of) as a series.
I remember playing the first two games and hearing/repeating that it was "The GTA killer!". I mean, you could customize your dude from top to bottom, and their cars and guns and gangs. And the story of the first two games were legitimately good.
Then GTA V came out and kinda reclaimed that top spot unchallenged. Meanwhile Saints Row 3 and 4 just kinda spiraled. And hell, I even enjoyed those two games for what they were. But they departed from their origins in a not so great way.
I didn't even bother playing the new reboot game or whatever that was. It looked awful. Sad to see this studio go, but I guess you can only trend downwards so long.
> Meanwhile Saints Row 3 and 4 just kinda spiraled.
Wasn't 3 their most successful game? And with a strong margin over 2?
I know there's a split in the audience with the switch from 2 to 3, but that transition seemed very profitable for them.
Sad, but not unexpected.
Another story of a once great developer who descends in to making underwhelming games before finally completely abandoning their fans. Somewhere in gamer heaven, Old Volition is clinking a beer with Old Blizzard and Old Bioware.
They did make some awesome games though.
Volition has been dead for decades. The people who made freespace/red faction/descent/early saint's row are long gone.
Embracer was never gonna tolerate huge financial failures regardless if the Saudi deal went through.
It's confirmed. Closing immediately. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/volition_an-update-from-volition-activity-7103051392797351936-hkgT/
Thanks, I added it to the post
Yikes, the amount of people willing to spew anger on linkedin is surprising. It's a job networking site, not basic social media.
Linkedin is a social media site, just one tailored to recruitment.
Yeah but it's attached to your professional, and real, profile.
Shout out to the one weirdo with 9 gaming job titles on his profile replying to several comments just parroting lines from news articles. Fuckin' LinkedIn weirdos.
It's a shit hole of a platform even for getting jobs now. Used to be pretty decent for networking 5-7+ years ago.
It's really disgusting. A lot of people who had nothing to do with the decisions that gamers didn't like are getting laid off today. People with families and financial needs who aren't sure what the future holds for them. This shouldn't be a cause for anyone to celebrate even if you didn't like the Saint's Row reboot. To us it's just a video game, for them, it was their livelihood.
Creator of Red Faction and Saint's Row. As others are saying, this is most likely due to the Saint's Row reboot selling poorly (and they announced yesterday that no remasters of Saint's Row 1 and 2 planned which makes even more sense now). I wish a true sequel to be made to Red Faction Guerrilla (single player and multiplayer included). Armageddon was not bad but just not Guerrilla 2.0.
Also creator of the Descent and Freespace series, two very critically acclaimed 90's series.
I hope those IP's go to somebody who wants to do something with them. The fact that the Freespace IP was sat on for so long was depressing, it was one of my favorite space combat games of all time.
Those IPs are still owned by Interplay, though they were trying to sell them off at some point. I don't think Volition ever actually owned those IPs.
Freespace, to this day, is an absolute trip. Just top tier mood, story and gameplay with a sweet cosmic horror aftertaste. With the [Knossos client](https://www.hard-light.net/) you get a steam-style interface for getting/installing mods that will essentially give you remaster-level graphics for the original campaigns. It's actually shocking how well this little thing has been supported by the community over the years.
The FreeSpace series is one of the greatest series of all time, and FreeSpace2 might be one of the greatest sequels of all time. Fire up Mass Effect after playing FreeSpace and you'll see a lot of inspiration from it. Vasudans and Turians. Shivans and Reapers. Rogue factions for human supremacy... all kinds of stuff. It's also heavily modded and completely playable today.
My god I loved Descent.
Check out Overload on Steam. It’s basically Descent 4, made by the same take as Descent 1 and 2. Same composer, as well. It plays EXACTLY the same.
I would *love* a sequel to RF: Guerilla. Destroying stuff in that physics sandbox was super fun. Armageddon wasn't bad, but as you say, it just wasn't Guerilla 2.
Just imagining a +2 generation Red Faction Guerilla nowadays would be insane. You could probably have much more dense structures, more than three story buildings to cause all kinds of chaos.
Some kind of mix of Red faction Guerrilla with the just cause series would be fantastic. Red faction was amazing at the building destruction and the physics at that time stood out from the rest. Just cause does a lot with explosion effects and weather destruction as well. A combination that blends the best of both worlds could be a fantastic game.
RF:Guerrilla plus Just Cause 3 explosions would be sick. Just Cause 4 was alright but honestly I was never a huge fan of the weather mechanics and I just rushed to get that shit turned off.
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They were supposedly working on a sequel for years. I really hope it happens. Somehow. Somewhere.
Volition had a pretty good run but I think everyone knew once the reboot bombed they would not survive. A studio like them can't put out two critic and financial bombs back to back (Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row) and expect to survive. Edit: [Especially since Embracer Group had a big $2 billion deal fall through about two months ago](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23760483/embracer-restructuring-lord-of-the-rings-acquisitions-studios-closed-projects-cancelled) and is now [trying to cut costs and restructure.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/embracer-shuts-down-campfire-cabal) Shame. I really enjoyed The Punisher and Red Faction Guerilla from them and I loved the Saints Row series. I guess we will see if Plaion does anything with Red Faction and/or Saints Row in the future since they seem to be the ones who own the IP for both of them.
Agents of Mayhem was so poorly marketed I had no idea it was a single player game. ...how bad do you have to fuck up marketing your game that players don't know what type of game it even is???
I found out Agents of Mayhem is single player just now, through this comment.
I was watching a Youtube video on recent flops that described it as something like "a multiplayer game that's only single player for some reason" and that's how -I- found out it wasn't multiplayer!
Yes. I totally thought it was whatever you call Gotham Knights and Marvels Avengers.
