It's been said quite a few times that as fun as Superpowers are in SR4, they tend to make a lot of the normal Saints Row mechanics pointless. Cars are a good example: SR4 has a truly great system for car storage and customization, but once you get the Super Jump there's really no point to using vehicles anymore. Superpowers turn this and a few other things into exercises in futility. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a continuing, compelling reason to not just use your Superpowers all the time?
As it happens, I was thinking about that tonight and a possible solution hit me. It's a two part solution, that when combined would make SR4 a bit more interesting to play. First...
1) Add a hotkey to toggle Superpowers on or off. To be clear, one hotkey that toggles ALL available Superpowers on or off. Obviously this would need to be disabled for situations where the mission requires said powers to be on/off. Now, that in itself is not a new request, and would really just leave everyone on the "honor system". That would be kind of boring, which is where the second part comes in...
2) Having active Superpowers slowly increases your notoriety. This would be the stick to keep people from leaving their Superpowers on 100% of the time. Unless you're prepared to deal with a never-ending onslaught of Zin forces wherever you go, your Superpowers will have to be used SPARINGLY, only when necessary or when you've already attracted Zin attention. Ideally there would be a little bit of "wiggle room", e.g. it takes 30 seconds of having your Superpowers active before your notoriety starts to increase and Zin forces start coming (with a corresponding cool-down period), so that certain Superpower-required objectives like the towers could be done "quietly" if one was careful.
There'd be more to it obviously - contingencies, special cases, whatnot - but those two changes would bring a lot of the old Saints Row feel back to SR4. No more flying around the city all willy-nilly and ignoring cars, some of which are actually pretty darn nice. If you want to keep a low profile, you literally have to keep a low profile.
I've been poking at what it takes to mod SR4 myself, but I have yet to do any actual modification to the game beyond a little bit of table editing. Certainly nothing like writing the code necessary to make this happen. I'm still going to keep poking, but I suspect it will take someone more experienced to figure this one out, at least before a year down the road. Hopefully such a person sees this thread and thinks this idea has merit.
As it happens, I was thinking about that tonight and a possible solution hit me. It's a two part solution, that when combined would make SR4 a bit more interesting to play. First...
1) Add a hotkey to toggle Superpowers on or off. To be clear, one hotkey that toggles ALL available Superpowers on or off. Obviously this would need to be disabled for situations where the mission requires said powers to be on/off. Now, that in itself is not a new request, and would really just leave everyone on the "honor system". That would be kind of boring, which is where the second part comes in...
2) Having active Superpowers slowly increases your notoriety. This would be the stick to keep people from leaving their Superpowers on 100% of the time. Unless you're prepared to deal with a never-ending onslaught of Zin forces wherever you go, your Superpowers will have to be used SPARINGLY, only when necessary or when you've already attracted Zin attention. Ideally there would be a little bit of "wiggle room", e.g. it takes 30 seconds of having your Superpowers active before your notoriety starts to increase and Zin forces start coming (with a corresponding cool-down period), so that certain Superpower-required objectives like the towers could be done "quietly" if one was careful.
There'd be more to it obviously - contingencies, special cases, whatnot - but those two changes would bring a lot of the old Saints Row feel back to SR4. No more flying around the city all willy-nilly and ignoring cars, some of which are actually pretty darn nice. If you want to keep a low profile, you literally have to keep a low profile.
I've been poking at what it takes to mod SR4 myself, but I have yet to do any actual modification to the game beyond a little bit of table editing. Certainly nothing like writing the code necessary to make this happen. I'm still going to keep poking, but I suspect it will take someone more experienced to figure this one out, at least before a year down the road. Hopefully such a person sees this thread and thinks this idea has merit.
