Shapeshifting - Will there be a spiritual SR successor?

[EricHVela]

Plaion/Deep Silver closed Volition and seems to have retained all property rights developed by Volition including Saints Row (through Deep Silver divesting Volition), but the Volition crew has since founded Shapeshifter Games and are working with inXile on Clockwork Revolution.

Often, closed businesses that reopen under a new name and under a new or no umbrella will distance their current projects away from their ones they left (or were forced to leave) behind, but sometimes, such a business will create spiritual successors of prior franchises (to varying degrees of success—some better, some rather less so).

In the USA (where Volition was and Shapeshifter is), an application's content and code can be patented and put under copyright. Game mechanics cannot.

(In several countries, getting the former two to be protected can be difficult, but it also took many, many, many tries for Monolith to get a US patent for its Nemesis System, having to argue some direct relationship between the mechanics and the content and code. I haven't read the patent, but I suspect it would be an interesting read to see how they managed it.)

Does anyone think Shapeshifter will attempt to succeed SR with a new property not managed by Plaion/Deep Silver? (Spiritual successors often bear little resemblance to their spiritual predecessor other than a general vibe.)

[LostSoul]

They could certainly create a spiritual successor to Saints Row. The question becomes *which* Saints Row? They each have their own tone and feel, their own vibe that's notably different from the others. SR2 is as different from SRTT as the Reboot is from SR4. If not for the recurring character/names, they could each be their own 'reboot' rather than a continuation.

But more importantly, these kinds of games are prohibitively expensive to develop, something a small(ish) new studio is unlikely to take on as their first project. At least, if the intention is to create something more 'cutting edge' than what came before. If they were to aim a little simpler, like using the art style and detail level of SRTT and SRIV -- which still holds up remarkably well even now -- they might be able to do something similar.

But then there's the elephant in the room that is Agents of Mayhem....

[Saint.Million]

Sad truth is everyone would hate another SR game, unless it is exactly like the particular one they personally favour.
Which is a big part of why 2022 failed.

Personally I'm open to it though. I hope it happens.

[Neit]

Originally posted by Saint.Million:

Sad truth is everyone would hate another SR game, unless it is exactly like the particular one they personally favour.
Which is a big part of why 2022 failed.

Personally I'm open to it though. I hope it happens.

This just feels like a cop-out.

While I don't disagree that before this there were 5 Saints Row games and all of them were quite different from each other, they continued to be successful despite that. This game however committed too many cardinal sins people grow tired off. It was yet another soulless reboot, that stole the name of other game and poisoned search results for what is now a different franchise, released as a very buggy Epic exclusive and to this day, there are numerous bugs of various severity from "I need to restart the game to do this" to "ugh, it crashed again when I finished mission and had to replay it". To add insult to the injury, it's not like these bugs are something new, some of them were already present in previous games, so one would assume that someone capable would be wary of that and try to avoid them in future releases. This is Bethesda level laziness. Story is also almost non-existent, seriously there are like 10 story missions in the base game (SR2 had almost 40, SRTT almost 30), padded by dozens and dozens of activities, some of which are tedious, some are simply atrocious and few of them are actually fun.

Luckily, spiritual successor is not plagued by most of this, they can start anew, following whichever of the previous games formula, tweaking it a bit and moving forward with the goal of making the game fun, interesting and stable. Ideally for a reasonable price. When Blizzard North fell and people regrouped and started from scratch with Torchlight, it was quite a success, despite the fact it wasn't exactly a Diablo 3 people were expecting. So yeah, give me "Devil Street Gang" that follows the formula of one of the previous games and I will probably buy it. I don't care if it's like SR2 or SRTT or SRIV, just make sure it's a fairly priced fun game that does not try to insult the customers with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mentioned in previous paragraph.