Saints Row 2

Saints Row 2 is taking on GTA. With customisation, a solid co-op mode and Tera Patrick on its side, Voltition's series has got a good chance of attracting the fans put off the genre by GTA IV's more gritty approach.

Alright, it's not going to beat Rockstar at the bank any time soon, but when we sat down with producer Dan Sutton he did a good job of talking up the game's strengths - mainly its massive amounts of customisation - and we reckon it's definitely got a strong position alongside the genre titans of this generation. You might even love it.

Here's what he had to say on tackling the PS3 and creating controversy on Wii.

This is the first time you've shown Saints Row on PS3. The last game was announced then canned for PS3 - how has the development situation on PS3 changed since then?

Sutton: In Saints Row 1 we got about half way through the process and then we realised that we just couldn't get our heads around the Cell technology. It's just really complicated and I'm sure you noticed other games like Stranglehold push their dates up.

The biggest thing was we just hired a PS3 dedicated team. There's a really, really large team on there and they got through all the issues we had on Saints Row 1. Now we're up to showing PS3 at the same level and only one day behind the Xbox, which is really exciting for us.

The biggest problems were just getting our heads around the technology. Cell's really, really powerful. The problem is it's also a really different system, the way it uses multi-threading technology. It was really hard for us to wrap our heads around and we got to the point where we were like, 'if we're going to release it it's going to be way too late'.

Do you think the industry's finally got it's head around the PS3 technology now then?

Sutton: I think it's closing. There are still difficulties on it, I think you still see some games push out their PlayStation ports a little bit later.

I think now the support's there at least - we've had many conversations with Sony trying to get our heads around that. We see PlayStation-only bugs pop up.

There are Xbox only bugs too, but the problem is those PlayStation-only bugs are so complicated and Sony didn't have the support to help us out during the Saints Row 1 development. But now we have that support and it's really exciting.


You mentioned you've got a dedicated PlayStation team on board. What does this mean for platform-specific features on the console?

Sutton: There aren't many differences. They're basically a one-to-one parody but the only thing we did was add SixAxis support for planes, jet skis and helicopters. Beyond that it's one-to-one basically. We don't have any special things, we're not giving any exclusives to Xbox or PlayStation right now.

Coming back to the game, what lessons did you learn from the first Saints Row?

Sutton: The biggest complaint that we had as a team was not being able to do stuff besides four-wheeled vehicles. The streaming technology back then was pretty good but I think you saw stuff like 'buggy Saints Row' video comes out and we realised that we had to re-do our streaming system. We really wanted to go vertical in this one, we wanted to let you fly planes and helicopters.

That was one of the biggest challenges in this one, we had to re-write our system and re-write our engine so that it could support different types of streaming technologies. So you can actually get above and look at the world below you all rendered. You can't have these holes in the world that we were able to mask up in Saints Row 1.

On top of that co-op is one of the biggest things. We've seen games like Crackdown and how much fun people had with co-op and we want to take it to another level. That's been one of the biggest difficulties but we've finally got to the point where we've got stable co-op, it looks great, it plays great and it's probably the funniest feature in the game.

How important do you think co-op is to the sequel?

Sutton: Really important. We wanted to do some stuff to differentiate ourselves from Grand Theft Auto so we knew that customisation, co-op and our combat would do that.

Once you hop in there and you play it's amazing. Just to see how much fun it is to go with a partner, do missions, see the fact that missions play differently when you play them with a partner.



You have different strategies in co-op, you do different objectives. We think it's going to push us through and drive sales up a ton just because it's so much fun.

You listed Crackdown as one of your inspirations. Have you taken many pointers from it?

Sutton: Yeah, definitely. We're definitely students of the genre. When Crackdown comes out we play that, when GTA IV comes out we play that. We definitely played through that, we saw what Crackdown had in its co-op system.

We saw that they had an untethered system so if you go any place traffic would spawn there, you could go to one side of the map, your co-op partner could be on the other side of the map and you'd still be able to interact with objects around you.

We wanted to do that but we also wanted to make sure that the game evolves and changes as you play co-op, which some of these games didn't have. They didn't have different objectives that came in, we have all these diversions and activities we want to make sure you're able to do. We wanted to take a solid system like what Crackdown had, and then improve upon that and inject it into everything we do in our game.

It looks to us like you've taken a much more arcadey approach with the second game's combat and such?

Sutton: I think so. I think Saints Row 1 was kind of a fast-paced, shoot 'em up approach. We just want you to be able to go in, blow things up... we're all about having fun basically.

We don't want to slow down the combat at all. If you want that you have a game like GTA which was a great game, but it's a very slow thing - you can hide behind cover for an hour and just keep shooting at opponents. We want missions to be really fast-paced. You get through them fast, you blow up a ton of things along the way and you make an impact on the world as you play the game. It was a very conscious effort.


How have you balanced the arcadey, heavy customisation-based stuff with cinematics and plot?