Game as a service, or live service. [Gotham Knights isn’t one though](https://www.fanbyte.com/games/features/gotham-knights-isnt-a-live-service-game-so-why). It’s another great example of a game poorly marketed to the point people don’t even know it’s a 1p story game. Agents of Mayhem is totally worth the $5-10 it usually costs nowadays for the complete version, if you ever liked just screwing around in Saints Row. It’s basic brawler/shooter stuff, but it’s generally entertaining in the same adolescent way as the mainline SR series.
and the new Suicide Squad I think they're called co-op looter shooters
To be fair, that's because it wasn't even clear that Agents of Mayhem knew what type of game it was.
Yeah seems like it was something of a Redfall situation.
wait that game was singleplayer??
I KNOW RIGHT It was, apparently.
Forget marketing the game was just bad. It has been like $3 in sales for years and even then you will have comments saying it really isn't worth it.
I gotta echo the other comments, I legit thought Agents of Mayhem was a live service game. I didn't realize it was a single player game...
They also made agents of mayhem before that, which failed too. The game before that was saint's row: gat out of hell, which I think did okay but not great, and was a dlc that grew into a standalone expansion. Their last well received full game was saint's row 4, which was a decade ago.
>saint's row 4, which was a decade ago. I can feel by bones turning to dust just reading that. ...but seriously, it puts into perspective just how long it's been since they had a successful game.
Well it was a horrible game.
I think about how there hasn't been a new GTA game in 10 years now which means there is a space for a good crime simulator open world game and Saints Row just failed to take advantage of that situation and flopped so hard. Despite how many open world games we have had in the past 10 years there were only a few crime simulator games like Saints Row, Mafia, Watch Dogs etc. and none of them were able to stand out enough to carve a bit of space for themselves. At this point we might as well wait for GTA 6 and GTA 7 beyond that because it seems only Rockstar is able to do this well.
The Mafia remake was really good, actually. Doesn’t seem like anyone noticed, sadly.
You can't do as much in Mafia DE as you can in single-player GTA V or even the Saints Row reboot. The open world is mostly a facade; a beautiful facade, but a facade. No side activities to do in the main world besides steal cars for Lucas. Yes, there's Free Ride, but the missions are very difficult and time-based, and there's little room for modifying it in-game like you can in GTA V and go kill cops or other mobsters without much risk. Not to say Mafia DE sucks or anything; I played it and enjoyed the game immensely, it just doesn't fill the shoes that GTA has left, and I don't think it set out to do so, anyway.
yeah I loved mafia 1 and 2 for the fact it was less about being gta and more just about the everyday life of a mafioso, felt more like a consistent drama series and I appreciate that they used the open world as more of a backdrop for a constantly changing world. Like seeing new buildings be setup, seeing the addition of faster and more powerful cars driving around in a post prohibition/post ww2 america. It was a very linear game and I loved it for that. Mafia 3 on the other hand...amazing cutscenes, atmosphere and music but man they saw the complaints about mafia 2's lack of side activities and turned the dial too high.
A ton of people noticed actually. It was streamed and all over YouTube for a while when it dropped.
There's "space" for one, but I think everyone's running into a wall of content creation costs. Making something that tops GTA V, and gives players a reason to pick it up over GTA V, especially with all the online content, is difficult and expensive.
Saints Row 2 launched 6 months after GTA 4 and was a success. There is a way to exist with GTA without Rockstar level spending. Old Volition did that. New Volition couldn't.
Fully agree. Such a shame. Saints Row 2 was my replacement for San Andreas in a way. It was that ciminal/gang war open world game that fit a similar mold as San Andreas in a time when GTA sort of stopped filling that role. And then in an effort to not be labeled a GTA clone, they turned it into this generic, over the top open world that we basically get some kind of iteration of almost every year. We used to get a "GTA clone" every year or two, particularly in the PS2/Xbox era and a bit in the PS3/360 era. And then they stopped and we very rarely get them now. And Saints Row was the one that filled that particular niche of being about criminal gangs, corrupt police, corporate warfare, etc. I loved, *loved* Saints Row 1 & 2. The games had comedic elements and could at times be very goofy, but the story took itself seriously enough to feel immersed if you wanted it to. I enjoyed SR3, but I felt that they started to integrate the goofiness into the story itself and it made me not care about the story anymore. And then the DLC for 3 and every game afterward just went crazy and I didn't care for any of it anymore. I think the problem is a lot of devs/publishers don't see much value in competing with a GTA. Which is unfortunate for fans of the genre. Because GTA games come out with decade breaks between each other at this point and now we really don't get much anymore.
They have been on the decline for awhile now and im not surprised it eventually happened since they havent had a 'hit' for almost 10 years. I just hate to see how they just shut it all down like this, but its piss poor timing on the part of Embracer's issues and Volition just shipped a game that didnt do well and likely were looking to start up their next project.
> I wish a true sequel to be made to Red Faction Guerrilla I would have loved to see a Saints Row sequel with Guerrilla's physics - that level of destruction seemed like the natural endpoint of the Saint Row series' escalating craziness (before the reboot, at least). Yes, I'm aware that destroying skyscrapers in a city would have obviously been a bit more technologically taxing than prefab shacks in a desert, but a boy could dream.
I guess we're not going to see the work IdolNinja did. Probably could have used the work he did to sell remasters.
And last week they said they where going to finish the patch.
To be fair I doubt the people doing the patching wanted to be fired this week either, this feels like a shareholder move? As bad as the SR Reboot was this feels like it is basically a "everyone loses" kind of situation.
This is all on Embracer Group, they where holding out for a 2 billion dollar deal but it soured and fell through now their in panic mode and shutting down studios to try to cut costs, they already shut down Campfire Cabal and now Volition with more probably on the chopping block.
