Saints Row Has Me Feeling Some Kind of Way

I picked up the much-hated Saints Row reboot on the most recent Steam sale. I never played any of the previous entries in the franchise (unless you count Agents of Mayhem), though I’m broadly familiar with the basic concept of being a sillier cousin to Grand Theft Auto. I knew it was widely unpopular, but I’ve liked lots of unpopular games, and it looked fun in the trailers, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

In the end it did end up being another entry on the long list of disliked media that I’ve enjoyed. In fact I downright loved it. Oh, it was a bit buggy, and certainly not highbrow art, but I loved the characters, the totally unexpected wholesomeness, and the general light-hearted vibes of it. I really needed something light and silly right now, and it hit the spot for that super well.

But I’m not here to do my usual thing of staging an impassioned defence of a game everyone else hates. At least not exactly.

What really struck me playing this game was the sheer scale and detail of it, and the incredible amount of effort it must have taken from so many people to make a game this big.

The game world was huge. You can steal and drive every vehicle in the game, from food trucks to military grade aircraft. You can glide, and there’s whole mini-games around it. There are multiple in-game radio stations you can listen to while driving. There’s traffic, pedestrians, a day/night cycle, weather. The skybox realistically models light pollution such that you need to drive out into the desert to see the stars at night.

And the customization! I spent an hour just on character creation. There are eight different potential voices for the main character, eight actors that would have had to record hundreds of hours of dialogue each. Dozens of different clothing pieces, all of which can be dyed any possible colour. You can customize the engine sounds of your car! There’s like forty different kinds of tire rims to choose from!

And people looked at this game and said, “Meh, whatever.”

I know a lot of these features aren’t even unique, that other games even within this franchise have done much the same. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? How did this become ordinary to us?

I grow up with DOS games. If they had any kind of story at all, that was amazing. If they had more than one or two lines of voiced dialogue, that was mind-blowing. The crudest 3D graphics were a revolution when they arrived.

It’s just so bizarre to me that Saints Row can be both an artistic and technical triumph the likes of which would have been unimaginable thirty years ago, and a disastrous flop. It’s heartbreaking the amount of time, effort, creativity, money, and resources that went into building something that everyone immediately tossed away like a mouldy sandwich.

I’m not saying the game’s perfect, not by a long shot. I liked it, but there’s plenty of areas it could have been improved. I can see how you might not be thrilled by it. But the whole “worst game ever, don’t even bother” vibe around it boggles my mind.

It’s the dismissiveness. The completely blase attitude towards something that had so much work put into it. We live in a time where technology has created such wondrous things, and we just let it become so mundane to us so quickly.

I’m not even really sure what point I’m trying to make here. I guess I don’t understand the modern gaming community. I don’t know how people can be so jaded.

I suppose I’m not immune. There’s some very big and impressive games that I think are just plain boring, and gods know I can be critical when I don’t like a game. But I try to remember the people behind these things, and honour the work that went into them. I don’t always succeed, but I do try.

I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I guess I want to take this opportunity to appreciate how far games have come since I was a kid. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a world where a game like Saints Row can be considered a failure.