It’s never a good day when you hear that a game in a franchise that is beloved flops, and that the team that made it has to shut its doors as a result. In the case of Volition, which was most known for the Saints Row franchise, that’s exactly what happened. Their “GTA Clone” series may have seemed paper thin in “point” at first, but it slowly became its own entity over time. That became especially true in the third entry, which was the best-selling title of the set, and even a Game of the Year nominee! The fourth game introduced superpowers and an alien invasion, and that’s apparently where Volition and its boss, Deep Silver, decided to scale things back.
They felt it was best to entirely reboot Saints Row and take things back to its core of a young street gang trying to make a life for themselves in a city overrun by other groups. In theory, it would’ve worked out well and allowed for new stories to be told. However, when the title was released, it was plagued by numerous flaws, including game-breaking glitches that couldn’t be overcome, a story that was disjointed in the worst way, and the Saints themselves didn’t feel as engaging as those that came before.
Volition had to shut its doors because of the financial failure that followed, even though it kept improving the game and attempting to add to it with DLC content. The question became, “What happened?”
In a video released to YouTube, user mrsaintsgodzilla21 revealed that he went to Volition in 2019, when the game’s development was going on, and they saw all sorts of things that proved that the reboot would be much different than what it turned out to be later on.
For example, the original Third Street Saints would return, with some of the actors, like the one for Pierce, already recording voice lines. Yet, all of their parts were cut so that the new Saints could get “more time.” Gameplay-wise, there were tons of new elements that were cut, including giving people more control over the city that they slowly bought, and seeing how it would affect everything around it, including the citizens who just walked by certain places.
Even the story had serious changes from what was shown in 2019 to what got released years later, and all of these reveals point to a lot of meddling from Deep Silver and other questionable decisions dooming the game, and thus, dooming Volition.