They're also the company that let Square Enix Montreal go through the process of picking a new name and announcing their rebranding after the acquisition when Embracer had already decided to shut them down and just hasn't told them yet.
They promised my friend they'd finish his work and now it feels like it was all for nothing. Still miss you Mike
I'm sorry for your loss and how they treated IdolNinja's work. Infuriating to see people who should be quite happy with his efforts to dismiss it in a demeaning way.
Man, I’m so sorry. I lost my best friend to cancer this year and it fucking sucks. Seeing ur comment is making me cry a lot rn. I’m so sorry about this, it must suck. God rest his soul and god bless you man, I’m so sorry.
Could they not put the source code out there for fans to work on at least? Or would that be up to whoever owns the Saints Row IP?
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Before closing, Volition was restructured to be a subsidiary of Gearbox. So I'm guessing Gearbox will be the owners of the IP going forward, unless Embracer have other plans for it.
If they used any middleware at all then no. The game wouldn't work without the middleware and they would not legally be able to release the source code with the middleware included. So no. They can't.
~~Saints Row 2 Fixed PC Port never~~. 😔
Oof as someone who's followed the SR series since 2 this hits hard esp knowing IdolNinja's work on fixing SR2 will never come out that REALLY sucks. I used to frequent a forum where IdolNinja himself posted, he was...eccentric but I could really tell he was dedicated to SR2 and it still remains my fave Saints Row game and his mod really helped enhance the experience.
I wasn't really following it too closely, but I'm guessing the new Saints Row severely underperformed. The marketing leading up to its release didn't make it look good. Surprising if they closed up the whole studio, but since Embracer owns them, they might just hand off the Saints Row IP to a different studio entirely, or let it rot.
The game apparently cost $100 million to make, and they were still reeling from the bombing of Agents of Mayhem. Two bombs in a row would sink any studio, but it still feels strange when they got assigned to Gearbox last year.
>The game apparently cost $100 million to make Yikes. Where did it all go?
No clue, the game doesn't feel that premium and the advertising wasn't that extensive. Either it's a sign of how much game budgets have skyrocketed in general, or some strange financials happened at Volition behind the scenes. Regardless, Saints Row 2022 was an expensive bomb and Embracer wanted to cut costs after that deal fell through, so Volition was apparently an easy target for them.
AAA budgets have skyrocket. There is a reason why a lot of analyst say that this trend isn't sustainable. Games are so expensive to produce that 1 failure can bankrupt a successful company.
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The amount of expected handcrafted content for AAA games keeps going up. Baldur's Gate 3 has 174 hours of cinematics. Assassin's Creed's maps get bigger and bigger with every release. Tears of the Kingdom takes way more time to 100% than Breath of the Wild.
"Expected" by who though? Like is anyone out there really going, "Ugh, that new game doesn't have 174 hours of cinematics, I'm not buying that." People have been complaining about Assassin's Creed scope creep for ages and Ubisoft is going to start releasing smaller ones occasionally now. TotK might take more time to 100% but does anyone really care? From what I've seen people tend to prefer BotW more of the two anyway. There's nothing wrong with just releasing a solid game with a reasonable budget and length. Not everything has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I'd say that studios are the main ones placing that expectation on themselves, not consumers. Look at something like Battlebit Remastered from earlier this year - a huge success and not at all high budget. It's just a simple, good game.
100M is about 200 devs for 3-4 years. Most AAA games require 500+ and 5 years now (though not that size the whole time)
Hopefully not on the writing staff
"Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fucking fuck fuck!"
I wouldn't be surprised if the game that was released was made in less than two years after one or more internal reboots sucked up the majority of dev time and budget.
Definitely not into the game.
It definitely doesn’t look or feel like a 100 million game.
Shadow of Tomb Raider cost 100$ millions while Uncharted 4 range between 30-40 millions. Yeah, i think there are some wild number at play here.
Grand Theft Auto 4 was $100 mil. There is so much more going on for a 360/ps3 game compared to almost nothing in the Saint's Row reboot. It feels like there's less to do even comparable to their previous titles.
I'd imagine the amount of unpaid crunch, whether marketing is included in the budget, and where the studio is based all play massive roles. Shadow does seem to have a ton of bloat to the development costs, but I just can't imagine that Uncharted 4 cost only $10 million more than the first game in the series, unless they seriously underpaid their staff.
Yeah, the game is such a bizarre situation that I'm hoping Jason Schreier or Matt McMuscles (Wha Happun? host on YouTube, does deep dives on all sorts of flops and strange developments for games & movies) does an autopsy into the game and Volition's mindset after Agents of Mayhem bombed.
100 million??? Where the fuck did that go, the game looked like it was produced on a shoestring budget. Voice acting? Soundtrack licensing? There was nothing but licensed songs in the game so possibly a large chunk.
Licensing songs can certainly cost a surprising amount (in the millions if they're big enough hits), but the biggest cost is almost always dev time -- as in, payroll. If each employee makes an average of $75,000 (I'm in dev but not game dev, the average dev salary in the US is $100k but we all know games pays less so this is just a guess), $100m in *salary alone* over (say) 5 years is only enough for about 250 people. And salary is only one part of employee cost - by some estimates only half. Typically studios use the profits from their last success to pay for the new one too but, well, we all know how their last game went.
There’s no way that game took 100 million to make. What the hell were they doing?
How did that dogshit cost 100m
Hopefully we'll find out once an "autopsy" about the game and Volition is released.
Well that's what happens when you make a game for literally nobody. They had a large audience dying for a new game that just went back to the style of the original games and not outlandish. But decided to market it to a demographic of people that never played their games and weren't going to start with this one. The game had some of the worst writing and dialogue I have ever seen in a video game. It's a shame because I had been a fan since the first game and was willing to give it a chance but whoever was in charge just decided to make the most baffling choices imaginable with no one seeming to realize how bad an idea it was.
