Saints Row IV AMA Talks Grand Theft Auto V, Next-Gen, Multiplayer, Co-op, Australia, Movie, Dragons, Dildos, DLC, The Last of Us Crossover, More

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What’s the current situation with the Australian Classification?

We are actually waiting to hear back on our edited version now and should hear any day now. We tried to appeal their ruling – hoping that we wouldn’t have to release an edited version of the game in Australia but were rejected a second time. Now we wait to see if we made enough edits to satisfy the Australian rating board, which should be the case. We’ll see!

Do you feel that people who play a censored version of the game will be missing something, or will all the important stuff still be present?

I certainly wish we didn’t have to release a censored version in Australia, but as you can imagine there really was’t anything we could do about it. I will say that the changes we’ve made are not too disruptive to the game. Assuming the current edited version gets approved the Australian version will be missing one weapon and one mission, and that is it – nothing else will be changed assuming this passes.

Was there anything that was suggested for Saints Row IV that you wish you could have added, but did not have the time? Also, can you give a little insight on what happened with the SR franchise when THQ went bankrupt?

Scott loves to tell the story about how we had a flyable dragon in the game at one point. We had a week where the team could do anything they wanted, and a group of people added a dragon. It was work in progress but did work. The problem was that it would have taken a fair amount of work and time to get right, so it didn’t make it in the game. Wish it could have!

As for SR during the THQ bankruptcy, basically companies were free to bid on THQ as a whole, or on individual items such as Volition and SR. Deep Silver ended up winning us, and we couldn’t be happier with the way things have gone!

What is the most wack thing ever submitted to be put in the game by an employee?

Wow, that is a really good question! Given how many crazy things we have in the game, you can imagine that we’ve had some pretty crazy ideas that didn’t actually make it in game. I would say the flyable dragon I just talked about above would be one that jumps to mind. I always laugh when Scott talks about how the dragon isn’t in SR4 not because it was too crazy, but because we didn’t have enough time to do it right. Would have been amazing!

Will there be the return of mission replay in Saints Row IV?

Sadly, we won’t have mission reply for SR4. Based on changes that were made to the engine in SR3, it makes mission replay fairly challenging for us to get working. I wish we had time to have included this in SR4.

Can our Saints Row: The Third character be carried over to Saints Row IV?

It can indeed! We’re really happy we were able to add this to SR4. You just need to make sure you are logged onto your existing profile and then you can load your character!

What would you say to try to persuade a gamer who has only played GTA IV and never played a Saints Row title before, to try Saints Row: The Third? Also what made you go with such a strong sci-fi theme for Saints Row IV?

For fans of GTA IV, I think they would definitely enjoy SR4 quite a bit. There is no doubt the tone of SR4 is quite different than GTA, but we’re both open world games with a TON of things to do. Where SR4 is different is having some really over the top moments throughout the game, along with our super powers and aliens. This really changes up the gameplay quite a bit.

As for sci-fi, we felt like it would be a really fun way to change things up for the SR series, especially by adding super powers.

What’s next for the Saints Row franchise? Saints Row V, or something completely different?

No idea at this point! Now that we’re finally done with SR4 (but plenty of DLC ahead of us), we’re at the point where we can start to look at what is ahead.

What are your opinions on people saying that SR4 is just 50$ DLC for SR3?

Honestly I completely understand why people had this question when SR4 was first announced. We talked about how we were developing our expansion pack (Enter the Dominatrix), and then were doing a full sized game instead,. Then we were purchased by Deep Silver, so there were even more questions.

Now that we have finally been able to really talk about the game, and how we’ve been working on SR4 since the end of SR3, I think people are seeing it isn’t just expensive DLC. We have SO much content in SR4 – there are even more things to do in SR4 than there were in SR3. We’ve made a lot of major additions like superpowers and aliens, full mission campaign, tons of side quests and activities, an unbelievable number of collectibles. SR4 is definitely a full game and I hope people are getting a better sense of what the game has to offer as we have shown more an more of it over the past number of months.

How does the Importing System work? Will you have to be signed in to a SaintsRow.com account?

You will indeed need to be signed in to that account. This is the way we save all your characters so that’s how you’ll be able to download and share your characters with others.

Do you have any plans to include destructible environments in your future games like you had in the Red Faction series?

Unfortunately that isn’t something that is a part of SR4. The biggest problem we have with our destruction engine is how expensive it is. This means we would never be able to create a world anywhere close to the size and density as we have with Steelport. Once we shrink the size of our city enough to accommodate the destruction engine, we wouldn’t have a city close to the size of what fans would expect for a city based open world game. I wish we could make it happen, it would be amazing for sure, but it just isn’t doable from a tech standpoint.

Are you going to do a multiplayer for Saints Row IV where its like an MMO and everybody can see the other players, but there are still NPC’s?

Unfortunately we don’t have anything like that planned for SR4. For us, the focus was on co-op gameplay since we feel like that is the best way to experience the over the top nature of our game. We did multiplayer on SR1 & SR2 (not MMO), and we found that there weren’t that many people that played that. People really enjoyed playing with a friend and experiencing the story by playing together – this was in SR2 where we introduced co-op. We think that is the sweet spot for SR games, so we’ve stuck with co-op gameplay rather than trying to blow out multiplayer.

Is the character design part in Saints Row IV going to be the same as Saints Row 2?

If you mean character customization, we are very much like SR3 rather than SR2. We have the same types of character and clothing customization as we had with SR3, but obviously with a bunch of new items to chose from.

Are you buying Saints Row IV? Let us know in the comments below.

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