Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

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

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I'm guessing, just great.

There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we're here.

Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.

Damn, knowing this reboot was supposed to be the start of the new Saints Row franchise. It's depressing to just see it crumble down like this. I mean seriously in the broad scheme of things what happened here? It's like after SR4 they were all out of ideas.

Let's try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist ... and also he's now in hell.

Let's try being Overwatch!

Let's try starting from scratch!

Let's try permanently shutting down!

Volition died a long time ago. It started in 2017 with Agents of Mayhem. Saints Row: The Third Remastered and Saints Row IV: Re-Elected Edition continue the fall. SR 2022 finished the job.

They made good games in the past. But we're talking about the past not now.

From Wikipedia: In November 2022, Embracer Group stated that Saints Row "did not meet the full expectations and left the fanbase partially polarized", but financially "performed in line with management expectations in the quarter."

The piles of money were as high as we expected, but really we wanted them to be higher

This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.

Well fuck, it's now 150% we ain't getting Freespace3 anymore.

They had some kickass developer streams on YouTube. I still remember when they were playing Saints Row 3 and (I think it was the lead designer) being amazed that a helicopter had an interior texture for the cargobay even though 99% of the time you wouldn't see it. Also skinballs and how they used markers to determine NPC behaviour out in the world.

Also the horror story of how they spent weeks compiling visibility volumes for Saints row 1 and having to satisfy silly requirements set by Microsoft such as having a game trailer play on the title screen if no input was detected for a set period of time. They just played a video of them playing the fucking game so they didn't have to do any cinematics lmao.

The Red Fraction Guerilla stream was extremely interesting. How they managed to make destructible buildings and the limitations of that system. They used a stress mechanic that used key parts of a buildings frame to determine how stable it is (can't remember if they used vertex weighing or not).

But unfortunately the most talented on the team didn't get much of an input of where the IP went

Permanently Deleted

My perception of Saints Row isn't that they did something wrong or changed in a bad direction, but to the contrary, the type of humour and "amusement" the game relied on didn't age particularly well, it comes from the age of le random, LMFAO and similar content.

This is a long time coming, but they'll always be the studio that made Freespace 2, the 6DoF combat sim GOAT

Good luck, Alpha...

And another studio hits the dust. So long! We hardly knew yee. At least be grateful you haven't ended up in the Call of Duty mines, like Raven.

I think they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2. It’s fun fooling around and being wacky in a game that has realism to it but when the game is built solely around being wacky it’s just boring.

I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.

They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn't do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn't anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.

I honestly think gamer's expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn't meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.

30 year old studio. That's quite sad. Another victim of hyper capitalism.

Red Faction: Guerrilla will always be my favourite game of theirs.

So many good memories in the multiplayer. 🥲

I mean, I could see this coming.

Saints Row reboot at least had an interesting setting and played okay. But it was let down by awful writing and a lack of scope.

It didnt have all the features of even Saints Row 2. The plot seemed to pander to millennials in a very "how do you do fellow kids" kinda way. Some of the gameplay was repetitive and boring and it had a few bugs.

With a different writing team and another year in development, it could have been a huge success, but they didnt so it wasn't. RIP Volition.

Damn shame. I've not played the recent game but I loved Saints Row 3. Spent a lot of hours just driving around and beating people up with a dildo. Sad times.

I hope someone picks up their IPs. I want a good current gen Saints Row.

They had a lot of hits. Descent was revolutionary.

They had absolutely 1 thing to do:

Remake Saints Row 2.

And they continued to ignore what everyone wanted.

I think everyone was kinda expecting it but it's still sad to see 😥

RIP to a company that made my favorite game series (SR2-4)

We have to remember that it's the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.

That's sad, but not unexpected. The studio had pretty massive layoffs a few years ago I think when their Overwatch clone didn't sell well. And this Saints Row reboot didn't do well either.

Hope all the good people here find some work, one of my favorite LPers worked there and he's a good guy. Sucks he and others have been jerked around twice like this.

No FreeSpace games?

F in the chat

is starfield that bad?

Good to see. Glad to see low effort developers finally getting there comeuppance