Saints Row Team: We Aren't Backing Down, But We Understand The 'Knee Jerk' Reaction

It was odd and not that appealing - if on Gamepass I will check it out but not preordering lol - never played the original

Judging by the reactions on the Youtube stream there was a common theme of some 'anti-woke' types who were reacting to a female protagonist in this as well as COD and Halo Multiplayer. Not saying thats the only reaction but it causes a lot of noise and distracts from any real critique. FWIW the gameplay looked very Saints Row just with a slightly hipster looking cast of characters.

Modern gaming on social media really is a ***** show at times, from deluded fanboys arguing over the number of pixels being drawn to entitled little pr***s like that one above. By all means have critiscms of games, more so after you've actually played them but vote with your wallets if you're not happy about a product

Looks fine to me...

Gamers being mad about something is like saying you get hungry after you don't eat for a while. Of course that's the case...

@elpardo1984 it has absolutely NOTHING to do with a female protagonist. There are a million successful games with female protagonists. If you really think people don't want to play as a female, you obviously have ignored Tomb Raider, Horizon, Bethesda games, Assassins Creed, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Last of us, Broken Sword, etc. The list goes on and on. It has to do with the hippy, try to be cool, cringe, poor writing, lets try to be like fortnite character design that gamers that support these intellectual properties are tired of seeing.

I think Volition will get this right, they have to.
The trailer, although not original at all was still very Saints Row in essence. I think the game will be good. I would also think that they will do DLC with some familiar old SR flavour too...

As someone who always creates a female protagonist, where I am able, I am not concerned one iota that the lead is female. I create a female character because occasionally a game will treat them differently, which I then find interesting.

When I was younger, and the option was available, I used to create a character that looked like me. These days, as I approach my 60's, I'd rather not create some old balding, white bloke with a dodgy back and a scruffy beard!

@DrJamesOxford "It has to do with the hippy, try to be cool, cringe, poor writing, lets try to be like fortnite game design that gamers that support these intellectual properties are tired of seeing."

You literally just described the Saints Row series in a nutshell. For example, I was just talking with some people who are currently playing Saints Row 3 and they aren't liking the shallow humour of the game. Which is totally fine, but to say that the reboot started this trend cannot be further from the truth. It's been like this for numerous games. If you don't like it, then Saints Row just isn't for you.

@LtSarge surprise, surprise - your friends dont like it. There is a reason they are rebooting the franchise and not just making Saints Row 4.

Goofy GTA to Edgy Fortnite (design wise), I miss the absurdity...

@DrJamesOxford you said:

"...gamers that support these intellectual properties are tired of seeing."

This just about made me spit out my tea.. apologies if you're about 12 years old @DrJamesOxford and I mean no disrespect, but otherwise..

Saying you "support intellectual properties" rather than "buying games" is absolutely hilarious and peak internet. Astonishing self-entitled bollocks. These developers wouldn't care if you lived or died right now on the spot.

@Deadcow like I said it wasnt that there arent valid reasons people are sceptical(but really we should just wait and see how it looks and plays fully). Just my own observation that the reaction during the show (on YT at least) was very negative because a number of big games focused on female leads.

Plenty of people are ready to hate on a good looking cinematic because there's no gameplay shown, and plenty of people are ready to hate on a bad looking cinematic trailer even though there's no gameplay shown. Just regular gamers jumping the gun.

They can't spin this. They them selves said they changed the tone. The tone is the whole point of Saint's Row.

The Saints Row brand refers to an extremely over the top, game ultimately about gangsters, that is never actually serious. It does things that are insane, and casually goes about them as though it's perfectly normal. Like every character is the gangster version of Dr. Evil, personifying their role in a purely absurdist literal interpretation. It always has a sense of pure crazy being normal. And they were gangsters that although a tight-knit group were also all selfish gangsters, because they're gangsters, all trapped in their own headspace and the organization.

This isn't that, this is tryhard serious, the merry band of young trendy friends that are all hip and trendy, doing comic book hero things as underdog accidental heroes.

This game probably would have been great for its target audience, as a new IP. If you reboot a franchise with new characters in a new place with a new tone that shares nothing in common with the IP, you're just using the name for boosting sales, it's not really a game in that IP. Other than the controls, nothing shown has indicated it's a Saint's Row game at all outside the name, which they couldn't even bother to make the logo feel thematically connected to Saint's Row. Or even the feel of Saint's Row. The logo say "this is a serious game about serious things." The trailer says "we just borrowed random bits from popular things and made a game out of it."

