Saints Row The Third

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xenoargh

Grandmaster Knight
Wow, never thought I'd actually start a thread in this area  :lol:

The game deserves its own thread, to talk about it.  I have found this game to be interesting as a way to think about how I feel about game design (and to some extent, what people want to buy).

Here's my review:
First, a quick note:  I'm going to use 'SRIII' throughout the review, since typing out "Saints Row The Third" takes too long.

I bought this game with a great deal of reluctance, despite hearing and reading lots of good things about it.  I wasn't a big fan of GTA, and I am not a big fan of "gangsta" anything; having spent some time around the reality of those people's lives years ago, it's an ugly life and it doesn't deserve to be treated like a toy, let alone turned into a male power fantasy.

That said, when Steam offered the entire Saints Row The Third series with all the DLCs (and there were a lot of DLCs) for $18 the other day, I bit. 

Well, that and review after review written by the guys in the review business, all getting paid more than I am, all with the same "it's !@#!!@! incredible that this silly mess works, but it does and it's fun and you should play it".  I don't take those fellows all that seriously (most of them are, well, ex-AAA) but in this case, I figured the entire herd of them probably wasn't wrong.

Huge amounts of text has been spent on describing how this game took both the open-world premise and absurdity to the nth degree and works anyhow. It's an open-world game that clearly stole its core from GTA, yet it takes itself un-seriously to the point of being bad in a good way, gameplay-wise, but with amazingly-high production values.  So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. 

In the main story missions, things are either Pretty Silly or Incredibly Silly.  Not going to spend much time on that, either.  If you don't like Daffy Duck humor and lots of cute references to movies and other forms of modern media (looking at you, mind-control squid launcher) you're just plain not going to like it.  SRIII's one of those games where you're pretty much going to have to quit worrying about Reality immediately and if you're not at least somewhat savvy about current cultural memes from a North American POV, a lot of the Funny will go right past you.

Which leads to my first observation, which is that for a lot of foreigners, this is going to be a very odd experience, because, well, it's not like being a real criminal and it's only very peripherally related to the real world of modern American crime. 

If  you're looking for something that pretends to simulate real-world criminality, it's not for you. 

Then again, there really isn't anything for you folks in this area, so far as I know; a truly simulation-like game about being a gangsta would be both too horrifying and, in most cases, too short to be compelling.  When it wasn't incredibly dull, that is, watching simulated people get high on simulated stuff at simulated parties or driving very, very carefully so not to attract the attention of the police.  Oh, and spending a few years in prison and stuff.  I really think that if anybody wants to do a crime sim, it needs to include that experience (and the things people learn there).

So, if GTA's basically a male power fantasy, about being a person who is allowed to do the ridiculously illegal without much penalty... SRIII's basically that same model, with all pretense of being a sim-like experience taken away and all of the funny bits turned up to 11.

While I found GTA IV's main character and his backstory compelling, I found the gameplay much less so.  Drive around, in cars that might or might not be easy to drive, at frustrating FPS on my hardware (ATi card here, amongst other woes) and well... it got pretty darn boring after a bit.  I never even came close to finishing GTA IV and it exited my hard drive, which is pretty rare for me.

I haven't even bothered trying to finish SRIII.  I'm still screwing around and trying to figure things out. 

But it's a weird, weird game when we go beneath the artwork.

It's not balanced, for example, and tries to be quite a bit less than my own little project here, Blood and Steel, which I always have thought of as one of my less-serious attempts to balance anything.  For example, one of the DLCs gave me a tank that I can just whistle up whenever I want, which is, for all practical purposes, invulnerable and allows me to to just kill anything.  There are all sorts of other toys like that that basically aren't even slightly balanced and the game designers didn't care. 

So why do most of the guns you'd use if you wanted to play without the nukes suck pretty majorly due to console-ish auto-aim and RNG stuff obviously being in the PC code, making resorting to the power toys seem like the logical way to progress?  It's a weird decision. 

But my main issue with the game has nothing to do with mission design or game balance.  It's a philosophical problem I've been thinking about for a long time now.

One of the DLC guns gave a nod to Golgo-13, a fairly pornographic anime series from the 1980s (IIRC) that is a classic about violence.  That anime's also what inspired the Hitman series, too; seems there are a lot of mid-30s guys who all watched the same anime stuff and have copied some of the style (mainly, the violence) while making references to, but not including, the sex.

Which is, frankly, my biggest beef with SRIII.  Games like this turn casual violence into cheesy pornography.  It's not do-or-die violence.  It's not kill-the-abstract-thing-to-earn-points violence. 