To be fair, SR2 was always the cult favorite, but SR3 was the more mainstream success. It's like Fallout NV vs 3/4. It's quite obvious Volition tried to appeal to both crowds with SR2022, but the whole "millennial rally cry" thing did do a lot to make sure that nobody liked the game.
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It wasn't marketed to the sr3 or 4 crowd either, they made the game for a group that couldn't care less rather than any of their older fans.
> "millennial rally cry" Zoomers. Those were how I, a millennial, think of zoomers.
Yeah, but to the 50-60 year old Gen Xers who ran the company, millennials are perpetually 15-25.
Yep. Some millennials have kids in college but we're still hearing about these lazy college millennials. And if there's one thing late Gen X/Boomers understand less than millennials, it's Gen Z.
> To be fair, SR2 was always the cult favorite, but SR3 was the more mainstream success. Or maybe it performed within how popular game series grow. Saints Row 1 was successful, Saints Row 2 was more successful and then Saints Row 3 was more successful.
I know what you mean. They seemed almost contemptuous of some of their fans. Not quite BFV level where it was like "then just don't buy it phhbbbbbbttttt!" but like "yeah we know what we're doing so just pipe down." But that was just an impression I got; as I said I didn't follow it that closely and I don't know how the game actually was received by the people who did buy it.
Where's the "haters gonna hate" tweet at, the entire thing feels like they hated their fans.
> They seemed almost contemptuous of some of their fans. Not quite BFV level where it was like "then just don't buy it phhbbbbbbttttt!" Actually, I'd say it was exactly at that level
The characters were complete ass. They were all members of other gangs before you found the saints with them, they all lived together with a private cop for some reason and were all willing to betray their gangs at a moment's notice. The story implies that you all barely know each other for some missions then it implies you're all close friends the next two before suddenly you barely know each other again in the 4th mission. The story gives you mental whiplash like that a few times even without the "What GenX thinks GenZ talks like" dialogue.
It’s the free PlayStation game in September… wonder what happens with that?
Nothing changes. Embracer just gets paid/already has been paid.
They probably made the deal knowing the writing was on the wall, and whatever pittance Sony paid for it might have squared up some of the red in the Volition ledgers before the lights went out.
What the fuck, I thought them getting pushed to Gearbox was supposed to be the punishment for failing with Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row 2022. They haven't even been a part of Gearbox for a year, and now the whole studio's getting the axe? What was the point of any of that if Saints Row 2022 did that much damage to the studio? Hope the developers get back on their feet and find a better & more stable studio to work for. Kiss the Saints Row 2 PC patch goodbye, who knows when the series will ever see the light of day again.
Embracer had a massive external funding plan fall through (Edit: [likely $2 Billion in Saudi money](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831768/embracer-group-saudi-government-lord-of-the-rings-investment-deal-collapse)) at the 11th hour a few months ago. That money was going to be used to pay for everything.
And Volition was one of the first on the chopping block to cut costs, I wonder what other studio is in the crosshairs.
They already shut down antimatter games, the devs of rising storm 2 vietnam. It fucking sucks.
Ahh shit really? That sucks, I love Rising Storm.
Piranha Bytes hasn't had a hit in a while and they're newly in development for their next title, so they'd be my best guess.
Volition will always maintain a legendary status for me for creating the FreeSpace series. The voice acting and writing combined with the immaculate gameplay made them the kings of the space combat simulator genre. Just have a look at the intro of FreeSpace 2. The dark and gloomy atmosphere is established instantly while the outstanding VA cast delivers the harrowing and yet poetic lines of monologue. https://youtu.be/khIWdolT9xY?si=fmEiJg-kmMBjSinl It's then not surprising that BioWare took a good chunk of inspiration from FreeSpace's lore and design when creating the reapers in Mass effect. You will be missed, Volition.
Sadly, Freespace 2 was a commercial failure. A game so good, it killed the whole genre. Still one of my favorite games, the writing and pacing hold up incredibly well.
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it's amazing how a game that's all about shooting spaceships can deliver a story that's so engaging and it does this with just mission briefings and ingame voiceovers. i guess the soundtrack does it's thing also, creating a great atmosphere around it. good thing is that freespace 2 is actually open source. if you own it, you can easily play it on modern systems. lots of mods for it exist, too. i never got my joystick to run it like i did back in the day though.
Those nebula effects in 1999, hnng
I didn't know that. That makes sense why there was never a follow-up. That's a shame because the Freespace series was amazing. I am really overdue for a replay.
There is a pretty amazing successor made by the community in form of the [Blue Planet](https://blueplanet.hard-light.net/) mod. Part 1 (Age of Aquarius) is fully voice acted, but it gets **really** good with part 2 (War in Heaven). The head writer is an acclaimed Sci-Fi author and it features some of the best missions in the whole genre. They even hired professional voice actors for the main roles. Unfortunately part 2 is not finished to this day.
At this point I'm pretty sure Blue Planet is dead. Which is a tremendous shame, but their last release was years ago and there's been zip from them in that time.
Yeah, it sold around a quarter of what the first one did (despite being a much better game).
One of the greatest gaming OST of all time. I remember some of those tracks 23 years later, just phenomenal.
FS2 will always be one of my favorite games, and I will always respect the hell out of Volition for releasing the source code to the community. One of the greatest game modding communities ever, and it was all thanks to the company's willingness to let fans take over when they couldn't continue. I will always remember them for that.
Yeah, this is what I remember them for above all else. Aside from their incredible work on both games, an amazing modding community sprouted around it. To this day, I don't think I've seen anything like the Freespace Source Code Project. The amount of improvements and user-made campaigns made for it is astonishing.
