Viewing the comments threads on video game web sites is like stepping into some alternate universe where people are sincerely anticipating Grand Theft Auto V.
Maybe I could’ve written “I am old and out of touch” and said the same basic thing. Or maybe I’m being a hipster; I’m not buying Grand Theft Auto V, you plebeians, because it is too mainstream, and it’s what everyone will be playing and I’m way too cool for that. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman and chicks just aren’t into this sorta thing.
Except that none of these things are true. As my headline mentioned, Saints Row IV was so nice I bought it twice. To be more precise, between my husband and I, we bought it twice, because we have all the consoles these days and clearly both the 360 and the PS3 wanted a copy of the game.
I tried to get into Grand Theft Auto IV, but I ended up totally agreeing with Steerpike’s review that its main achievement was being “memorably mediocre.” On the other hand, looking back, the only reason Saints Row the Third didn’t make it to my games of the year list in 2011 was that I picked it up as a Christmas item and played it a bit too late. Which of these games did I want a sequel for? The answer is obvious.
But in case you needed more justification for this decision, other than me being an old female hipster (already covered), here’s several more detailed points, all set to songs from the Saints Row IV soundtrack.
Opposites Attract
The following, as I understand it, are the selling points for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V.
- It’s really really huge.
- You can play tennis.
- There’s more than one main character.
- One of the characters is a dad now, because that’s the in thing.
- You can fly planes.
- You can’t date anyone/don’t have to bother with dating anyone.
- It’s got a really big soundtrack.
- It’s back in San Andreas.
- We fixed the driving, really, honestly (we promise).
Here are the corresponding bullet points for Saints Row IV.
- The game’s area is limited and largely recycled.
- You can play basketball: with people, whose bodies you telekinetically lift up into the air and then spike into glowing hoops.
- The main character can be a woman.
- One of the characters is Keith David, playing himself, who is also the Vice President of the United States.
- You can fly alien saucers.
- You can sleep with pretty much everyone, but still don’t have to bother with dating them.
- The soundtrack includes the song “The Touch” from Transformers: the Movie.
- It’s set in virtual reality.
- Driving wasn’t broken in the first place, but you won’t have to do much of it, because you’ll have the ability to super-speed run faster than any car.
Of the above lists, GTA wins on one factor only that I can see: setting, since San Andreas was the last good GTA game. Those Grove Street pictures carry with them a powerful nostalgia. But if I’m really feeling nostalgic for San Andreas again, it’s only a few mouse clicks away. GTA V meanwhile has GTA IV to overcome…
Along For The Ride
It was nice to see Rockstar admit in its GTA V gameplay trailer, however subtly it did so, that the driving in GTA IV needed some work. There is no desperation in the nice trailer lady’s voice when she promises the controls are now “fun and responsive.” I thought at one time, playing GTA IV, that it was my fault. Surely since many other players were able to make this driving system work for them, the problem with GTA IV‘s driving was somewhere between the television and the couch.
But after getting my sea legs again in San Andreas, I’m still semi-competent, so I’m going to blame GTA IV and not myself. Maybe the cars in GTA IV are merely “more realistic,” and if so, I have discovered that I do not want my video game cars to be very realistic. I’d rather my video game cars all handled like Mario Kart; just give me a playable game. The driving in Deadly Premonition is better than the driving in GTA IV.
The driving in GTA V would have to be better than the driving in GTA IV. It probably still won’t be as good as the driving in Saints Row IV, on the occasional times when I feel like doing said driving. It also will not have Pierce Washington singing duets with me on the radio while I do so.
The Boys are Back in Town
Grand Theft Auto V won’t have any of the old San Andreas cast, and that’s confirmed. No CJ, no Ceasar, no Officer Frank “Samuel L. Jackson” Tenpenny. Saints Row IV has most of the same cast as the previous games, and if I hadn’t played The Third I’m sure I’d be totally lost here. SR4 also has callbacks to SR2 and, at least I think the first game, in ways that make me really want to go back and try them all just to check it out.
Where it comes to The Third I used to see a lot of comments to the effect of “Shaundi is totally different now.” So finding out that Saints Row II Shaundi was present in Saints Row IV (not a spoiler – it’s in the trailers), I went back and watched some SR2 cutscenes to get a feel for her. What I saw was… not necessarily a different character. Shaundi in SR2 is eager to prove herself to the Boss and be useful. Shaundi is also doing a lot of drugs. In SR3, quite early on, Shaundi loses Johnny Gat, a character that was obviously important to her. From there she’s sober, and she’s a much angrier person. In SR4 Shaundi has the opportunity to reconcile her current personality with her old one, with the help of virtual reality. It’s a wink-nod admission that the writing on the character took a swerve, transformed into showcasing actual character development. That’s quite a feat for such a ridiculous game.
