Saints Row, and how to properly manage spectacle creep

"It was too crazy for Saint's Row."

As I neared the completion of the Enter The Dominatrix DLC, after having my mind fucked sideways in a dirty alley without a condom, I had an odd thought; Somehow, for four (and a half) games, Saints Row has managed to constantly churn out these batshit crazy third person open world GTA parodies that somehow are actually really good.

On paper, I'm pretty sure the design document of any Saints Row game simply states;
"Make it like Grand Theft Auto, but throw in the craziest scenarios you can think of, toss in huge set pieces and then tie it together with ridiculous character creation. Add a dash of whatever seems to be popular this year."

Saints Row 2 had that Need For Speed; Underground visual aesthetic. Saints Row The Third threw in a bit of Just Cause with some Left 4 Dead, Saints Row IV threw in Prototype. Gat Out Of Hell threw in a dash of mediocrity (honestly should have just been DLC man). But the spectacle of it all never wears out. It's like one of those carnival freakshows, you keep coming back just to see if it has anything else that's so unimaginably weird that you just stare agape and wonder how much cocaine was involved. But let me get to the point.

So when you're making the sequel to a film, book, game, play, whatever you can think of, you have to deal with the inevitable spectacle creep. "The stakes are heightened as they've not only Taken his daughter, but they've also Taken his wife." Every new iteration has to have bigger explosions, bigger bad guys, bigger blue sky holes, larger amounts of CGI alien soldiers to fight, epic battles in space... But there's a ceiling. You cannot keep rising.

So how have they managed? Well, I have to assume at least some cocaine is involved. Look, after driving into oncoming traffic with a tiger in the shotgun seat, fighting zombie clones of a giant russian man named Oleg, after riding velociraptors out of a computer simulation, after beating Santa Clawz with the actual fucking north pole, after jumping out of a plane and hijacking an airborn a tank while shooting hostile skydivers, after going to hell and shooting the ever living crap out of Satan whose daughter had fallen in love with you, after preventing nuclear war and becoming president, after fighting sentient toilets, beating up mexican wrestlers with sex dolls, after beating up prostitutes and gimps with gigantic weaponised dildos, even you'd question the sobriety of whoever the fuck even wrote this shit.

In all fairness, try spending an afternoon just coming up with insane scenarios. Try right now. Just start with Abe Licoln, a Batman cosplayer and a barrista who curses like a sailor but has a soft spot for fluffy kitties, and ask, what's the weirdest thing these three could get up to? Maybe fly to the moon and witness an alien orgy gone wrong. Or visiting the city of Atlantis but accidentally starting a civil war over whether are friends or food. They could get trapped in a computer except it's running Windows XP and every ninety minutes a different teenager comes to wack off to hardcore porn and they have to fight off the malware being downloaded onto the hard drive.

That's just off the top of my head.

Saints Row has embraced spectacle and made it a selling point. Saints Row may have started as "GTA, but batshit", but it's quickly become an acid trip monstrosity that is full of cheap thrills and just enough substance to lose hours to. And it has, for the most part, pretty tight gameplay. For all of the parts that make it a Grand Theft Auto clone, at least mechanically, those parts are always done really well. What also carries us through all the insanity is a somewhat revolving cast of genuinely likeable characters, from the ever cool Johnny Gat, to the chronically sarcastic hacker Kinsey Kenzington, to the adorkable Matt Miller and even Keith David, no connotation needed.

Saints Row is trying to sell insanity and Spectacle Creep is its ally, not its weakness. I'd wager the first order of the day in the writing room is to push the spectacle all the way to its ceiling and tone it back from there. Instead of aiming to go crazier than what came before, aim to go as crazy as possible and then compressing it all into a gang management sim slash Grand Theft Auto clone and suddenly you end up with a solid game with tons of replay value and a word of mouth marketing campaign that includes a bunch of people inadequately trying to describe how crazy Saints Row is. All the character customization and the vibrant city to explore and the cars and gang operations is the just the platform it's delivered on, and you see the progression of the game through its history there, in the dynamics, and not in the presentation.

The other thing you can do is also sell the same game every year with a fresh coat of paint and never try to innovate or push the ceiling or break the mold in fear of a fanbase that only worsens with its expectations as time goes on, but who am I to question the giant that is <Assassin's Creed/Fifa/PES/Call Of Duty/Gran Turismo/PGA Tour/NBA/Any EA sports game ever made>

I guess the take away from this is that more games should experiment just for the sake of experimenting, but we shouldn't get caught up in just delivering bigger and better. It's okay if you just deliver better. It's okay if you scale down the size of your city but tighten up the gameplay and sell the player off as a sex slave as cover for infiltrating an organized crime syndicate. Doing insane things every once in a while is what makes life worth living. But don't do insane things just to be the bigger better iteration of yesterday's game. Approaching the design of your sequel with this in mind is a pitfall many creators fall into, and it's how franchises end up at that point of uncertainty, where they no longer have an identity. Look at the scope of any trilogy of Marvel films. It just widens until you have to ask the question; "We've saved the world, where do we go from here? How do we increase the stakes?"

Saints Row is still asking the question "Is it too insane for Saints Row?".