Sutton: In Saints Row 1 people complained about the story, especially the ending for example where you got blown up on the boat. We decided we wanted to take lessons from movies like Pulp Fiction where you have this dark, comedic humour.

So if you want to play through as a badass character you can do that, but we have a lot of consumers who just want to make really outrageous characters. If you want to do your missions in a hotdog suit, you can do that. It definitely looses serious darkness but if you want to play it that way you can do it.

It's all about the user experience. If you get bored playing one way you can go back and change the way you look. I think it adds playability by being able to go through and play as a celebrity or yourself.

Volition has decided to focus on completely on free-roaming games. Why do you think the genre has become so popular in this generation of consoles?

Sutton: I think people want to do everything in a game. They don't want an eight hour limited experience, they want to be able to go in and if they see something in the world, for example a mail box, they want to be able to pick that up and use it as a prop. Or they want to fly a helicopter, pilot a jet ski through an underground channel... people want to do everything and we want to try an capture that element as best as we can.

I think these are the games that people latch on to, put hundreds of hours in to... if people pay $60 for a game they want to be able to get their money's worth.

Doesn't focusing on this genre make your life as a developer incredibly difficult though?



Sutton: It was a very, very hard decision for the studio. But then again one of the good things is we have Red Faction Guerrilla and we have Saints Row 2 - two open world games. The good thing about that is we do have technology that we can share. For example there are things in Saints Row two that you can blow up now which we took from Red Faction.

We don't use the same engines but we're able to share technologies. It makes it a lot easier in the long run. If Red Faction was a first-person shooter it'd be a lot more difficult because we'd be investing a lot of resources into processes that don't match up with each other. So I think in the long run as a studio it makes it easier for us, because we're focusing on one genre and we're trying to do the best we can.

GTA IV: It's out, the public have played it, finished it, destroyed it. Does it have legs? And if so what does that mean for your game?

Sutton: GTA's definitely our biggest competitor. The encouraging thing is that a lot of people seem to be in favour of Saints Row. I saw on the internet comments that a lot of users seem to feel that GTA IV went to the realistic gameplay and lost a lot of the fun experiences from games like San Andreas. San Andreas is one of my favourite games and Vice City was a lot of fun too - just the whacky activities you got up to, the fast paced action.

They really slowed it down for this one. They made it really realistic. It's an awesome environment but I think they lost a lot of fun factor. We've seen that on a lot of forums. It's been months since it came out and multiplayer's kind of held on to that. There are still some things you can go back and do like the hitman stuff, there's some racing activities you can do, you can shoot pigeons if you want... but beyond that there's not that much replayability.

That's why we wanted to add co-op, all this different missions, diversions... you're just getting rewarded for playing the game. That's what we feel is the defining factor of Saints Row.

So you've got the customisation edge over GTA, but you also mentioned you've improved the combat system a lot?

Sutton: Yeah. The free-roaming aiming reticle is one thing that we like. We like the first-person shooter type thing injected into a third-person game because it just seems that you can actually get the targets you want.

A lot of games have targeting systems that work 90% of the time and then the other 10% you're shooting at someone 50 yards down to the left, when you're really trying to aim towards the guy at the right.

So we refined that. The melee system is improved too; we have finishing moves, power up punches, human shields... just new strategies that you didn't have in Saints Row 1.

Wrapping up, we have to ask what you thought of E3 this year?

Sutton: It's definitely evolved from the E3 of a few years ago. Now it feels like an isolated event. You have events that are in separate rooms now; you have to go to THQ's booth or Sega's room... it just feels like it does need a change, it needs to evolve a lot more. It either needs to get back to what it used to be or probably dissolve as a whole.

It may lean more towards these gamers days that you're seeing, just because it was too expensive first off, there are too many games being forced at journalists and they can't dedicate their time towards your products. It's more affective to give journalists a one-on-one encounter with your product as opposed to these massive events where they get just a quick glimpse.

And the press conferences?

Sutton: Microsoft impressed me a lot. Nintendo didn't seem to do as much as these other companies did. The game line-up impressed me for Microsoft, Sony too. The Wii is definitely focused on a genre that we're not. We're not really a Wii-based studio at all. I'd say that was definitely underwhelming.

At Volition we're really about pushing really good graphics and with the Wii you just fell like you're playing on an older console. Although they do have the really cool motion controllers, but with games like ours you get much more controversy when you add motion controls like you saw with Manhunt 2 and Scarface. We're definitely focused on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Do you think Saints Row Wii would receive the same controversy?

Sutton: Oh I'm sure it would. We have weapons like chainsaws, satchel charges, stuff like that. I can definitely see people having a problem and outcry towards that because it does actually feel like you're using weapons that way.

In Manhunt it feels like you're hacking at somebody, though I suppose that was a bit more over the top than our game was. But yeah, I definitely think you'd get criticism for that in our game, GTA and Crackdown.

Interview: Saints Row 2 - ComputerAndVideoGames.com