Saints Row reboot [2021]

Downloaded and gave it a go tonight. Seems really good. Crazy for a free game. I've about 2 dozen games to play now so may be a while before i get to it

 

Lol this is exactly what I’m thinking. But you would also expect that they’re banking on significant revenue from existing fans of the franchise.

 

Think about when the original Saints Row came out? The first Saints Row game came out in 2006, which would put me in my mid/late 20's. Obviously the game did well with younger kids as well, so let's assume they were aiming for the early 20's to early 30's crowd. Thinking about this new game not as a Saints Row franchise explicitly, instead just some new open world shooter. Honestly this is roughly what I would expect a software dev team to try to ship this year.

They're ripping off all the games which are popular right now; Fortnite is obvious, so too are all the various military clones I can't be bothered to keep up with. Honorary Call of Brotherhood Duty Infinite 38 or WTFever. Oh and a bunch of purple aesthetic thrown in to emulate some of the original SR color palatte.

Meh. Not my cup of tea, but I see what they're aiming for.

 

just call it something else.
It's like releasing a new mario kart and making it like gran turismo.

 

Or better yet. The next Gran Turismo is basically a copy of Mario Cart.

And then people can just say that Polyphony just want to sell to the current generation young ones if anyone complains.

If they wanted to go a different direction, then just make it a new IP and absolutely no-one would complain.

Regards,
SB

 

Not saying you're right or wrong, however... How many have you specifically asked?

I suspect you and I are in the same age-group, and I find "hipster millenials" a bit of a cringe statement in a general sense. Like I already said, this doesn't appear to be my cup of tea, yet it seems like it's copying (maybe, as a tongue-in-cheek ripoff?) all the same tropes that the 20-something's of current-day seem to be doing. Isn't that what the original SR did?

It's obviously not aimed at the early 40's and older crowd

 

The Dislike:Like ratio on the trailer is a pretty good indicator.
21k like, 39k dislike

 

“Haters gonna hate.”

 

I like the girl tho. She has glasses, she must be smart.

 

True dat, agreed.

ROFL!

 

Aren’t the old folks who are whining about Volition ruining “their game” acting just like millennials though? Also a lot of millennials are in their late 30’s now. The fortnite crowd is more gen Z.

 

To be fair, if one looks back at the first SR, it was pretty much equally cringey. It was riding hard on the fads of high-school middle class kids of the time. They didn't do a fantasy gangster hip-hop game out of some love for the genre, but because that was hot in 2006.

But it did fit the genre. Coming off of GTA SA, it felt almost like a spiritual sequel. Only Rockstar captured that more inspiring and picturesque Hollywood interpretation of classic LA hip-hop from the 70s, while SR was doing Suburban kid gangster wannabe from MySpace version of hiphop.

This one with the college students just feels out of place in the genre. It feels derivative for the sole purpose of being derivative. It feels very watchdogs, for example, but the world of watchdogs was a heavily constructed one, and not something pulled out of our shared collective-unconscious like the gta games are.

I think they are misjudging the audience for that kind of theming. There indeed are consumers out there with a half-shaved purple dyed hair and neon clothing listening to skrillex and streaming Among-Us. SR looks like a parody of that. But I am not sure if that demographic is as large as they think it is, and I think its way more culturally niche than the pop-radio white-kid gangstah-rap of SR1 was in the 2000's. And then there is the fact that usually people play games that portray things that they aspire to, and not charicatures of themselves. It is cringy because it hits too close to home.

Teens look up to be successful adults, not in-debt failed college graduates. And in-debt failed college graduates are embarrassed enough with themselves (been there, minus the debt) they don't wanna be reminded of their failures when playing a game.

I honestly can't imagine the persona Volition was going for here. I think it was a hard miss, and sales will suffer.

 

But I also don't think they could do SR1 again today. Even ignoring the outrage culture that would bitch and moan about representation of this or that. THAT world of american-gang-culture is way less culturally relevant today than it was then. The average gamer is just not even nearly as interested in that universe today.

The Third and Fourth SR games were already noticing that a decade ago, and thus why they pivoted to this wacky Wayan-Brothers-style parody comedy those games adopted.

Now, that was a smart move because the audience of wacky parody comedies DID have a lot of overlap with the 2000's hip-hop and these two cultural spheres felt like neighbor to each other.

But that too would feel out-dated today. What a reboot needed to do, was find another direction to pivot to that still felt equivalent in social relevance as the themes of the previous titles, and at least loosely connected to the world of street-gangs and hip-hop.

Instead they went for something completely different, that still is absolutely unoriginal, and stole the name of the franchise hoping that brings in sales.

It feels like what an A.I. would spit out if it only watched fortnight dance move tik-toks and autistic milenial tumblr rants.

If I were to point to an equivalent in mid-2000's to what SR reboot is going for here, I'd point at the EMO fad. Not many games about emo then, though, right? At least not many that sold... (well, do JRPGs count?)

 

So remember when the 2014 Ninja Turtles movie came out? I took my kid to a really nice theater to see it. Drove an hour and a half away. He really wanted to see it, and I love TMNT, so I figured the movie couldn't be so bad and it's something we could do together. Keep in mind that he's 17 now, so he was 10 at the time. So, I watch the movie, and of course the movie is bad. And the turtles are cringey. And we're leaving the movie and I'm thinking, well that was trash who would like that and my kid looks at me before I say anything and says "That was the best movie I've ever seen". And that was when I truly understood that the movie... It wasn't made for me. It was made for him.

This is what reboots and remakes do. They target other audiences. If they were targeting the original Saint's Row fanbase they would have continued the series. Sometimes you get the 2003 animated series (which was good), and sometimes you get the 2014 Jonathan Liebesman directed film. Which was at one time the best movie my kid had ever seen. I fixed that, don't worry. Liebesman is directing about half the episodes of the Halo series coming out, if anyone wants to be worried about that.

Anyway, I got off track. This new game.... It's probably fine for the people who are too young to play M rated games but their moms let them anyway. And by fine I mean they will like it. Not that letting your 6 year old play a game with a dildo gun is fine. I'm not saying that.

 

but TMNT is a kids show, and stays geared towards kids, saint's row series was more of an adult tone, those were 18+ games even if inconcious parents let their kids play those games.
So that a drastic change for the series.

 

Yes, but it isn't really a series geared towards mature adults. All I'm saying is, it's not meant for us. It's meant for a new audience. That's why it's a reboot and not a sequel to the original series.