Useful Reading and Viewing

[Unapologetic Miscreant]

Saints Row The Third Post Mortem

The Art Direction Of Saints Row The Third

The Art Direction of Saints Row: The Third

It all started with an internal joke and a word that inexplicably caught on...Exaggereal. Exaggereal became the internal name and catchword of the new art style for Saints Row: The Third. In this presentation, Frank Marquart, the art...

www.gdcvault.com

The Physics Of Fun - Vehicles In Saints Row The Third

The Physics of Fun: Vehicles of Saints Row

One designer, 90+ vehicles and only six months to go. That was the scenario when coming onto Saints Row: The Third. Without a single vehicle with even first pass handling and a brand new style to define and implement, there was no shortage of work...

gdcvault.com

What Makes A Saints Row Game Anyway?

GDC 2012: What makes a Saints Row game, anyway?

At GDC 2012 on Thursday, Volition design director Scott Phillips explained that the biggest problem with making Saints Row The Third was figuring out what Saints Row is in the first place.

www.gamedeveloper.com

Lighting And Simplifying Saints Row The Third

Lighting and Simplifying Saints Row: The Third

Describes some of the key rendering technologies behind Saints Row: The Third. Main topics will be an update on Volition's inferred lighting technology and our new automated LOD generation system. Neither of these systems existed in Saints Row...

gdcvault.com

Saints Row The Third Real Time Capture Tools

Saints Row the Third Real Time Capture Tools

In the past, we had several outsource partners that worked with us to help create marketing videos for Saints Row 2. Every cut we got back had bad footage because It was simply too hard for outsourcers to capture good visceral gameplay....

www.gdcvault.com

 

[L'Andromada]

Man, that GDC talk is painful to watch, even after all theses years. Just seeing how misguided they were when going into SR3 in terms of tone...

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Unapologetic Miscreant]

Personally, I am of two minds about SRTT. The first time I played it I didn't know enough about the back story to understand the dislike. I did however feel that the game was incomplete. Not sure that is the right word. The gaps in the storyline were wide enough to drive a Peterliner through and it felt unfinished.

 

[reina3]

Yeah, SR3 definitely had a solid foundation . Driving around and having violent fun with Sandbox+ felt nice, but outside freeroam, only the non-DLC Genki arenas were fun enough to play over and over again. Replaying SR3 and its sequels after a few years, it reminds me of how every activity in SR2 felt more polished, and that the storyline missions in future games felt more like a movie flick than a game (especially Gat Out of Hell, oh god - but atleast they aren't hiding it there).
I don't entirely blame them of course since I didn't know all of the troubles games past SR2 had with development (lower budget compared to SR2 being one of them), and modders of this wonderful community give the games their own flavour anyway for people to have fun around with.

tl;dr the games are still good in their own right if I just pretend the story missions don't exist and give what I want through mods

 

[Unapologetic Miscreant]

The difference in how the characers look and behave in game almost makes it seem like a different series to me.

But my biggest attraction to 3 and 4 was how they felt like they were designed to make the player feel like they had no limit to what they could do.

Everything from the soundtrack with
songs like You're The Best Around or
You've Got The Touch to the way you can totally destroy your enemies with just your bare hands. I always felt like
the games got that part right.

In my normal life I am just a normal person, but in those games I can feel almost omnipotent. At the end of the day it's nice to escape into that reality for a while.

As for Genki, that cat has been the
bane of my Saints Row existance since
I first encountered him, but he is also probably the biggest reason I keep returning to 3 and 4. Forget Zinyak
I want to trounce the Pink Fink!

After a while of playing any game what used to be a challenge becomes a matter of course and I think that is one of the reasons I like modding so much because it allows you to change things up.

Gat Out Of Hell. Yeah, that game is its own thing. There are certain parts of it that I love. Flying comes to mind and
it's very relaxing to me to just go around and collect clusters without hearing whoo hoo or Oh Yeah every other minute.

That said, I hated how in the vanilla game I couldn't play as my character. I love Johnny Gat but I have played as my boss for years and it just felt wrong
to play as someone else.