Jim Boone: Yes. Loads. Maybe even more in IV than there were in 3, to be honest. There’s a lot. There are a few that we have in there that I can’t wait for players to discover when the game comes out. Some of them we’re certain to not reveal to the press, just so people can see them in the game themselves. But we have a few in mind that I think people will go wild over.
We tried to use a tonne of our humour in it. And we’re big fans of all these things. It’s a bit of an homage, because we play games all the time. We’re big fans of a lot of the other games out there, so when we use references, we try to do it a funny but unique way.
SPOnG: The leader of the Saints looks an awful lot like... Commander Shepard from Mass Effect...
Jim Boone: [Laughs] You got that, did you? Yeah... a little bit! There’s more than a few Mass Effect references in there, for sure.
SPOnG: How has the recent THQ collapse affected you guys, in terms of development of Saints Row IV? Was there a negligible impact?
Jim Boone: Fortunately, nothing significant. It was an interesting time for us, obviously. We were trying to figure out what was going on at THQ - who’s going to buy us, if anyone, that sort of thing. But we were pretty confident, in the sense that THQ had another backer with Clearlake - and with that, it was a certainty that Volition would be safe.
From our viewpoint, we were really far along with Saints Row IV, it’s a good brand... so we selfishly felt pretty confident that someone would buy us. Unlike some of the other people, and friends of ours, who didn’t get picked up by anyone. That part was sad. But at the very least, we thought that someone would get us. We had a lot of publishers visiting us, so that was interesting. It was a chance for us to meet them just as much as it was a chance for them to meet us.
The biggest thing from our point of view was what would things be like when a publisher does comes in and picks us up? Are they going to want to change things? Do they want to change our process, our culture, or the game? So it was a little bit nerve-wracking for the team in that context.
When Deep Silver came in, very early on Klemens [Kundratitz], the CEO, actually came to Volition. And we’re in the middle of Illinois, so the fact he actually came to visit the studio was pretty cool. He was just a great guy - super nice, was able to answer everyone’s questions - and fortunately for us they’re not changing anything regarding Volition. The culture’s the same, as is the process, and they’re not asking us to do anything differently. They’ve not asked for any changes in the game.
They appreciate, and somehow get, our special brand of insanity, and so it’s been awesome. I can probably say that for the average team member at Volition, most of them wouldn’t even notice the difference. There was the stress of wondering what was going to happen. But it didn’t really impact the game, in the sense that we were able to just continue full speed ahead during that whole process.
Jim Boone: Unfortunately, no. We’re just doing Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. And the reason for this is... Summoner, that came out for the PlayStation 2, was a launch title for us. And it was, far and away, the most brutal game I had ever worked on. It’s incredibly difficult to do a launch title at all, never mind an RPG launch title. It was really crazy of us to do it.
But we felt like we learned some lessons there - while we were happy with Summoner and people liked it, we knew that it could have been a much better game if we hadn’t tried to force it to be a launch title. When Saints Row 1 came along, we didn’t try to target next-gen launch, because we wanted to give it the time and make it the best it could be.
We kind of used the same principles with Saints Row IV. Because of the timing of this game’s release, [if we had attempted next-gen] it would have essentially had to be a launch title for PlayStation 4 and whatever else comes next. And we didn’t want to try and force this thing into being next-gen. We wanted to be able to take the time to add in a lot of crazy new things like super-powers and aliens and things like that. And honestly, I don’t think we’d have been able to do any of that if we had to build all of this new technology to work with next-gen.
SPOnG: Have you had a chance to tinker with the PS4 at all?
Jim Boone: We do have some people looking at such things at the studio, but unfortunately nothing I can talk about.
Jim Boone: We’re definitely intrigued by the things that Sony’s doing. The thing that excites me most about it are the features that go beyond just adding extra hardware. I mean, of course as developers we want all the memory and horsepower we can possibly get... but I’m intrigued by some of the additional things.
One of the things that always happens with Saints Row games is that people love to make YouTube clips. There’s loads of them - because it’s such an absurd game, people usually find a way to record a clip that’s unlike anything else out there. So with something like the PS4 the ability to hit a button, record the footage you’ve just seen and send it out to someone is awesome.
There have been so many times I’ve played Saints Row and I come across something amazing... and I wish I had a way of recording it and showing someone. Something that’s so trivial that Sony has implemented, I think could be really awesome for the games that we do at least.
SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time.
Jim Boone: Thank you very much!