With a large degree of effortlessness, as it happens. In Saints Row IV, you still control the leader of the Saints gang. Only this time, he’s the President of the United States. Yep. And he has super powers. Uh huh. And not only are you utterly free to wander around your country causing as much havoc as possible, you also need to fend off an alien invasion by a race called the Zin.
You can wear an extravagant Uncle Sam outfit, drive monster trucks over everything, perform wrestling moves on passers-by, use an Inflator Ray to blow up people’s heads until they explode, and fire a Dubstep Gun that forces any crowd to do the robot against a Skrillex-esque soundtrack.
My God. It’s utterly insane. I had a chat with senior producer Jim Boone, and wasn’t exactly sure where to start.
Jim Boone: Seemed like the logical transition [laughs]. We laugh about it in the sense that... that character’s got such a trajectory from Saints Row 1 to 3. He enters a city, he conquers the city, he enters another city and he takes that over too. And he’s always got to be ‘the man’. So why not just fast forward in time where he IS the man now? He’s the President of the United States.
SPOnG: A President that’s allowed to beat up his citizens?
Jim Boone: Exactly. You know, he’s the Commander-in-Chief. It’s his duty, as an American President, or something like that [laughs].
SPOnG: I kind of want to just get into the thought processes of Volition when it comes to game design. Where do you come up with this stuff? Do you guys sit around at a bar and just riff away on game ideas?
Jim Boone: Almost... pretty much! It’s funny, because a lot of times what ends up happening is that our design group will get together, and they will just brainstorm ideas. And yeah, sometimes over a couple of beers, no doubt about it. But really we just try to come up with something that’s both over the top, and also fun. So our team just literally spills their minds and we drill down into them.
But filtering that out is a process. Some ideas seem really cool in terms of the tone, but we realise there’s no way to make it fun. Sometimes it’s the other way around; we find something fun but it seems rather pedestrian. But you do get some real gems from the get-go - the Dubstep Gun, for example? That’s one where the guys were just coming up with ideas for exotic, crazy weapons. Someone just threw out just the words, ‘Dubstep Gun’. Without even knowing exactly what that would mean, we knew immediately that there was something there, something interesting.
Jim Boone: Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. It’s interesting. At the end of Saints Row The Third, we were kind of mentally tapped out. We were thinking, ‘My God, we couldn’t possibly go any further than this, this is just absurd’. But then we got to clear our minds, got to take a step back, and started to come up with new ideas. That’s where some of these things started to come from.
I think one of our earliest ideas were the super powers. I think that’s helped us out in a couple of areas. Two of the key things you do as a player in Saints Row is you either shoot something or you drive something. We’ve been doing those things in exactly the same way for three games in a row now, so this was a way to add something totally exotic and over the top, but also differentiates things.
You can still shoot if you want, but now you have a new dimension of combat which breaks things up from the three previous games. Same thing with driving - you can collect, customise and upgrade cars as you always could, but now you can choose to super-sprint through the world, and super-leap around it. It’s offering more variety.
The big obstacle that came up from that though, was a formidable enemy. If we gave the player all these super-powers, and we just left you to fight gangsters, where would the challenge be? That’s when we developed aliens - and you have this wide range of abilities in the Zin which starts to work against the super-powers mechanic. We can super-power the aliens too, so the balance works out.
We can still have you enter these base units, destroy the hell out of them and feel like a badass, but now we can have these new super-exotic ones that are a bit more challenging. It also gives the designers the tools when building missions and scenarios to offer the right balancing. So, really it’s not about creating a path towards figuring some of this insanity out. It’s always about the mechanics towards having fun and ideally done in a very over the top, unique Saints sort of way.
Jim Boone: There wasn’t as much. Usually the feedback we get is just ‘more’ - more customisation, more weapons, that sort of thing. And we certainly try to do that. I think the biggest thing that jumps to mind with that question is... I know sometimes people have asked for certain things in the combat system. I mean, our combat was really fun but there are certainly new things out there that we can pay attention to.
One thing we often get asked is whether we will have a cover system. And we chose not to include one, because our feeling is that it just doesn’t suit Saints Row. It’s not that kind of game. Saints Row is bold. You go out and kill things. But that sort of request... we use that as inspiration to improve in other ways. So we ask, if players want something different with combat, what can we do? That’s where the super powers come into play. We feel that’s satisfying that angle, where people may be looking for a little more in combat.