Goodbye Volition
- Thread starter Admixon
- Start date
And here we are rn saw Volition closed
hate to go on about it but since i recall Sarkeesian talking about sex workers in video games a lot i think it was a wild fuckin subversion of that age old "beating up prostitutes in gta" caricature to make Boss, the main character of these games, canonically a prostitute in sr2. like knowing what the public perception of gta was at the time it is so on the nose it's hard to believe it was completely coincidental. the concept alone kinda blows those turtlenecks right outta the water, too bad they didn't really do much with it beyond the diversion
They peeked with SR2, then just couldn't seem to replicate that formula in their future games.
We can blame it on the story, the writers, the graphics, the publishers, the "woke agenda"... Whatever.
But the truth is, they made the perfect game, lost the source code, then just rebuilt the series from scratch and lost the thread.
Just look at how immersive SR2 was, I once did a run of the game where I ignored the main story and just played the role of a paramedic for a few weeks. So I managed to make an honest living in a game designed to be about gang violence.
You want to build up a gambling debt, go for it. You want to rip off crazy taxi, go for it. You want to spend a few hours spraying literal shit all over the entire city, guess what, you can do that too.
SR2 gave players the chance to play the game any way they wanted to. Every game after that was always too structured, where everything was interconnected and you felt like nothing was particularly optional. It all had to be done to progress the game.
If I didn't want to do a bunch of activities to earn respect to play the story in SR2, then I just chose the easiest thing to do that earns respect and grind it out for a few minutes.
And the explorability, I've played that game for probably over 10 years now, and to this day, I'm still finding new locations and secrets that I've never found before. It could be anything from an entire row of buildings, to a small security camera up in the mountains, but I still keep finding new things that show they really did pay attention to detail in that game.
I used to hold out hope that they'd give the modding community access to the source code once they found it, but now they're gone and I don't even know who's hands the source code is now in.
If I had the money, I'd buy the SR2 source code & rights from them and then let the modding community keep the SR series alive through the one game that made this series the best gaming experience of my life.
But... I'm not even rich enough to quit my soul crushing job, so... This is literally a dream that will never come true.
We can blame it on the story, the writers, the graphics, the publishers, the "woke agenda"... Whatever.
But the truth is, they made the perfect game, lost the source code, then just rebuilt the series from scratch and lost the thread.
Just look at how immersive SR2 was, I once did a run of the game where I ignored the main story and just played the role of a paramedic for a few weeks. So I managed to make an honest living in a game designed to be about gang violence.
You want to build up a gambling debt, go for it. You want to rip off crazy taxi, go for it. You want to spend a few hours spraying literal shit all over the entire city, guess what, you can do that too.
SR2 gave players the chance to play the game any way they wanted to. Every game after that was always too structured, where everything was interconnected and you felt like nothing was particularly optional. It all had to be done to progress the game.
If I didn't want to do a bunch of activities to earn respect to play the story in SR2, then I just chose the easiest thing to do that earns respect and grind it out for a few minutes.
And the explorability, I've played that game for probably over 10 years now, and to this day, I'm still finding new locations and secrets that I've never found before. It could be anything from an entire row of buildings, to a small security camera up in the mountains, but I still keep finding new things that show they really did pay attention to detail in that game.
I used to hold out hope that they'd give the modding community access to the source code once they found it, but now they're gone and I don't even know who's hands the source code is now in.
If I had the money, I'd buy the SR2 source code & rights from them and then let the modding community keep the SR series alive through the one game that made this series the best gaming experience of my life.
But... I'm not even rich enough to quit my soul crushing job, so... This is literally a dream that will never come true.
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How about "Motor Oriented Crime Related Open World Action Adventure Game"?
It's not just that, there's no tonal unity in the series; 3, 4, GooH, AoM, and 2023 all have a different tone both to each other and 1 & 2!
Speaking of that: the whole reboot thing really does beg the question of just why didn't they innovate on the age old "GTA mission structure" to capitalize on what people like doing nowadays. GTA RP is freaking huge exactly because role playing in a giant sandbox like that can be really compelling and something that you could actually build a whole game around.