I use to buy gaming magazines that had pictures of the game, developer interviews and some insight into what the games about. It had a one out of ten excitement meter and previews and reviews and I would be able to kind of decide whether it interested me or not. If not, I kept flipping the pages to the next article, the next game. I didn't ever feel outraged enough to tear out the page, March to the street, and shove the article in peoples faces as I scream at them. I never once felt my opinion was so superior that it deserves a platform outside of my own mind. I simply moved on, I turned the page, and found something that did appeal, did excite, but I didn't go around being a cxxt about it. Oh, I miss those days.

I'll just stick to playing saints row 1 & 2 through bc on my Xbox one when I feel like playing saints row this just doesn't look appealing to me

I think it would have been helpful for them to be more clear about the fact you create your own boss and can edit over the default boss

@LightningLeader You just proved my point. Don't talk to me

@elpardo1984 It’s sad that a female protagonist means “woke” to some contingency. What a stupid dilemma we’ve put ourselves in for no good reason at all!

I’ll join the haters bandwagon if they remove the purple dildos.

@Clankylad Almost like you shouldn't base your opinion of a game on a two minute CGI trailer. A lot of people definitely jumped the gun on this one, which is so sad to see. Definitely goes to show how negative the gaming community is in general. Common sense doesn't exist, people are ready to hate on anything given the opportunity.

Anyway, after watching the gameplay trailer, the game looks much better than I thought. It looks much bigger than any other Saints Row game, it almost seems like a similar size to GTA V with a huge city and open rural areas. I'm very stoked to play this game now!

@LightningLeader What about it is “woke”? To me it’s just the trend of how youth is portrayed in the media. We’re the Burger King Kids Club “woke”? Was Saved By The Bell “woke”?

We’ve had a dry period for what a generational “characterization” would look like in media. The 90s and 00’s had a vibe, and the 10’s were like this vacuum of Disney/Nickelodeon type kids and this moment now is that translated into teens and 20 some things.

Lame? Sure. But there’s no real politics (outside of Disney becoming something like a “Deep Media”) here as far as I can tell.
I’m honestly asking if you’re seeing something I’m not seeing.

*and I’m not going to shut you down, dismiss you, or berate you if we don’t agree — good grief at some of these commenters!!!

Apparently they’re trying to make it more relatable to a younger audience, so they’re probably going to have you going around ‘fighting’ capitalism while looking at your iPhone driving a Mercedes.

Saints Row 3 was over the top goofy. This Reboot still looks like it'll be goofy to some degree, and unlike many, I won't pretend I've mastered the game based on a couple minutes of footage while spewing dumb, modern buzz words.

Thought the trailer looked fine. Looked like saints row to me (I started with 3 so the series has alway been wacky to me). As most members in gangs tend to be adolescents and young adults and everyone was wearing pretty common fashion trends so I’d say there isn’t anything wrong with the characters either. My only issue is the locale. I live in the southwest and it seems so uninteresting for any kind of game that isn’t perhaps a racing game but that’s just me. I will say they felt more like vigilantes than gangsters which makes the game more appealing to me. Saints have been anti heroes for a while.

A bunch of 40 and 50 year olds whining that the game doesn’t look like a movie from the 90s shouldn’t bother the devs.

I like it. I have always felt saints row was what GTA would have been had it not gotten all full of itself. It’s like a natural progression from Vice City.

@Ryu_Niiyama Vigilates, not gangsters. I think that's a big part of what the turn-off is, actually! There's a bazillion games (and comics and movies) about vigilantes saving the day. Few about anti-hero gangsters. I think you hit close to what makes it feel generic.

@Luigi_Skywalker I do think trying to cash in on the endless sales of GTA is part of it too. Ironically that's how SR started, and then realized it was getting nowhere against the more popular juggernaut and went its own way. This almost seems like "hey GTA is the biggest cash cow that doesn't have talking raccoons, let's go back to trying to clone it."

@Spiders To be fair, Disney has never not been political since Walt himself was doing the media propaganda characterization of Germans as black ink blobs spreading tentacles across the globe for the DoD, and engineered corporate cities 60 years before Outer Worlds.....

@NEStalgia haha for sure. But you know what I mean... provincial left-right politics.

I don't even get how people got so much detail about the game from this reveal, it's like they've played it but no. I mean it's a basic and derivative trailer but SR was that until part three and the general consensus on part four was "an expansion pack to three".

Just feels like a situation where people are angry about a mostly overrated clone franchise that got it right once and is still doing what it always did. Maybe this one gets it right again, maybe it's bad. Who can say yet?

Remember when Volition was one of the absolute best studios? Descent, Freespace, Summoner. Things went downhill when THQ bought them. Then went downhill again when Koch bought them. This really isn't even the same company anymore, just a name. Like Bioware....

Thought this looked cool tbh. Who cares about tradition so much that nothing can be new. Replay the old games if you like em

Lol at how upset people are getting over the few minutes they have seen.