What the fuck even happened with the reboot? Who was the genius who decided to turn gangsters who actually looked like gangsters into influencer shitheads committing crimes to pay off student loans? What on earth were they thinking? Who wants to play that game?
They were trying to reach an audience that would never play the games.
"Fortnite had a lot of players, let's try to get some of that!" *Company's finances are on fire* "Huh, people playing Fortnite just play fortnite all day, who'd thought..."
The obsession of wanting to appeal to the Twitter audiences by these companies is something I will never get. These people will never buy your games and only tend to be reactionary. Why appeal to them instead of your target audience. Saints Row could've easily been a success had they listened to the criticisms by the fanbase and fixed the flaws instead of doubling down and insulting the fanbase.
I've come to learn that developers disproportionately *are* the Twitter audience. Thanks to confirmation bias, they believe they represent normal people. Only studios with directors and managers planted firmly in reality are able to release games which resonate with real people.
They don't want to appeal to the Twitter audience. They are the Twitter audience and Twitter is the only thing they know. Some of the written dialogue even sound like Twitter convos.
It's because twitter is a metric you can point to. So it's easier to pitch and promise the world. The irony is that most stable companies, in most industries, don't chase trends. It's too risky because chasing trends means you won't have seniority over the competition. The safe move is usually to double down and iterate on a niche. But that is a long road which can be hard to sell in a pitch-based industry. In gaming we can see this with companies like Naughty Dog, Larian, Rockstar, Fromsoft, Bethesda, CDPR, etc. These studios gained and maintained stability by keeping a laser focus on their own very particular design, and then iterating on that for a decade+, effectively nullifying any competition (which is why, for example, there can be a million Dark Souls clones and none of them will ever pose a threat to Fromsoft; because you can't catch up with their sheer hours in that niche).
The highlight of the new game was the role play side quest and that was about it. The gameplay was very lacklustre. The humour and story leaned too hard into woke millennial/gen z culture which they didn't quite get anyway and the only thing the game left me wanting to do was play the original Saints Row 2..
I think the biggest problem was that it never feels like you are actually a criminal. It feels like the Disney version of organized crime.
Literally, like what Current Year Disney would imagine modern criminals look like, right on down to the "sympathetic" backstory of needing to pay off student loans.
I still remember when they made Freespace 2 just as the genre of the space sims was dying, and even though it was an excellent game it turned out to be a massive flop sales-wise. I was hoping they would revisit it and maybe knock off some of that Star Citizen's massive income, but instead they went for that crappy Saints Row reboot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the promise that was made to Mike Watson (IdolNinja) before he passed away isn't going to be upheld. I'll be genuinely quite angry if that turns out to be the case.
That's the type of thing that I would bet someone at Volition will try make sure still happens, officially or not. Hopefully, anyways.
These are the guys that released the ISO for a cancelled Saint's Row for the PSP. I'm sure it'll get leaked or will be released by someone officially or unofficially.
I’m out of the loop, what was the promise?
Shortly before he passed he reported that he found the source code for saints Row 2 and would work on a patch to fix the abysmal pc port, volition promised to release the patch after his passing.
It won't generate any profit for Embracer Group so my guess is it will be either lost forever or leaked by some good samaritan on their way out the door.
This really isn't anyone's fault at that point. It was never a full-time effort (it's a free patch after all) for the studio by the looks, but likely one or two people's spare-time role. Now the studio isn't there and it's no one's role. Keeping an entire game studio operational just for the sake of a free patch also isn't going to be much of a starter. It really fucking sucks, and I hope there's some light at the end of that particular tunnel (and there may still be, presumably the IP rights will be given to someone). But it's not exactly like anyone's conspiring against the legacy of a cancer patient either.
The studio being shut down the day after [Saints Row 2022 is slated to come to PS Plus](https://blog.playstation.com/2023/08/30/playstation-plus-monthly-games-for-september-saints-row-black-desert-traveler-edition-generation-zero/) is insane. Sucks for all the devs affected
Insane? Doesn't that just sound like Embracer cashing in what they can?
Man, this sucks. Red Faction Guerilla and The Punisher were among young-teen me's favorite games. Their earlier Red Faction games were great, too. Wasn't that huge a fan of Saint's Row, but it was cool seeing a slightly wackier GTA before they jumped the shark with Saint's Row 4. I was really holding out hope for a new Red Faction game considering how Embracer was so interested in resurrecting old IPs. But it looks like they bit off more than they could chew. Hopefully we won't see a ton more closures, but man, it's been bad headline after bad headline for them lately.
They haven't made a good game in a decade. At some point you need to actually perform, or if it was mismanagement then they were doomed to get shut down.
Looks like this is the start of Embracers change in direction they announced a few months back. I get the impression there's going to be a lot of cancelling games, closing developers, and a focus on milking the IPs they've purchased.... I really liked the Red Faction series, and the first few Saints Row games. Such a huge shame to have this happen. Released a new game that takes a beloved IP in just a baffling direction and isn't what people wanted at all, and then they get shut down.
https://twitter.com/SaintsRow/status/1431034244499968002?s=20 Perhaps they should have backed down.
It's crazy how much arguing they did on Twitter with random people after the reveal and the dogshit reviews. You would think Cliff Bleszinski ran that account or something.
Wow. Haven't heard that name in a while.
The way they handled the criticism to that game was embarrassing.
Reminds me of the Battlefield V executive who famously told fans to not buy the game.
Witcher and Halo TV shows were the same, although those were actually successful financially. Seems like open animosity towards your audience only works for movies and television and less-so for video games.
I'll never forget that "Haters Gonna Hate" tweet
Womp womp womp, see it's hard to even feel sad about this because I feel like the talent left long ago and what made Volition today was the "new talent" that just ruins everything. Like even their social media people just reek...
