We have a solid gameplay code to work with now, problem is we have a severe lack of coding autists or anyone who will want to deal with this franchise after being burned so much. The best one died of cancer. I'll bet someone will just rebuild Agents Of Mayhem with this, or make their own faggy SR game that gets C&D'd by deep silver because they were retarded enough to advertise it before releasing the files for it. I can literally just write fanfiction and game narrative rewrites here that sound more appealing and appeasing to us fans of 1-2 than anything that will ever be done with this IP again, at least for the next decade.
Saints Row died because beginning with 3, the writer became retarded or held back. This weakened the importance of enemy factions and how they were tied in to the story. Their influence means nothing, the mission design is all over the place in 3, relegated to literal side tier optional missions essentially instead of focusing on one or multiple faction missions. Its all random hamfists of minigames, all of the boss fights are shallow, all of the shootouts and fights cutscenes and gameplay wise are not as interesting as 1 and 2 where there were heavier stakes like having Shaundi's ex hold her hostage, tricking a guy to crush his girlfriend in his monster truck, Johnny Gat burying a man alive who disrespected a funeral of a loved one he lost, betrayals in 1, Carlos being tortured with road burn ending with you having to pit him out of his misery. In 4 it is so non-serious and a non-threat because you have prototype tier powers now and its all just about the silly aliens while also being a lazy rehash of 3 and areas of 1/2 setting-wise. Its fun, but it isn't really Saints Row which I see as a successor of sorts to ideas found in GTA San Andreas and classic gta. SR1-2 bleed the good designs and amp it up for modern hardware. If you wanna know what happened to GTA III, VC, and SA they all lived on through Saints Row 1 and 2, and people see the clone as a negative but ironically I feel like because they clearly understood what made gta fun and satisfying they were able to get a formula and design not even IV, V and soon VI could replicate since they were scaled back for realism and shallow old reliable game design. 1 and 2 are addicting, especially 2. In 3 it is held back as the story missions are mediocre, the characters for the mostpart are forgettable, and now the core of saints row and what made it fun is lesser. See, what made SR genius was the way you had some freedom. You could do whacky activities that were chaotic and gave you rewards, it was like downtime in between the more serious story missions focused on controlling territory and rising to the top. There was genuine GROWTH. In SR3 you are immediately given a high class penthouse, which could be fun but it cheapens the idea storywise because now they use the saints being popular as a lazy excuse to let you do whatever you want which falls into the trap of having too much freedom which feels burdensome or pointless. There is no real struggle with the saints being this worldwide brand anymore and it takes a bad ending just to get a really good line delivery from Killbane about the saints whereas in 1 and 2 you had many memorable antagonists that posed a threat to you and your gang. In SR1 gangs would literally pull drivebys on you sometimes and the ammo pool was limiter and expensive, which made things pretty unforgiving but annoying. My point about villains and story would be how much more dramatic 1 and 2 were. It was, at its core; a story about a criminal gang and all of the baggage with it, with some silly aspects added in through the wit of characters like Johnny. The gameplay tied everything in a near perfect bow. All of it crashed and burned in 3, and then it was flanderized as if the silliness were some defining pillar of the series when it was only an aspect. All things in the duology are done incredibly well, and time has been very kind to them since even younger people may still cite SR2 as one of their all-time favorites.