Never played the other ones bc they looked to mediocre to me. But this one I’m excited about. Love the style.

Wow at the comments here…. First people saying “people are jumping the gun”…. I can see from that trailer… gameplay or not… it’s not for me…. Thats cool… this type of game and style is for a lot of people… I won’t jump on YouTube or Twitter and get angry the game isn’t for me… It looks to me a lazy… easy to produce cash in and could have easily been something epic. I’m sure plenty of people will buy and love it. It looks very much for the fortnite generation.

A reboot suggested - starting again and going in a different direction- it started as a Goofy GTA clone… so that suggested to me it would be a GTA clone but darker… gang wars… but more realistic and that would be epic. This isn’t really a reboot if it’s just the same as the others

@Spiders I actually get what your saying about this seeming “trendy” and not “woke”. Good point! I still get annoyed by modern trendiness. It’s still off-putting. I was a 90s kid and 00s teenager, so I’m now the old man in the corner yelling about youth today (lol), so the game does seem weird and try-hard to me. Not really appealing at all. However I’ve never played any Saints Row so idk how this compares. But I can see why people are annoyed with the choice of tone.

But I definitely agree with your cultural statements for different eras!

@NEStalgia so I guess you hated 3, 4 and GatOH then? The saints have been anti heroes for a while. And there really aren’t a lot of sandbox hero games that aren’t lego or has a comic property nailed on it (and much less of that than lego sadly- as a fan of non lego hero games I have been lamenting this for about a decade as it’s still mostly batman, spiderman and the occasional ensemble game that isn’t a sandbox). Personally this has the potential to be a breath of fresh air to me. If you wanna be a criminal GTA has that covered.

You do realize my comment about the trailer was positive right?

I will say I am most glad for no Gat. He always felt like he forgot every game wasn’t SR2 and the devs imo tried too hard to make him seem like the biggest badarse ever. So boring.

That being said I wish they would give agents of mayhem another try. The game needs some work to be sure but the concept was a good one and I had fun overall.

@Ryu_Niiyama no-no, I liked them quite a bit. Though the gameplay in 3 feels supremely dated now, unfortunately, because I like the overall theme and feel the most.

It's not about wanting them to be not heroes or be gangsters so much as wanting them to be larger than life. The Beanie Babies here aren't that. These guys are less Anti heroes and more Marvel at accidental heroes without the license. If you told me this was guardians of the Galaxy and added a talking tanuki I'd believe you.

I did understand you were being positive about it, but I do still think you hit onto what's grating about it. Though with Gat, I always thought he existed as a parody of 80s action star characters, duke nukem, etc. So it was appropriate that he and the others saw him as this infallible walking tank.

IDK, seeing this it looks to me like they're backing off the satire series and trying to be a direct GTA competitor that takes itself seriously, which is exactly what went wrong with GTA, (from a fan perspective not a business perspective), but infusing it with as much marvel and Fortnite as possible because it tested well in market research.

@NEStalgia I have no idea how you got GTA competitor and taking itself seriously after watching a shirtless dude in a digital kitty helmet hit someone in the face with a motorcycle while another member of the same group thinks it’s a good idea to have a rocket launcher showdown in the middle of a city. Looks over the top as usual. Guardians are wacky but competent as well so I don’t see how a comparison is somehow bad.

That being said wacky ragtag group of homicidal nut jobs is not automatically a MCU reference. Or fortnite. Anyway, if it doesn’t click with you it doesn’t click with you. Still looks like saints row:vigilantes edition (which is 4 with no superpowers) to me. Which means I’m interested.

@Ryu_Niiyama Sad as it is, all that feels commonplace in the post Fortnite world. It's all cringe. GTA 3 had skydiving into the penthouse hq of a bigger crime organization and taking it over for the business. And raiding a military base to take over satellite weaponry. This one has shirtless kitty hat guy ((C)2008 Ubisoft) and random rocket fights by a student loan gang. Ugh!

It's a different tone, with a different caliber of protagonists. I'm all for new characters in a new town. But the whole vibe of Sr is one of supremely competent pros, that bungle a lot, in not rag tag school kids. Like....... Marvel. Everyone is Peter Parker....

Meh. It really does look generic as can be to me. It could be any game/Netflix universe targeting the 16-30 demo post 2015.

@NEStalgia just as “cringe” as trying to mimic the 80s/early 90s city life in America is crapsack movies and having everyone look like they robbed a Fubu store and footlocker before going to their GTA crime palaces for a night of steroids and crack. And they still acted like the power rangers version of a gang.

Student loan gang? Where were these people when I graduated undergrad? I don’t know, I see no difference in this popular culture video game and the other popular culture video games before it in this series other than it is 2021 and middle age gamers need a cloud to yell at. Everything gets compared to fortnite which is code for “this is geared to a younger crowd that I don’t understand nor do I want to.”

