ItBurn wrote on Sep 28, 2017, 01:04:
Their new game was badly explained, badly marketed, almost invisible and ... puzzling. How could someone think it had a chance to do good? I wouldn't want to be the person to blame for choosing/green-lighting this project.

Yeah, I was thinking about this. I'm a big SR fan, and while I'm actually not in the mood for that style of game at all, this should have been high on my radar for when I was. But it wasn't.

On one hand, the game makes perfect sense. The Volition team had basically done just SR games for a decade, so they were probably a bit burnt out. They wanted something somewhat new to stretch their creative muscles before diving into SR5. SR4 added some weird abilities, so making a game more around those abilities makes sense, and sounds fun - Saints Row with super powers? Yes, please! And, let's be honest, superheroes are all the rage now, without any real superhero open city games. On paper, I get all this.

But what came out... let's start with the name. I can see how "Agents of Mayhem" worked for them - it communicates that they're part of an organization, and they're chaotic. Great. But it's so generic. It sounds either like a generic, forgotten mid-90s game, or like one of those endless generic mobile games that rely on 1% of gamers paying 1000s a month and the rest waiting for counters to go down. It inspires nothing. Then there was the marketing, which seemed to be around "you're someone new and you have powers" rather than who the characters are or what the powers are. Or what you'd do. Or where you'd do it. Lastly, is anyone really clamoring for an open world superhero game? They were basically everywhere from 2005, with Spider-Man and Hulk games doing it, to the launch of the PS4, with the new Infamous. We haven't had one in a while, that I can remember, and the only one I know is coming up is Crackdown, which at least promises something new with a somewhat destructible city. I feel like we've done so much there you need to really bring something new and innovative to the table, and they didn't communicate well that they did.