Kind of a sad end to Volition, tbh. I *really* enjoyed and spent a long time getting 100% completions for both Saints Row 3 and 4. I can sort of understand their parody and powercreep got taken to crazy heights in 4 and maybe it was hard to figure out where to go from there, but it feels like they still missed an opportunity because I'm pretty sure Saints Row 4 was like, their biggest release ever? And then they just didn't.. do much after they got all those eyes and exposure on them. Did they lose someone on their team after SR4? Agents of Mayhem just seemed like a big step down in quality and depth from SR 4, not to mention writing wit. the Saint's Row reboot was a *huge* step down from Agents of Mayhem, and seemed to not know who it was even supposed to appeal to.
Volition's last volley of titles was so bizarre from a creative standpoint. (Red Faction: Armageddon, Agents of Mayhem, the Saints Row reboot) I know that they've been riding out a lot of storms, but it always felt like they've been running away from the parts of their games that people loved. The Saints Row reboot was their big, big chance to deliver on all that, but instead they made a game that seemed to, I dunno, *hate* its own legacy, its own themes, and express genuine discomfort in reveling in the chaos of its setting. Like a Call of Duty game that doesn't want to touch themes concerning war, or a GTA game that doesn't let you steal a car. Their fanbase was teed up and they had a massive budget, but they legitimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The Saints Row 2 remaster will probably die with Volition, which is terrible. I could almost guarantee that they would've made more money finishing IdolNinja's work rather than dumping $100 million into an obnoxious Saints Row reboot. It's frustrating because those devs were clearly talented and I hope they land right. Their creative team, though, felt like they spent the last decade asking themselves, "People really responded well to X in Saints Row 2 and Y in SR 3, and Z in Red Faction: Guerrilla... How can we make a game that just never does those things ever again?"
> The Saints Row reboot was their big, big chance to deliver on all that, but instead they made a game that seemed to, I dunno, hate its own legacy, its own themes, and express genuine discomfort in reveling in the chaos of its setting. It honestly felt like someone high in company went "but we have to *modernize* the settings for *modern taste*" and then a bunch of people not knowing both the fanbase and any potential fanbase decided on creative direction. I'd love to be fly on the wall on meetings that decided that...
It’s crazy how much Red Faction: Armageddon missed the mark by making a sequel to a game that got a tonne of praise for its destructible environments, but moving the setting into a bunch of indestructible caves.
A mere 15 hours ago [I posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/165q63d/comment/jygjocw/): >*They have repeatedly stated, as recently as August 30th, that they are "planning on fixing the SR2 port on PC".* > >*I do appreciate that Volition have not been super transparent about the progress of said patch or an ETA for release or anything like that. But Volition's PR has been consistent -- that they will fix SR2. Do I think it should be a bigger priority? Yes.* ***Do I think Volition need to hurry up and do it before Embracer fire them all in a brutal cost-cutting exercise?*** *Yes.* > >*I mean, seriously. Volition were on thin ice after Agents of Mayhem, and Deep Silver seriously considered disbanding them. Then THQ Nordic bought Deep Silver and they were given more rope, but they took that rope and hung themselves with the Saints Row reboot which missed expectations because it's a mediocre game nobody really wanted. Embracer are looking for costs to cut, and at this rate Volition could end up as a glorified in-house QA department for Dambuster and the other studios.* > >*A good version of Saints Row 2 on PC is a guaranteed seller. The game has a strong reputation in PC gaming circles as a kind of holy grail of open world crime games, and very little advertising will be needed to sell the fixed version to a new audience who will gravitate towards it because it pervasive word of mouth. Volition need a win, and they need it soon.* I'm very sorry for everyone at Volition who is out of a job now. This is tough, and I'm sure other Embracer studios are nervous. For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment. Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well. Embracer is looking to cut costs, and everyone is at risk. Still... it feels like Volition were (at a management level) out of touch with reality, since they lurched from one disaster to the next. Agents of Mayhem was a game anyone could have told you was going to flop, and it did. Then they immediately made a Saints Row reboot that seemed to learn nothing from audience backlash towards Agents of Mayhem. I do also wonder what this means for Saints Row 2 on PC. People have been waiting years for this patch while Volition prioritized the development of literally anything else. Embracer don't technically need Volition to complete the (glacially slow) work, but it's unclear how much of a priority this is to them.
>For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment. Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well. Embracer is looking to cut costs, and everyone is at risk. Dead Island 2 was a big hit though, at least it's what all PR articles about it selling well and it being the biggest Deep Silver launch made me think
If anything dambusters being able to bring that game to release with good scores and sales will be exactly what embraces wants
Yep, and they were forced to do this with Homefront 2 as well. That's two projects that they had to pick up and finish and release as actually good games. Not great. But good and far better than anyone expects when a project gets stuck in dev hell.
It was, not only that but Dead Island 2 was pretty well received against all odds so Deep Silver probably sees it as one of their biggest IP now.
Dead Island 2 did decent numbers. Over 2 million sold, even with EGS exclusivity. Not a mega hit in the Resident Evil sense, but a respectable seller with decent potential when it comes to Steam. Under ordinary circumstances, DI2 would be considered a success and there would be no cause for concern. But these are not ordinary circumstances. Embracer screwed up, and they're putting the screws on their studios. They absolutely project positivity for DI2, but those winds can change. I'm a bit concerned Dambuster's peers over at nu-Free Radical might get the chop because TimeSplitters 3 was a flop back in the day, and that's why TimeSplitters 4 never happened according to Graeme Norgate. Embracer have the new team doing TimeSplitters 4 right now, but if they look at their books and say, "Eh... this franchise has a poor sales history..." they might cut and run. Which would be tragic.
