Alright I'll try and collate my thoughts.
- I like the shaders and artstyle they picked, I hate uncanny realism and prefer slightly stylized visuals, I feel like they have a good blend here, and the characters look more like real people because they don't try to push the uncanny valley.
- I really do not like the look of the main cast, I hate the millennial hipster aesthetic and the default boss they showed looked super ugly with that haircut. The gang that was shown in the cinematic had some really cool character designs, and I honestly would prefer playing with characters that look closer to them. I love muscular women don't sue me.
- Santo Ileso has a lot of potential to be a really interesting and well developed city with some unique culture and environmental storytelling, but it depends heavily on if they worked on making the civilian AI intelligent and interesting. Agents of Mayhem had very static pedestrians and the locale of Seoul and its culture was barely utilized in an interesting way whatsoever.
- The description of the game as a "millennial power fantasy" is extremely off putting, and a reason why I avoided Watch Dogs 2 like the plague. I hate that style of storytelling and find the characters in them to often be horribly written, incredibly obnoxious, and obsessively politically correct.
- The concept of buying real estate, running criminal enterprises, and having choices on how they are run and where they operate impacting the city is a really cool idea in theory, and I want to see it come to fruition to add interesting depth and personalized storytelling, but execution is what matters, so I'll need to see more.
- Kawaii Cyberpunk Anarchists and Sci-Fi weaponry is straying too far from the style I was hoping for, and has the potential to be extremely obnoxious and unsatisfying (sci fi weapons often have worse sound design in games than ballistic guns with heavy bass).
- " The most advanced suite” of customization tools ever seen in an open-world game." Should have been the centerpiece of the announcement trailer, showing a montage of different "boss's" with unique visual design and personalities engaging in the criminal underworld in their own unique way. I hope in the name of being politically correct they don't remove the ability for sex positive character portrayals, as I know for a fact that there a lot of people out there who enjoy and appreciate the ability to play characters with sexual confidence and personally beautiful aesthetic designs without negative connotations.
- John Wick, Baby Driver and Fast and Furious (although Fast and Furious is terribly written), are really good reference points for the type of kinetic action combat I was hoping and excited for, mentions of brutal melee takedowns, stunts and the ability to fight on top of vehicles is the kind of action movie style combat is that missing from Triple A games, and I feel would be an extremely good blend and balance between Saints Row 2 and 3's styles.
- Vehicle customization is great to see mentioned, and should have been another focus of the announcement trailer. I hope it is well designed and in depth, and that vehicle destruction and physics are given a strong attention to detail. Hopefully driving is fun and well designed, and that there are unique activities that utilize it that aren't just "A to B" or "Destroy everything in a circle".
- Epic exclusivity is a huge disappointment, and means I wont be able to support the game at launch.
- "We love [the old Saints Row games], but we also recognize those are games of a time," he said. "They made sense within that era, and we were able to do things that felt good back then. But that tone is not something that we feel like we want to do today. We had a different kind of story that we wanted to tell."
This is extremely worrying, and I feel will effect the game in a drastically negative way if not handled correctly. It is vague what specifically is being talked about here, but the PC Gamer article seemed to consider it as such:
"What's probably not returning is the exact tone of humor that players might remember from Saints Row 3 and 4. I remember laughing often at Saints Row The Third when I played it 10 years(!) ago, but it took some googling to remember just how embarrassingly edgy its writing was. Between memorable setpieces and lovable characters were moments of casual sexism and homophobia within its main cast and beyond—the sort of stuff that I breezed by in all media when I was a dumb 15-year-old."
I am baffled by this statement, since, especially with the fourth game, I recalled absolutely nothing that could be labelled as discriminatory or bigoted. I found some of the BDSM jokes in 3 unfunny, and I didn't enjoy Benjamin King's loyalty mission in 4, but that was due to not finding the writing humorous, and finding that it didn't fit my depiction of The Boss. This writer is demonstrating no nuance or understanding of the previous games, and is making an incredibly shallow statement.
I absolutely hope that this doesn't rotate around into self censorship, there is a huge difference between changing the tone of a sequel because it was felt that writing wasn't funny or entertaining, and toning down themes such as sexuality or hard topics like discrimination within a criminal enterprise, in a story about bad people doing immoral things. Due to the vagueness of the statement, you can hopefully assume he is talking about the outlandish style of 3 and 4, and not the idea of sex positive character portrayals. A game about drug running operations, murder, and criminal enterprises shouldn't consider sexuality a taboo, and sexuality is also not inherently immoral whatsoever. A sex worker or burlesque dancer isn't inherently inferior, and such parts of a city and world should be able to be portrayed without hesitation in a game for mature adults.
- Let characters be sexy and fun, have characters with charisma and characters who are dangerous, don't be prudish.
- I hope that the combat has lessons learnt from Agents of Mayhem, as I feel it was its strongest point. A focus on intelligent and reactive enemy AI is hugely important to me, and I hope that stays. Strong impactful weapon sounds, and satisfying enemy reactivity is also hugely important to make gunplay feel satisfying.
- I hope the trend of high quality animation continues from Agents of Mayhem, as the character animations were exceptional.
- I hope that the comedy writing takes a turn in direction from Agents of Mayhem, as I found a lot of it decidedly unfunny, and that it instead focuses on character like the background lore and banter in AOM, as that was one of the best parts of the game.
- Side activities being repetitive and lacking in depth, challenge or complexity is one of the weakest parts of Saints Row and AOM, and I hope that a strong focus has been put on making them replayable, challenging, and hopefully customizable.
- The return of high difficulty options from Agents of Mayhem, I love a satisfying challenge and want to see that remain.
- End game open world content so that the city doesn't become an empty wasteland after the story is completed would be greatly appreciated.
- The ability for the player to interact with and live in the open world, workout at the gym, eat at a cafe, drink at a bar, heck dancing at the strip club without it being treated like a joke, looking at a museum, swimming at an aquatic centre. Ways for a player to personalize their boss and create a unique experience for themselves, and make the city of Santo Ileso feel like a living breathing world.
- Likeable main characters, I hope that the game doesn't lean into the millennial hipster youth culture, and creates engaging characters with an interesting dynamic with that isn't afraid to handle mature topics and gang culture.
I get why people are upset to an extent, the cinematic trailer wasn't very good, and they didn't do a good job clarifying important things during the Gamescom announcement. They already showed journalists an hour of gameplay, so I hope they don't leave consumers hanging and unsatisfied for long. I'm not sure if the Saints Row dev team even reads this forum, so if anyone knows a better place to post feedback feel free to me know.