It's running over old ladies with my Porche and being expected to laugh about it afterwards violence.

There aren't any consequences worth mentioning; just "hide out" and your "rep" goes away.  The FBI doesn't start a manhunt and keep coming; the other Mafiosos don't have any more memory than a goldfish.  It's pure power fantasy; all the gore, all of the petty activities of small boys picking the wings off of flies... none of the consequences. 

Sure, the gore, such as it is, is kept pretty tame, really no worse than Warband's, really; people don't get dismembered, they just get a bit bloody, scream, turn into ragdolls and quit moving.  But I still just ran over a bunch of people with a car or started a firefight on a busy street or beat a guy to death with a huge purple dildo.  It's violence.  Fantasy violence, largely because there aren't any meaningful consequences.

If we're going to have games without consequence, then we may as well go ahead and include sex.  Me, personally, while I'm laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of SRIII's premise and I am sure I will enjoy all of the main missions, if the intro missions are anything like what they'll entail... me, I wish they'd gone ahead and included consequences in their universe, and made a game where, sure, you can do silly stuff, but you're closing doors.

I still think that Fallout got closest to doing this right in a RPG setting.  You could kill everybody in a village, but it cost you.  People remembered your behavior, and you'd eventually become hated for your infamous actions.  It wasn't perfect, but it made the violence, which was very real for its day, feel much deeper and closer to the truth.  Fallout III got it largely wrong; you can't ever negotiate with the Raiders, you can't have real relationships with most of the world.  You can kill people, but it felt pretty cheap and the Karma system wasn't geared correctly for the gameplay.  My personal take on it is that if you did certain things (both good and bad things) that it should have closed some doors forever, making being good and being bad different fundamental experiences.  But, like Morrowind, BethSoft largely screwed up again, and not only did it feel pretty irrelevant, being evil was considerably easier.

SRIII's game designers, on the other hand, seems to have decided that having morality in the game at all would distract from the humor and the basic power fantasy stuff.  But no kids, no sex, in this consequence-less world; you're surrounded by XXX theaters and buildings with boobs sticking out of them, but you can't actually hire a whore, let alone beat her up after murdering her minder.  It's all of the surface gloss of the Thug Life and practically zero substance.

It's like... well, frankly, it's like something that some 30-ish, mainly white, nerdy and basically not at all thuggish guys who never quite grew up and were influenced by a lot of gangsta rap, anime and internet porn would come up with, when they examined the basic absurdities of their own fantasy lives.  Except for the parts where they dreamed about having sex with the girls who were attracted the bad boys of that real-world set. 

You can make those girls your alter egos, fight with them.

Byou can't ask them for a date or screw them in the back of a car that smells like weed.  You can't get them pregnant and discover your baby will be brain-dead because of all those jello shots.  You can't suddenly have to get a regular job so that the IRS won't destroy you or have to go into the cooler for a Class-C Felony pled down to 1-3 by your PA, get raped in jail or learn all about how transport cocaine in your colon.

Like I said; it's a game by guys who almost certainly haven't been to the places they're using as a springboard.  They're using their own self-mockery and the utter ridiculousness of gangsta rap (which, btw, is largely made by guys who have the right skin colors but are also not actually from the places they talk about).

In short, I'll probably enjoy this game for its sheer cartoon value, and there's plenty of very real humor there, but it's mainly shallow stuff and I don't know whether I'll finish this either. 

The fundamental gameplay's far better than GTA IV, I feel.  I'm not talking about whether the missions 'make sense' or whether the balance is 'good', but whether they work, have variations that are interesting and have good balance curves.  For the most part, they have done a good thorough job here.  It's clear that the missions were QA'd pretty carefully and that the fundamentals were tested a lot.  That said, I'm a sure a lot of people here wouldn't be able to look past the content; many missions are so completely over-the-top that they make Schwarzenegger movies look like Zen poems. 

So, as a game about being able to roam around and Do Whatever, it's a better game, I think. 

Sure, the car physics suck, but GTA's did too and neither one of them are racing games at heart.  If anything, I prefer the slightly-more-dumbed-down "suck" of SRIII, because it keeps driving mainly about Getting There so that we can Do Stuff, rather than ever really worry about which vehicle we're using and its problems (other than that street-sweeper theft mission, sigh). 

