I liked Saints Row 3 fine, but it really wasn't a great Saints Row game, you didn't feel like a gangbanger at all in that one, with all of the international celebrity/VIP shit and the futuristic weaponry and the sci-fi paramilitary guys with hoverbikes and laser tanks and shit. It was a fun game, sure, but it leaned way too fucking hard in the whacky hijinks direction. Sure, it was fun [although it was really fucking easy, too - I 100%'d it without even really trying to] It's really just like Saints Row IV - great superhero game, shitty Saints Row game. And I was really hoping that with the end of SR IV, they were going to go in the direction of either all of that shit being a dream whilst the Boss/Playa was in a fucking coma again, or they used Zinyak's technology to go back in time and prevent Gat from dying and get back to the roots of the series. Unfortunately they didn't, then of course when they first announced the reboot, I was pretty hopeful with the first promo being the graffitied wall, thinking 'damn that probably means it's not going to be a game about fucking aliens or mutants and superhero shit', then it turned out to be the biggest fucking disappointment ever.
I'd like to have been a fly on the fucking wall in that room where they brainstormed that first Reboot trailer. The one where the androgynous looking dyke 'playa' holds up a rocket launcher, sneers like she just told you off for a micro-aggression in the college library, and says: "hey bad guise, leave my fwends alone!!!" How the fuck did anyone think THAT would appeal to this fanbase?
Likewise, to have been a fly on the wall in Nu-Volition's HQ when it became clear that the Reboot was bombing and all of their snarky 'haters gonna hate' Community Manager bullshit went over like a wet fart and people started packing up their fucking desks and shoving office supplies in their work bag. I can't think of another game that deserved to become a bomb quite so much, it was viscerally satisfying to see it panned, even if it killed Volition. At that point, Volition wasn't what it used to be anyway, 99% of the talented people who made that studio what it was were long gone. It seriously would have been so fucking easy to come up with a concept for the Reboot that catered to the existing fanbase while drawing in new blood, too, and they just fucking fumbled it historically hard. I still can't believe anyone signed off on that fucking bullshit, like I get that this was right smack-dab at the peak of leftoid culture warrior power, but they didn't have to fucking neuter the series to THAT extent even then.
It was really satisfying to watch that fucking turd get flushed, honestly. Every bad review was music to my ears, I can't think of any other game that satisfying to watch bomb and be rejected, aside from maybe Concord. Concord was pretty much the entirety of that virtue-signaling, 'safe edgy', quirk chungus bullshit being outright rejected, so maybe it's a little more satisfying, but the Reboot's downfall was close.