I Don't Want To Live In A World Where Saints Row Is A Risk
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Loading... - Brenda Butler
- 21 Mar 2023
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Embracer Group says Saints Row was a risk, but what does that mean for a game so safe?
Embracer Group is the latest big player in the video game market, and it's hard to know what it stands for right now. It's currently buying up huge properties like Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings, and making promises of five triple-A games in the next five years from just one of its many studios, and four Lord of the Rings games too, which seems to suggest an ethos of IP reliance and smaller, more readily available titles, rather than the prestige, eight year development cycle process taken by Naughty Dog and Rockstar. There's certainly a gap in the market for these double-A games, as the 'indie plus' titles from Annapurna and Devolver have shown. But now Embracer has said it will take fewer risks after Saints Row, and I'm not sure what that means if Saints Row constitutes a risk.
Saints Row is an established title with a substantial fan base and popular characters. Making a new Saints Row game should not have been a risk. The problem is the reboot threw out not only these beloved characters, but any understanding of what made them special, replacing them with characters that seemed to be written not by human beings, but by a demographic-seeking algorithm. The edges of the series were sanded away into crude and ineffective humour, the stories were cliche, and the gameplay was dated.
None of this is a risk. Not one developer sat down and said, 'here's the pitch: we make Saints Row, but it's bad'. The characters are written in such banal fashion in the hopes of appealing to an audience it doesn't understand. The edges were sanded down in fear of being 'problematic', without any insight into why Saints Row worked and how it could satirise modern life. The stories were cliche because the line between cliche and cool is very small in gaming, and nobody at the studio could tell the difference. And the gameplay was dated because typically, gamers like what they have played before and are distrustful of new things. Saints Row was not a risk. It was safe. Unfortunately, it was also bad. Read More…