In all other respects, I think it's a better technical product; the engine's much smoother and the graphics engine delivers content smoothly without lag even when moving around at breakneck speeds, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.  Characters respond to what's happening around them in a way that feels pretty natural and the feeling of being in a John Woo scene when gangstas and the po-po show up at a major battle, tires squealing as they slide their vehicles into the scene, is a good touch.  Animations overall are top-notch and were executed very carefully and with an eye on letting people really feel the actions; I really appreciated how they gave a good sense of weight to the actors in the hand-to-hand fighting, something that Warband never quite got right.

But for me, if a game goes beyond merely being a game about doing some stuff to Win, when it starts touching the way we live or what it's like to be a human being- that invisible and highly-subjective line between, say, a Modern Warfare II where we're basically just passive observers to the story and make no fundamental choices- at that point, games need to take themselves seriously enough to care about what's good, what's bad, what consequences are like. 

I wasn't ever really happy with the way this worked in the GTA series and I'm even less happy with seeing it taken to the final extreme.  I don't think it's just that I'm getting older; I have always felt pretty ambivalent about violence-as-porn in video games, all the way back to seeing N.A.R.C. in an arcade and going, "yuck" as a youngster. 

But that's my final call on this one; it's going to be funny and fun so long as I decide not just to not bother thinking critically, but without any sense of morality at all.
 
The Japanese Running man gameshow platform with commentary was one of the best bits in the game.
I made a shemale with a cockney accent and punk style mixed with joker.
 
Honestly one of the best games I've played in a while.

Looks good, runs good. The writing won't blow your mind away, but it's hillarious, with some very nice gems here and there.
As for replayability, I'll probably get tired of just cruising around the city and coming up with insane ways to kill random people soon, but for the amount of time I've invested into the game it's well worth the cost. Take into consideration the mini-games, achievements, DLCs and bonus missions then you actually have quite a lot to do once you're done with the main plot... which I have yet to complete due to so much screwing around.

Haven't played the previous games in the series, so I can't relate with the long-time fans who seem to have a lot of gripes with the game. Apparently it's too 'different' from the first two or something. But hell, the game blew my expectations away with the amount of fun it offered, and ultimately I only play games for fun.

Anyway, Saints Row IV is in the works.
http://www.vg247.com/2013/03/22/saints-row-4-presidential-campaign/
 
Trying on some mods for it that promise to fix my main beefs about balance (useless guns, amongst other things) and hopefully improve the driving experience (FPS view)  :smile:
 
Sooo Saints Row IV is now out on Steam.

Reviewers and previewers have been raving about it all year so I'm anxious to get my hands on it. Anyone tried it yet?
 
Hm, interesting review. I enjoyed SR3 quite a lot, it never really bothered me that it's a completely shallow power fantasy with no depth or consequence. That's what the game wants to be, and IMO it does what it wants to do rather well. I have to disagree with the idea that SR3 has high production values, though. Most vehicle and character models are incredibly hideous and crude, which coupled with the ****ty car physics makes the game feel very cheap.
 
Ringwraith #5 said:
I have to disagree with the idea that SR3 has high production values, though. Most vehicle and character models are incredibly hideous and crude, which coupled with the ****ty car physics makes the game feel very cheap.

The latest one looks like a complete reskin with them just adding in new abilities for characters to use. Guess it is more profitable to make a new 'game' and not an expansion though.
 
Kevlar said:
The latest one looks like a complete reskin with them just adding in new abilities for characters to use. Guess it is more profitable to make a new 'game' and not an expansion though.
Well yeah, it was originally supposed to be DLC. Though to be fair, from what I've seen so far, which is to say TB's WTF Is and a Let's Play, it seems it's not even the same genre anymore. SR3 was a GTA-clone, albeit a silly one. SR4 is a superhero game with some vestigial features from its predecessor, like jacking cars. You can do it, but there's no point, given that you can run faster and jump up buildings. Kinda reminds me of Just Cause 2 in this respect. It's more of a Prototype-clone now than a GTA-clone.
 
See, I was hoping that wouldn't happen. I was ruminating on the fact that with superpowers vehicles would essentially be for decoration now, but I was hoping somewhat that they would have a good balance between vehicular and super-powered gameplay. Alas.
 
So can you just throw on some iron man-esque costume and play it that way, then?

****, I can't help thinking that the main promotional image look so much like a thug-life Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.

Saints-Row-4-ps3.jpg
 
Austupaio said:
So can you just throw on some iron man-esque costume and play it that way, then?

Or you can do it old-school and forego the using of your powers. Admittedly there's little point in using guns and vehicles when you have said powers, but I appreciate the fact that they're giving you a choice in the matter. If nothing else it could serve roleplayers well or as a way of increasing the difficulty.
 
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