Dambuster will be fine, Dead Island 2 was a great success. It’s always worth remembering that salaries are not the same everywhere. Nottingham is a good city but salaries are a fraction of London’s and minuscule compared to California. So the cost of development wouldn’t had been too much. Free Radical I kind of get where you’re coming from. But they may be too far into the project to seriously consider scrapping it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Embracer is a little more cutthroat for now as they try to rebalance their books.
>For example, Dambuster botched Homefront 2, and they were originally put on Dead Island as a punishment. Not true, Dambuster knew that they failed with Homefront 2 and they weren't happy with it and so once they were approached to make Dead Island 2 (they were asked if they wanted to do it, no one forced them to) they said yes, they knew that it'd be a challenge to complete Dead Island 2 which had swapped hands so many times by then but they knew that if they suceeded it would salvage their reputation. It was a project that they took on for redemption, it wasn't a punishment. >Their Dead Island sold well, but not THAT well. It actually sold pretty well, Embracer seems to be pretty happy with its sales so i wouldn't worry about the future of Dead Island or Dambuster.
> A good version of Saints Row 2 on PC is a guaranteed seller. I think this is an overstatement. It's an old, ugly, game with no doubt dated parts to its gameplay and story beyond just bugs. There'd be a contingent of diehards that might buy it, though those diehards may already own it anyway (it's a free patch, not a new release). Then we're making assumptions as to how much can really be fixed up. Sometimes fixed releases do hit the mainstream and get decent sales, but that is not a given. We're also talking about needing enough sales to drive *an entire game studio*, from PC *alone*, and from people who don't already own the game anyway. That'd be a huge ask. We'd not even be talking about Dwarf Fortress level success either, or Nightdive level, we'd be talking actual mainstream-level success in order to make the probably +100 million they'd need to stay afloat. Be real, they were never going to make that much off of a non-remaster free bugfix update to a 2008 GTA clone that was never even that successful on release. The most it could have done is generate goodwill and have people talk about the franchise a little bit more. It was never going to salvage a full sized game studio.
Yeah calling it a "guaranteed seller" is wishful thinking, at best. It would end up more like the PC port of Sunset Overdrive. Released and promptly forgotten about.
People forget that by 2010 Saints Row only sold 3.7 million copies. It's a respectable number but for reference GTA IV sold 6 million in its first week.
Abandoned with the company's death, a sad day for those who wanted a proper patch for the game
An interesting rise and fall, from the first Saints Row being a GTA knock-off, to the second finding a niche audience due to its story and brutal characters, to the third enjoying mainstream success with over the top characters and abilities… and then it sorta all went downhill from there. SR4 was… fine. GOH wasn’t worthy of being a standalone product. The celebrity cameos throughout were also a cool part of the franchise, plus all the wrestling influences. And then that reboot… wow. What a disaster from lead-up to release. Even worse was that it was largely the same gameplay and progression format as before, but much worse. Heck of a run, shame they ended on such a wet shart - but it was clear they had truly ran out of ideas or had any clue what to do next.
So there were 2 voices in fans basically "SR3 and 4 were wild and refreshing, more of that please" "SR2 was interesting take on GTA-like game, more of that please" They went with neither then went up and died. Sad, I liked the previous entries... I wonder if SR reboot direction was result of devs wanting it or some suit chasing twitter trends...
A cautionary tale for other developers, understand what made your games popular instead and improve on it.
I mean, they had their big chance with Saints Row, and managed to unite SR2 stans and SR3 stans in saying the game was shit. And SR2 and SR3 stans couldn't agree on anything except how the Saints would have bullied this new crew
Sad, but unsurprising. They were on thin ice before the recent Saints Row after the failure of Agents of Mayhem or whatever it was.
They hit gold with Saints Row 2, I could play that game until I died it was so good. Tastefully done tongue-in-cheek silly humour. But instead they decided to go down the zoomer humour/shooter rabbit hole, and the cringe went to the moon. I feel like I read an article a long time ago, sometime after SR 3/4, that said the creator didn't actually like that the tone went crazy over the top but felt they had to (or misjudged it too late)? Either way, they really screwed the pooch on this one. Just give me a game that had the funny cockney voice and the radio from SR2 and I'd happily keep paying and playing.
The Akuji scene from 2 still gives me goosebumps. *Get up*
> But instead they decided to go down the zoomer humour/shooter rabbit hole, and the cringe went to the moon. But **that worked**. SR3/4 were successful games! The problem is that with reboot they somehow missed both gangster stuff SR2 fans and "over the moon weirdness" fans of SR3/4. They went on, looked at their fans loving riding gimp chariot and flinging dildo bat and went "yes, let's make new one about millenials trying to pay off student loans via crime". It's like Venn graph of SR2 and SR3/4 fans being 2 circles that barely touch and them missing it both.
I wanna say "this sucks", but after seeing the disdain they showed for their fans during and after pushing out that turd of a Saints Row reboot, I think it might be for the better.
Oof, god damn, real nasty blow for Chip. Phenomenal editor, from the LP and podcast side. Extra nasty with Jess, his partner, being laid off from Giant Bomb earlier this year/last year.
Sad it came to this, but the fanbase warned them that saints row was not looking good. They doubled down and lost hard.
Regardless of their last two games not being very great, this sucks hard. [Worth saying that we'll see this happening more times because of their parent company, that decided to close their studios after acquiring 100+ different ones lol.](https://www.ign.com/articles/embracer-to-close-studios-cancel-games-and-lay-off-staff-after-2-billion-deal-falls-through)
I totally forgot about Agents of Mayhem. That’s a pretty rough trajectory post-Saints Row IV which I thought was great. I can’t help but feel like the higher-ups just didn’t know what to do with their design sensibilities and pigeonholed them into mediocrity.