Saints Row has an unfair advantage with its character re-use. These are people I’ve gotten attached to over the course of the previous game, and the plot structure surrounding getting the gang back together and completing “Loyalty Missions” works because I care, even though it’s also shamelessly stolen from Mass Effect 2. Grand Theft Auto V meanwhile will be starting fresh. And quite frankly, even putting aside that I obviously can’t play it as a woman, I doubt it will have many interesting women in it, either.
Money on My Mind
In my semi-review I mentioned The Third sometimes wore a little thin, and Saints Row IV doesn’t not have that problem, since its length is bolstered by objective-based side missions. Many of these quests are doing the same thing over again in different parts of the city, which is exactly how GTA IV worked. Saints Row IV has a lot of recycled assets and content, not just from within itself but, as mentioned, from the previous game. Saints Row IV is also a glitchy little bugger, which slows down for me semi-regularly on PS3, and has locked up entirely twice (XBox 360 has similar lockup issues, but no slowdown).
Saints Row IV paints over the bugginess by altering the scenario. Your character, the Boss of the Saints, is actually trying to break the virtual reality that holds the game’s simulated world. The game crashing is not intentional (one would hope). But inevitable minor graphical glitches become wanted outcomes: signs that your chaotic influence is having a positive effect. Enemies snap into T-poses or wiggle free from their animation skeletons during combat as part of the normal course of play. There’s flashes of untextured skybox before the city area loads. Z-buffers throughout Steelport’s brick walls are forever locked in pitched battle. Don’t worry; Saints Row IV meant to do that. The game even avoids having characters comment on this in “boy is this game broken” fashion at least most of the time.
I can’t really blame developers for recycling assets for AAA games. It’s a careful wire to walk, though, since too much recycling makes enemies repetitive and environments seem uninspired. I don’t have any firsthand accounts from current-day Rockstar, but based on reports from a few years ago, their strategy for combating this problem seemed to be hiring eager young environment artists straight out of school and burning them out with overtime. This is part of the price that is paid for the largest, most massively detailed cities in gaming. A vote for Saints Row IV and its recycled city is a vote for greener, more sustainable game development.
Simply Irresistible
Saints Row IV is an admittedly flawed experience. Sharp writing and some creative weapon and superpower mechanics still make it a game I happily recommend. I write this at about the half-way point in the game, having logged several evenings and over a dozen hours with plenty left to do in Virtual Steelport. That’s just not bad for a game that some people derided as glorifed DLC.
In a best case scenario, GTA V is also written sharply. GTA IV did set a pretty high bar here and had some memorable characters, though none I liked as much as the Saints characters at the end of the day. But also in a best case scenario, it’s likely GTA V will still also be padded out with repetitive mission structures, have mundane weapon selection, and will be packed cluckin’-full of shallow implementation of a bloated number of optional worldbuilding features for the sake of a surface-level appearance of “hugeness.” I am prepared to be wrong here, fully admitting that I have only trailers and hype to go on. I don’t really expect to be. In any case, I can think of no scenario where GTA V has a Dubstep Gun.
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com.
Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. “The Touch” is on the Saints Row IV soundtrack?! I…I need to go buy my copy now. Bye.
I finally fired up “Saints Row The Third” the other week, after never having played any of the prior versions. In fact, I didn’t even really understand what the game was about or what it was like.
I thought the writing was hillarious and really enjoyed the opening sequences. Then I got to my crib and things started to fall apart. I stole a car, accessed my phone, found another car to steal, tried to do that a few times and simply ended up getting shot at and chased by cops and another gang members as I raced through the streets, desperately trying to get the car back to the chop shop. I was never successful with that last part and eventually just became bored with the entire exercise. I know I must being doing something wrong and I am probably better served to just skip the “side missions” or whatever they are called and stick to the main/scripted missions.
I can’t remember the last GTA I played, but it had to be the first or second one. My experience with that game was largely similar to my experience with Saints Row, but without the amusing intro scenes.
I see we added a tool that allows all commenters to edit their own posts and everyone’s names are gone. This… this is something we’ll have to rectify. Either that or – more likely – Steerpike is trying to break the virtual reality that Tap-Repeatedly is set in.
