You know, I'm not as worried about the same team getting SR4 or not. This seems to bear all the hallmarks of publisher interference. DLC spam, no bug fixes, no time to test updates or content, no time to produce an in-depth thing.. publishers are generally the ones who set a deadline, and who allow or don't allow patches and content. Old example that comes to mind is KOTOR2 (Knights of the Old Republic 2). It's buggy as sin, and has probably as much content stripped from the game as is in it. Midway through development LucasArts told Obsidian they wanted it out by the christmas rush.. and suddenly turned the full development cycle into 14 months. Midway through. Then, after stuff was stripped and cut and reworked (including the end area, and a 99% complete whole side quest with area done), they weren't allowed to patch. They asked LucasArts if they could patch it, could put the stripped content back in as a patch, LA said no so it was never fixed. It's a great game, but it was one of those that suffered the most from arbitrary publisher decisions. (Publishers have to make sure a game stays in budget etc, yes, but that's no reason to pull that kind of crap to a developer)
In turn I really get the feeling that while some of the letdowns of the main Saints Row 3 were Volition (like the smaller feel of the game, the lack of diversity in activities, etc) part of it was THQ laying down a firm deadline for gold and in turn stuff was kicked to the wayside. Thankfully they polished what they had a bit, but unfortunately we don't see a lot of cut content left in the files. On the other hand, post-release, it feels like THQ didn't like the money the game was making, and that's when it went into DLC spam. The DLC was pre-planned, the mission ones, but the rest feels like Volition is being told "MORE DLC! NOW!" and they're all running full-tilt in crunch time just to make this stuff and get it out the door. Minimal testing. No bugfixes, that's time that would be spent on making more DLC. No depth, takes too much time. The story ones got a bit more love but suffered from the same lack of time to polish and expand on them. And this trend will continue right until they finally give up on the game and go to work on Saints Row 4. Meaning we won't get much better and sadly while we can fix some issues, we're still restricted in tools (like we can't split the one-piece outfits yet without mesh/rigging tools, can't fix any major sound issues, etc), and half of the game feels like it's packed into the exe file which we can't touch (like a lot of the engine calls, any performance/multiplayer related stuff, the lack of ability to diversify npcs, the spawning mechanics and way it reads the files or more accurately
doesn't such as gang colour spawning...)
I dunno. I think what we really need is some people who really know how to deal with the in-depth nitty-gritty of a game engine, and will do something akin to the asm patcher code injection for San Andreas, or GTA4, or what have you (which is in part because they were researching the stuff since GTA3, and the codebase is surprisingly stable I suspect). Or otherwise, accept we love a flawed game that won't get any better, and nothing we can do to fix more than a few bits and add little stuff. Worst part, all this DLC rush is just reaffirming that feeling; even
Volition isn't adding new content with it, they're adding recolours and model swaps at best
![[V] IdolNinja](/forum/data/avatars/m/0/62.jpg?1394026296){kind=avatar}