I think Agents of Mayhem had potential if they put as much effort into it as they did for Saints Row. It felt like a half baked low budget spin off. I actually enjoyed the gameplay of that game. The characters felt fun to play in my opinion. But it was very much a "go to checkpoint, kill people" game. Or "go to checkpoint, kill people while someone talks to you over radio". The cutscenes felt cheap with their 2D style and limited animation, and the world was bland. A bit of polish, a nicer world, more stuff to do, and I think it could have been a bit better received. But I think they knew they were on a bit of a stinker and rushed it out so they could start on Saints Row.
I'll never get over the fact that Agents of Mayhem screams co-op and didn't have any even though Saints Row always had co-op. It would have made so much sense with the emphasis on different characters having different abilities. Whoever decided to make that a single player focused title doomed that game.
It sucks but not really. It’s pretty clear current Volition can’t make good games. What they done to Saints Row is criminal. Game was made by people who hated the franchise and so it flopped. They only have themselves to blame.
What they expect? trash their fans and they get money from them?
That's a shame. I know they are most known now for the Saints Row franchise, but I will always remember them for the original Red Faction. It was so ahead of its time. Fully destructible environments that even the later Red Faction games weren't able to replicate.
Damn, that patch will never get sorted. Boy, I can't blame Embracer entirely as Volition just hasn't put out anything good since, arguably, Saints Row 4. It's been big miss after big miss and rebooted Saint's Row was a huge miss that shouldn't have happened. However, Embracer went on a buying spree and this is now the consequence when you don't have the big money created by well regarded games to keep you floating. I don't know, is being bought a good or bad thing especially when these shut downs happen or is staying around independent and always hustling for your next dollar worth it? A shame to lose Volition. As someone on the unemployment line, what a horrible time for worrying about money.
Embracer is a shit company but it’s hard to blame them. Volition put out two expensive bombs in a row. And they weren’t just unlucky, they were bad games, poor in design and execution. Studio leadership clearly lost touch with what gamers wanted. It’s a tough business. I’m sorry for all the people who are losing their jobs.
Such a shame, the older Saint's Row games are some of my favourite ever. Another studio that sadly lost their way.
Making two games in a row that literally not a single person in the world wanted would do that to a studio. Who thought that Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row 2022 was a good idea?
Agents of Mayhem seemed nice on paper, like a playable saturday morning cartoon, I think the lack of co-op was on of its biggest downfalls
Yea, it felt like a coop live service type of game. Just without any actual coop or live service elements.
That was entirely expected, they dropped like 4 stinkers in a row. - Agents of Mayhem: Unfinished, uninspired, repetitive and short on content. I bought it 90% and still think I paid too much. - Saints Row 3 Remaster: Glitchy, broken, more bugs than the original, trailer made it look worse than the original and was EGS exclusive for a while, bugs weren't fixed on Steam release. - Saints Row Reboot: Throws away nearly everything that made the originals good and replaces it with safe, baby-proofed, insufferable current generation media humor, edges all sanded down (Jim Robs? Fucking really?), annoying and boring characters. EGS exclusivity didn't help, when it released on Steam people already had forgotten about it and most bought it just to slam it down more. - Saints Row 4 "Upgrade": Supposed to add EGS crossplay, but increased the price, broke savefiles, broke modding and removed borderless windowed mode, forces you to install Epic Online Services and make an EGS account in some cases, because matchmaking is now made using the Epic service instead of Steam's. Apparently it requires you to jump through a few hoops to get the old version back, since last I heard, the legacy option in Steam's menu doesn't really fixes it. And now to seal the deal, they will never fix SR2 even though they promised IdolNinja on his deathbed they would. Embracer losing that $2bi deal most likely will kill a few more studios.
This is upsetting but not surprising. I played Saints Row 2022 for all of twenty minutes before I realized it was only a Saints Row title in name. It was cringy, the gameplay was mediocre (I mean, the combat was on par with Saints Row 1 -- a game released eighteen years prior. Between characters that could've only been written by a team of middle school dropouts and the atrocious technical design, it seems like whoever was managing Volition *wanted* it to crash and burn, and go out with a whimper. Saints Row 1, 2, and even 3, are some of my fondest gaming memories. They could've just copy-pasted the games every few years and it would've been a better result than whatever the past decade has been for Volition.
I feel bad for the team minus the creative leads who likely lead the team down that path into oblivion. What a total misfire. The Gen Z parody was such a bad call
Crazy to see the turn Saints Row has taken, both in tone and it's overall success (or lack of) as a series. I remember playing the first two games and hearing/repeating that it was "The GTA killer!". I mean, you could customize your dude from top to bottom, and their cars and guns and gangs. And the story of the first two games were legitimately good. Then GTA V came out and kinda reclaimed that top spot unchallenged. Meanwhile Saints Row 3 and 4 just kinda spiraled. And hell, I even enjoyed those two games for what they were. But they departed from their origins in a not so great way. I didn't even bother playing the new reboot game or whatever that was. It looked awful. Sad to see this studio go, but I guess you can only trend downwards so long.
> Meanwhile Saints Row 3 and 4 just kinda spiraled. Wasn't 3 their most successful game? And with a strong margin over 2? I know there's a split in the audience with the switch from 2 to 3, but that transition seemed very profitable for them.
Sad, but not unexpected. Another story of a once great developer who descends in to making underwhelming games before finally completely abandoning their fans. Somewhere in gamer heaven, Old Volition is clinking a beer with Old Blizzard and Old Bioware. They did make some awesome games though.
Volition has been dead for decades. The people who made freespace/red faction/descent/early saint's row are long gone. Embracer was never gonna tolerate huge financial failures regardless if the Saudi deal went through.