Highlights from the Game Informer interview:
After Gat out of Hell, the team at Volition thought it’d be best to give series a fresh start, with a new tone somewhere between SR2 and SRTT
“Once you add everything and the kitchen sink to the game, it’s difficult to then plan for future games after that because if you start with the climax, where do you go from there? A lot of fans have been wanting us to go back to… a more grounded game.”
The idea behind making a game of the Saints’ origin came from fans requests to see how the Saints were originally formed. “With this, it gave us the opportunity to do that origin story, but not doing something that was set in the ‘80s or something like that to try and tell the origin of the Third Street Saints [from the previous games]. Now we can tell the origin story of these Saints.”
“We wanted to make really well-rounded character because if they’re one-note, they’re not going to stand the test of time. We looked at the past characters, and what aspects about them really made them stand out, and what roles they filled.”
“At no point did we want to just make a cookie cutter of, ‘We need a Johnny Gat character so let’s just reskin him as somebody else.’ We wanted all of these characters to be able to stand on their own.”
As the story begins, you control a low-level member of a militaristic faction known as Marshall in Santo Ileso, a city inspired by American Southwest.
Life is hard, and rent is expensive, so you put aside your gangs’ differences and decide to split an apartment with fellow grunts from your rival factions.
The rival roommates clash heads occasionally, but they quickly establish a house code where they have to leave their work lives at the door when they enter the apartment. Paying rent was worth more than anything else.
They need each other to survive; after all, low-level members don’t pull in the big bucks. They start doing small crime together like robbing stores to make the ends meet. Their personalities complete each other.
The first mission, “Making Rent” follows the friend group as they rob a loan office called Payday. Eli sets the whole plan, with a planned karaoke night afterwards. They walk up to the single guard, who is on the phone, point a gun to his face and the Boss says him to “walk away before the phrase dead end job gets literal.”
The whole mission focuses on car combat as you evade the cops, and finally go to a meeting spot at a junkyard, which is unfortunately owned by Panteros Neenah works for, and ask for their cut. It all breaks into combat you gotta fight out of causing the karaoke night to get cancelled
They see how well they work together and decide to form their own criminal empire and have the riches they dreamed off. Eli suggests they need a proper office space, to which Neenah suggest an abandoned church in the Mercado district.
The church is in the sorry state, but improves as the story progresses. They notice the fleur-de-lis symbols representing Catholic saints, and the sign becomes the crew’s logo, and they adopt the name “The Saints”, as your character officially becomes “The Boss”
Church is customizable, and you unlock individual items to decorate it with as you complete objectives and side activities
Huge emphasis is put on car combat too, in the trailer they got healthbars above them, and you’ll be able to get on the roof of the cars and shoot at the enemies, as well as a “brand new drift mechanics”
2nd mission features Kevin getting kidnapped by Idols for crossing them, and has Boss rescue them after they wrongfully assume he hooked up with someone instead (they use gender neutral terms too, and boss thinks a random guy answering his phone is the hookup… bi icon…)
You go to a bar his phone pinged from just to check, and find out he was captured. You shake a guy down and he tells you they tied him up tot he City’s landmark and plan to blow it up as a message to everyone who crosses them.
You go there, disarm 4 bombs (journalist hints its because of your marshall training kicking in), and then use your wingsuit to fly to a mansion where there’s an ongoing Idols party, and kill them all for messing with your friends (sounds a lot like Party Time mission from SRTT)
There are also “side missions”, called “Side Hustles” which are half the mission the main story ones are and are similar to activities in previous game, but not exactly (one sounds like trafficking 2.0, other sounds like “race” from AOM)
True highlight are “Criminal Ventures”, which are businesses you can build around the city to serve as fronts for your illegal operations, all of the giving you new side missions and even upgrades. You can build a total of 15 businesses.
The demo journalist played only had a Bright Future scam, which is a nuclear waste plant Saints own and dumb nuclear chemicals for he private corporations that pay them to do it, and a taco business that serves as a drug smuggling front
The journalist picked the taco business, which had Neenah introduce her friend Chuy who knows the distribution business inside and out, and according to Neenah, makes a killer michelada. (seems like every business will have a person running the operation for you)
All ventures have several missions in a chain before you complete them, taco business one has you stealing other food trucks and bringing them back to be converted into your own business. Bright Future one had you go to remote locations and pick up trucks with nuclear waste you gotta deliver to your waste plant (but you gotta drive carefully, if you’re too reckless the containers will blow up, earning you less money)
100% each of them gives you a new wacky reward. There’s a military surplus which can unlock you new weapons, and even a hoverboard for completing all instances of it.
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