I'm not talking about just being a paramedic or a cop of course but rather applying role playing concepts on the overall game design. Like imagine an SR game where role playing doesn't stop at character customization but you can have things like different character builds. What if I want to roleplay as a boss who hates firearms so instead he is a big bruiser using melee weapons? What if I'm a charismatic leader who doesn't like doing the dirty work so my gang is huge and I turn to my underlings when brutality has to be applied?
A game like that could have a more freeing narrative with a lot more choice too. For example you could choose which opposing gangs to destroy or to ally with, which characters to kill and who to spare etc. and I feel that these things would come as natural game design choices when it comes to taking the template of SR2 and changing it to be more modern and slick instead of pushing out a reboot that feels like a cheap chinese knockoff of GTA with a lot of its side activities coming from GTA Online.
Compared to the whole tagline being "self made" SR 2022 was the most creatively bankrupt version of SR imaginable and that could have been helped in such obvious ways if they only let go of GTA being the gold standard on how to do a game like this.
SR2 is your first dream where you can
Seeing how many women cloth are in SR2 i think they planning to made Female boss are canon but they dont make it.. and then the one and only your character are female its only in the reboot since your character sit in the beach chair like women.... I find it its funny they walk and run like a man lol.
if sr turned into an rpg i'd fucking burst a vessel i'm not gonna lie, it's been my worst nightmare since i got into this series. the reason why sr1 and 2 are my favorite games to begin with is exactly because the series completely subverted my expectations in this regard, having a customizable main character and not having them turn out to be just another blank slate completely devoid of personality and agency to make absolutely 100% sure the player's personal perception of them isnt't being stepped on. sr2 was written tight as hell exactly because Boss is like an actual person with actual drive and not just some faceless avatar with Insert Personality Here written on their forehead.
Writing a game in the way SR2 handles its characters is fine for sure but the thing is that literally every single one of these games is doing the same thing so doing the opposite would be an obvious way to stand out. Aesthetic customization is a good idea on paper but honestly a lot of people just don't give a shit about it when it doesn't affect anything gameplay or story related and just exists in its own bubble as a completely disconnected thing. And there is a good middle ground to achieve between "player driven" and "narrative driven" too I feel, for example Mafia 3 is very character and story driven yet you can achieve slightly different builds and outcomes when it comes to dividing up city districts between your underbosses. Sparing or killing enemy leaders only affects your income though.
An SR game should absolutely go further with that but I don't think that people would want an actual RPG but rather something with a lot of build variety and narrative choices. Even if you give players the option to make up their own boss the game could still surprise you with the outcomes of your decisisons and it only takes good writing to tie everything up in a way that makes sense narratively. A lot of good RPGs manage to achieve this and an SR game doesn't have to have Fallout New Vegas levels of outcomes.
there's a lot of interesting nuance to this topic because these kinda games have immense amounts of potential for variation in general, but i gotta focus on the narrative/cc aspect here specifically because every single other game in this genre was and is not doing the exact same thing as sr did, because they do not have character customization to the level sr does and presented in the way it was in the series' marketing. many people already play sr like an rpg, they create their own character with their own preferences for clothing and weapons and so on, but the magic of these games is that you're not forced to do that to enjoy the narrative to its absolute fullest. being able to not give a shit about that aspect is a choice all on its own and that is what the true "player choice" in this series always was about for me, it creates a very unique balance with player creativity and being narrative driven that i haven't seen any other game even try to achieve, not in this tiny little genre within a genre or elsewhere. trying to forcefully tug it towards one extreme or the other would just be diluting what makes these games so endlessly interesting to me.
like the series could definitely evolve to bring more variation and depth to gameplay and such, it's been a long time since 2008, but i'd personally be devastated to see such evolution come at the expense of this balance. i think explicitly aiming for a more rpg-like experience is entering some very dangerous waters in this sense.
like the series could definitely evolve to bring more variation and depth to gameplay and such, it's been a long time since 2008, but i'd personally be devastated to see such evolution come at the expense of this balance. i think explicitly aiming for a more rpg-like experience is entering some very dangerous waters in this sense.