The Saints Row reboot is being bombarded with dislikes on YouTube, with fans condemning the reveal trailer for failing to capture the spirit of either original games or the more recent wacky adventures. I think this is largely due to the absence of certain characters and a familiar setting, with gamers mad that this new vision isn’t exactly like the open world adventures they grew up playing. I mean, they’re all wearing purple, what more do you want? The sense of entitlement emanating from this needless anger is laughable. It isn’t the first time we’ve seen the internet hurl abuse and discontent on a development team for daring to try something different or leave the past behind, recognising that the medium can’t forever be a slave to dwindling nostalgia, and it probably won’t be the last.
Games are a bit of a stagnant field, having reached the point in their maturity that there now exists a healthy well of nostalgic releases to pull from and remake or remaster instead of risking the expensive proposition of creating new worlds and fostering unique ideas that we’ve never seen before. While new properties are still relatively common and indie games continue to innovate upon the medium in bold and surprising ways, older publishers are keenly aware of the appeal that comes with things we are familiar with. Nostalgia is a powerful thing – we are all drawn to the worlds, characters, and systems we grew up with. They helped shape who we are today, so it’s natural to feel an urge to revisit them in a new light, whether they’ve been subtly updated or completely overhauled for a new generation.
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Before I come across as a hypocrite, I’ll be the first to admit that I adore remakes and remasters. Final Fantasy 7 Remake was my favourite game of last year, and Death Stranding Director’s Cut is probably my most anticipated title of 2021. I love to see things I love be reimagined or expanded upon in unexpected ways, yet I also realise the importance of new experiences and for developers to abandon established properties in favour of greener pastures. The return of Saints Row is an inherent safe bet on behalf of Volition. The studio tried to branch out with Agents of Mayhem, a game that shared the same universe as the crime caper, yet aimed to build upon it with new gameplay mechanics and a world that isn't centered on building a corrupt empire. It flopped, largely because it wasn’t what we’ve come to expect from Volition, and to me that feels unfair.
Saints Row might be a safe bet, but it’s also different from what people expected, and that’s a cardinal sin in a medium that has spent years carving out comfortable spaces for people to form their identities around particular franchises. The Boss, Gat, Shaundi, Pierce, Kinzie, and so many other characters from this universe have gone down in history, and some have seen abandoning them as a slight on their personal preferences. How dare Volition have the nerve to take a world it helped invent and change it for a new audience, for a new generation of players who might have never touched the original games? As we grow older, it’s important to recognise that things will move on without us.
Games, films, books, and television shows will come to reflect aspects of the world that we aren’t a part of anymore. Saints Row is seemingly doing that, its cast now a younger selection of millennials and zoomers contending with real world issues like student debt and societal disparity, turning to a life of seemingly wholesome crime to overcome their struggles. It’s relatable while maintaining the original game’s sense of charm and wackiness, and also seems to abandon a number of horrendously sexist businesses and tropes that defined the earlier entries. It’s making necessary steps to modernise itself, and harassing developers or ratioing the trailer on YouTube is proof that you’ve failed to accept that. The standard protagonist being a woman of colour instead of a white dude and being met with so much hate also rubs me the wrong way, and it fits the usual suspects of harassment we’ve come to associate with this sort of crowd. It sucks, and we don’t know nearly enough about the game yet to draw any conclusions. It could be rubbish, and we can judge it on those merits, but it could be absolutely incredible. We just don’t know, but the internet has made up its mind so that doesn’t matter.
Big publishers are now servants to popular live service titles and the occasional remaster or sequel to help populate their libraries, with new ideas being few and far between. This is a direct result of our attitude towards the medium, and a failure to adopt new ideas as we happily accept new spins on existing games alongside little else of worth. Remastered games have a place in today’s landscape, and I do love them, but if we’re going to react to reboots like Saints Row with such rampant vitriol then perhaps we don’t even deserve them. Now gameplay has begun to surface, the tune is changing, which is a sign that we shouldn’t immediately demonise anything new the moment it doesn’t abide by our own irrational expectations. We need to do better.
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