The reviews are in, Saints Row is now released to the public and the response has been fairly mixed. Some have appreciated the way it rebooted the series and did away with some of the more ludicrous elements that crept in with Saints Row 4 and Gat Out of Hell, while others have derided it for its numerous bugs and uninspired open world design. This has led to the game receiving a 65 on Metacritic for the console versions, and 70 for the PC version. You can find out what we thought of the game by checking out our Saints Row review.
Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, there are some things the game could’ve undeniably done better and no one knows that more than the developers. We spoke to the creative director for Saints Row, Brian Traficante, and he lamented features that didn’t make the cut, chief among which was having rain in the game.
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“I wanted rain so bad,” Traficante says. “I just, there’s just something about it, right? Like, the world state changes, the overcast, the clouds, you see the umbrellas come out, people are reacting to it, and everything shiny looks great.”
This didn’t happen for a number of reasons, largely due to having to build their tools from the ground up. Speaking about this development cycle, he explains, “We started from nothing … at one point early in R&D, we let everything go and rebuilt from the ground up. So, it’s one of those game stories that, unfortunately, becomes common where you’re building your tech while you’re building your game, which is the biggest no-no in development.”
That said, what features in Saints Row can be considered a big step up from previous entries. Not only did Saints Row 4 not feature any weather effects, but it didn’t even have a day/night cycle. The game’s lighting engine is top-notch with the setting sun creating beautiful vistas, and Traficante is proud of the duststorm weather effect they were able to implement. “We’ve got a nice duststorm system, and that was sort of the trade-off where you could see these storms grow, build from a light storm into moderate, and things will get dusty.”
These sorts of compromises in technology and features may go some way to explain the perceived lack of polish in the final product, leading many to a question that has been asked of several games over the past couple of generations: How much better would this launch have gone if the game had just been delayed another couple of months?
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
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