Since Saints Row 3 is free on PS+ (PS+ is basically the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, I have enough games to play), I downloaded it even though I played quite a bit of the PC version about a year ago. It does get a bit repetitive but the writing during story missions is absolutely hilarious, so hilarious it would be worth enduring a bad game to get more of and even at its worst, SR3 isn’t a bad game. So finishing it is on my pile of things to do.
AJ, you’re wise to appease both the Xbox and the PS3 with a copy, especially if you sensed both wanted one. My Xbox – my SEVENTH Xbox – felt slighted, felt it was getting less attention than the PS3, and what did it do? It red ringed. Machines have feelings, and denying one Saints Row is asking for trouble you neither want nor deserve.
@Ajax If a side mission gets too hard, you can level up and try again, and leveling up DOES help with some of the harder objectives. But yeah, it absolutely will feel repetitive to side-quest and this isn’t really fixed in 4. The story missions are fun though.
Guys, I think we’re missing the most important point here. Saints Row IV has “The Touch” in it.
One can never have too much Keith David.
Yeah gta v is going to blow SR4 out of the water, theres nothing you said that makes me interested in sr4. I don’t feel like paying $60 for an exspansion.
That argument intrigues me. Blow it out of the water in what way? It will most certainly be larger. It will be a very large game. My criteria for water being blown is just different than most people’s I guess.
Open world games tend to be big at the expense of everything else, including game-ness. The first Assassin’s Creed was the worst offender I can think of here; about a dozen ten-minute missions wrapped in 100 hours of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Ultimately that’s what tends to drive me away from the “you can explore a giant city!” games. Yes you can explore a city, but it gets boring as hell very quickly.
I’ll take the smaller open world of Deadly Premonition, the more realistic one of Pathologic, the more handcrafted one of STALKER, or even the more mission-driven one of Borderlands any day over Sleeping Dogs’ all of Hong Kong plus car races.
Saints Row gets a bit of a pass because it’s so self-consciously silly about the whole thing. But like you, AJ, I don’t judge entirely by size. Size doesn’t matter. My (admittedly limited) experience with GTA and Saints Row tells me I prefer the latter on account of more-creative story missions that don’t always devolve into a car chase. Certainly critics will say that GTA V blows the water of everything else. In fact I’m sure most critics will call it the best game ever ever ever, again, just like the last one. But if history’s a judge, few of them will be able to articulate what exactly makes it such a jewel.
I don’t really know what Saints Row is all about either, though from that video with the dubstep gun (When will this terrible nightmare end? The asshole who popularized this garbage is steadily ascending the ladder of Worst People Ever.) and the television commercial with Keith David claiming that the aliens “stole our pants” it’s immediately apparent that Saints Row has the sense of humour and self-mockery GTA sorely lacks which, frankly, you need in this all-too-serious genre in 2013.
There’s just nothing interesting I see in it. It’s GTA IV back in whatever fictional west coast place San Andreas was set in. Even the commercials I’ve seen look really embarrassing. Like Rockstar is trying so hard. Too hard.
But GTA V is going to be big, xtal. Like SO big. Like… like… wub-wub-wub-wub-wub big.
Little dubstep for you there, brother. Wub-wub.
Seriwubsly, though, I’m with you; even enjoying Saints Row I realize that most of these open world crime games aren’t my style. In the case of SR I really want more of the main story – the dialogue, the imagination, the variety in core missions – but you have to go through a lot I don’t want to go through in order to succeed at them. I hope at least someone cobbles together all the great scenes of SR3 and 4 into something I can watch on YouTube, because while it’s doubtful I’ll finish either game, that kind of writing deserves appreciation.
Wub, wub.
I think Steerpike hits it on the head for me with regards to intimate open worlds over sprawling ones. What bothered me the most with GTA IV wasn’t its feeling of emptiness outside the cutscenes, it was the inability to deviate from whatever Rockstar had in mind for each given action sequence. They just didn’t allow for player creativity, locking you into prescribed actions and that, for me, is absolutely horrible against the backdrop of ‘Liberty’ City. If I blow up a speedboat which an enemy uses to escape, then that enemy shouldn’t be able to use it to escape in. Or if I shoot the driver in a truck to stop him driving away, he shouldn’t be able to drive away. But no, Rockstar want you to do it their way. Pffft.
