They've been really
the latest sequel, which arrives on August 20. Then, in November of last year, Volition's parent company THQ went bankrupt. Suddenly the Saints Row franchise was unmoored, and Volition were forced to sit on their hands. I was on Christmas break from THQ when I got an email that said Hey, come into the office, we're going up for auction', says Steve Jaros, studio creative director at Volition. It was New Year's Day, actually. That's when I read the email. Volition spent the month of January in limbo, seeing potential buyers come and go. Reception to the singular weirdness of Saints Row varied from buyer to buyer, but Deep Silver, a subsidiary of Koch Media best known for publishing the Dead Island Runescape games, seemed especially interested. The deal was done by the end of January. After a month in limbo, the fate of Jaros' job and Saints Row IV were no longer in jeopardy. Says Jaros: There would be no Saints Row were it not for Deep Silver. In spite of Volition's acquisition, they were not out of the woods. There are tonal subtleties in the Saints Row series that needed to remain intact. Again, this is a series that lets you play as a toilet. This is a series that lovingly ridicules every bad videogame cliche and parodies an increasingly shallow and celebrity-obsessed culture. Jaros needed creative control from new owners who were, at the time, a total unknown quantity. You can't not be nervous, he says. You spend years working for another company, and you kind of get your flow going, and all of a sudden it's like you're moving to a new school, you know? Jaros' anxieties were understandable; his company and product were completely uprooted and replanted over the course of just a few weeks, and he was expected to carry on making Saints Row IV as if nothing had ever happened. Luckily, Deep Silver did their best to help Jaros along, which is to say it seems like they [url=http://www.rsmalls.com]Old School RS Gold[/url] did very little at all. It's been amazing. They've been very hands-off, says Jaros. They've been really trusting of us, and we're really grateful for that. As a creative partner, Deep Silver has been a dream. Not to take away from Deep Silver's laissez-faire approach to management, but by the time of Volition's acquisition, the Saints Row IV project was only six months from being finished. It seems probable that Deep Silver knew what they were getting into, and were content to simply let Volition do their thing. Even before Deep Silver laid eyes on the Runescape game, Jaros and his cohorts had already implemented an admirable amount of weird Saints Row stuff. To hear Jaros tell it, the only way for Volition to surpass the toilet-skydiving, Hulk Hogan voice-acted insanity of Saints Row: The Third was to simply throw up their hands and give the Runescape player superpowers. From there, he suggests that the rest of Saints Row IV's scenario practically wrote itself. Once we had superpowers in play and they felt good, he explains, the next question becomes What is an enemy that is worthy of you fighting them with superpowers?' You can't really fight a gang member,頁:
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