The tone is still the same ragtag gang harassing the established older gangs. The saints were doing commercials and had their own energy drink and fashion line…yet that is somehow less weird than a group of modern young adults committing crimes. Ok.

Either way I will wait until the game comes out to pass judgment.

@Ryu_Niiyama LOL at the latter part of the first paragraph, though I never got an 80's vibe from SR, really. Though my understanding of the world ends at the 90s. I don't think I'll ever understand a single thing post-99. None of it seems real. If the world seen in this trailer reflects "post 90's life", then I'm going to need to copycat SR3 and take over that satellite weapons system IRL, I think.

It's two-fold on the younger crowd. Yeah, it's geared toward a younger crowd I don't understand and don't want to (seriously, where''s that satellite weapon.... We need a Berlin Wall around the world. One side for the people that remember the world pre-iPhones, and one for the people who don't.) But that goes back to my point that it ought to have been a new IP rather than coopting an existing one but making it something completely different.

But, also, things get compared to Fortnite because things are intentionally copying Fortnite, because Fortnite means money and capturing that audience is a corporate goal. It's like when DMC became DmC and ResE became ResE:Shootemup, heck even Splinter Cell became Splinter Cell: Shootemup to chase after the Call of Duty kiddies. Everything tries to force itself to fit that market because there's money in that market. I can accept Fortnite is every worst aspect of gaming rolled into one, with an obnoxious personality that appeals to the most, well, childish (read, 12-16) demographic. So I don't bother with Fortnite. And I'll criticize new IP that just tries to copy the marketing bandwagon of Fortnight. But there's a special wrath for when unrelated existing IP is retrofitted into Fortnite's marketing zeitgeist, sacrificing originality for focus group proven results.

Maybe, more to the point, it's yet another game about adolescents. Yes, you can say back in the day gaming was geared toward 7-14 year old boys. And then 14-23 year old males. But the whole point is it's now geared toward a large group, but now and then you get these clearly corporate hackjobs still going back to the dudebro-teen-dudesis (ok what's the female version of a dudebro?) marketing target and it's an automatic facepalm. Maybe that's another point to it. SR worked because it was adults behaving as children. Which we don't see too often in the media/gamespace. This is....teens behaving as teens. Because we have no other media/games with that theme /sarc

I'll gladly pass judgement on the game....when it's on Game Pass

@elpardo1984 "Anti-woke types" - you mean normal people who are just sick of political activists ruining every entertainment franchise in existence by weaponizing them in their pursuit of social engineering?

And STOP with that straw-man BS about people being intimidated by female protagonists. No one cares if a protagonist is female. It's when it's done in a "woke" way that it bothers people. Alien Isolation, Mirror's Edge, Control, Resident Evil 3 (and half of 2), The Medium, Recore, Half Life: Alyx - no one has a problem with these female-protagonist games because they're not done in a "woke" or "feminist" way.

In case you don't know what a woke or feminist way means, it's simple: when the female protagonist is perfect in every way, has zero flaws, is a total Mary Sue "Insert Self Here" character for "woke" female gamers - because apparently for some reason "woke" people need their protagonists to look and sound like them in order to enjoy anything (which isn't narcissistic or egotistical in any way and doesn't say anything at all about the mental state of the person in question...)

A "woke game" isn't simply a game with a female protagonist. That on its own is fine. A "woke game" is one where the female protagonist is genius level intelligent and every male character around her is a dumb, blithering idiot. It's where the female protagonist isn't just strong, she's superhuman strong surrounded by a bunch of weak, pathetic men who can't do anything right. It's where the entire game feels like some lecture, as though the writers assumed the player playing it would be a misogynist who needs to be shown a thing or two and cut down to size.

OR it's where the female characters look like men in women suits. Depicting insanely masculinized women as the norm in entertainment is part of an agenda to push an ideological belief that gender is entirely a "social construct" onto the population. In reality, women like that are less than 1% of women. The ironic thing is female characters like that USED to be cool (Vasquez in Aliens, for instance), but the Wokesters have ruined them by weaponizing them. When EVERY female character in a game or movie is one of those, it ceases to be cool and becomes a pathetically obvious propaganda piece.

The female character in this new Saints Row looks like a typical Feminatrix. She has the I-Hate-Men haircut and hipster clothes. While it might be unfair to judge at this stage it's a pretty safe assumption what kind of female character she will be.

No one has a problem with female protagonists in general. It's the TYPE of female protagonist that is the issue. That's why when I watch the Halo Infinite Multiplayer trailer I can roll my eyes, yet be pretty excited to play Tormented Souls.