I don’t want to say much about GTA V but I will say I’m surprised Rockstar or some other scrappy developer hasn’t modelled a city-wide crime simulator with dynamic events, gangs, drug trafficking, robberies, crime scenes, investigating, links, corruption, control… Think something like X-COM but with cops and criminals. Hell, it could be an MMO. I hadn’t played a GTA since the first game when I played GTA IV, and I was honestly expecting some of those dynamic elements to be in it based solely on the rave reviews it was getting, but obviously I was very wrong.
Gregg, I wonder how much the conspicuous lack of such a sandboxy crime MMO has to do with the catastrophic failure of APB. The general anticipation and pedigree of that game, coupled with the resulting disappointment in it and financial troubles for Realtime Worlds, leaves kind of a lasting impression on how suited the genre and medium are to each other, rightly or not.
One of the earliest story missions in GTA IV involve a guy trying to get away in a white van – a laundry truck, if I recall correctly. After many failures because the car chases were such crap, I found the van before initiating the mission. It was tucked into an alley with only one exit, so I just parked it in. Feeling smug, I triggered the mission. And what to my eyes should appear? A white laundry van, apparently teleported through the SUV and tooling down the road. Another mission failure. That was when I saw the truth in Gregg’s above remark – they want you to do it their way.
Meanwhile I tried Sleeping Dogs for about an hour some weeks ago. Free on PS+ and all. Beautiful game, but the idiocy of tasks like cell phone hacking, not to mention the crushing hugeness of the city and pointlessness of most of it – it serves largely as a place to host car chases – turned me off pretty quickly. In fact, it turned me off enough that Watch Dogs (similar in that it’s an open world with the word “Dogs” in there) holds essentially no interest for me either.
Compare this to Deadly Premonition, where as AJ points out, you’d do best to roam the town until you know your way around visually, and that’s the sense of where open worlds should be.
I do wish APB had succeeded. Bugs and bad pre-launch marketing brought it down. A sad end for the creators of the original Crackdown, one of the few sandbox open worlds I really loved. In general MMOs don’t agree with me, but they might be most suitable environment for a big-city crime versus crimebuster extravaganza.
I never played Crackdown – I kind of wanted to, at the time, but being a 360 exclusive was a problem for me. Open world games are a tricky proposition for me as well, especially those that look like GTA III/IV/V in any way, which includes Sleeping Dogs, though I did break down and pick that up cheap on Steam a while back (haven’t played it yet). The ones I like are generally less about being a sandbox and more about an environment for the story – Assassin’s Creed 2 et al., and inFamous come to mind. The verticality of those games also helps make the open worldness seem less pointless than a game where it’s basically just a place to drive in.
It’s a good thing I don’t care.
After GTA IV I think I could have quite happily called my time with the GTA franchise, despite being a huge fan of it prior to IV, but I must admit all the launch hysteria is making me regret that I won’t be picking it up just yet. Just about everyone in both my immediate and extended social circle seems to have picked this thing up in the last 24 hours or so, but as I’m currently without a PS3 or a 360 I’m sitting this one out. I suspect I will have to wait until the inevitable PC and/or PS4 port to check the game out.
Has to be said though, there isn’t much in the industry quite like a new Grand Theft Auto launch. I walked past our City’s main GAME branch today and they were queuing out of the door for it. At lunch time as well, despite being open from 8am and despite a midnight launch hours earlier. It’s absolutely colossal.
Absolutely loved both of the recent Saints Row games.
It has got to the point though that I don’t think the two titles can really be compared anymore. It would be like saying ‘yeah, I am not interested in the new Call of Duty because I feel F.3.A.R. is the better game’. Omitting the suffix: ‘for me’.
I’ve never liked the 3-D GTA games and think that they have been weak in what matters to me most: handling and mission structure.
I always say that if the missions in any of the GTA games were placed in a linear experience they will be laughed off the face of gaming (see Ride to Hell as an example) but because of Rockstar’s worlds people put up with it. Much like some of the repetitiveness of some of SR:The Third was fine to me because none of it was broken and there was always something mental around the corner to look forward to.
Saints Row is more likely to get my money but that is because it goes in the direction I wished that its peers (Crackdown, Prototype and Infamous) had gone/were going.
Also, I much prefer the condensed open worlds of Way of the Samurai and Deadly Premonition. Learning how the world works is the first priority before you can fully explore them. Is this anything to do with Eastern versus Western philosophy?
I’m not buying 5 either. Can get porn for free online and am not addicted to the word “f***” Gonna stick with my Sleeping Dogs until they make something better 😉
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