By Adam Smith on October 3rd, 2011 at 9:57 am.
Saints Row: The Third seems a bit more mad every time I see it and the latest announcement concerning its release is one of the maddest things of all. Showing a keen satirical sensibility, this declaration has emerged from the neon-lit, glitterball-strewn funhouse that is Saints Row HQ:
THQ and Volition announced that the PC version of Saints Row: The Third is scheduled to release exactly when they said it would. Developed in-house at Volition in Champaign, IL and powered by Steam, Saints Row: The Third on PC is not scheduled to be delayed by any unforeseen development problems, shipping issues, inclement weather, or zombie apocalypse. As such, it remains on track for a November 15 release, exactly when we said it would.
In a perfect world, this would not be necessary or amusing, but we live in an imperfect world and those few words sadly show that Volition are paying more attention to their PC audience than some companies seem to do throughout an entire development cycle.
They know we’re scowling about assassins and Arkhams, and they want to make sure we don’t scowl about their Saints this time out. More jubilant, violent glee in a new trailer follows, as Professor Genki returns.
There is very little that didn’t happen in that video. I’m going to say that nobody was inexplicably attacked by paratrooping grizzly bears wearing waistcoats and top hats in the hope that someone at Volition rectifies that by November 15th.
I don’t know that they can brag about their PC support yet considering what an unplayable mess SR2 was
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That port had been outsourced.
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I don’t care that it was outsourced. They are responsible of that mess anyway.
I guess adding “And this time the PC version will not fucking suck.” on that press release was too much, even for them.
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Well…there’s always hope that they learned from that disaster..and also maybe remove the region-locking.
I had to log in to Steam using a vpn just to activate SR2 because it wouldn’t let me play otherwise. Also I hope they fixed the driving.
But apart from that: the fun I had with SR2 somehow made me not care so much about the crappy port..
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They made the RF:A port in-house too and look how it turned up. The game refused to even start on some systems, the controls were bad as always and unconfigurable FoV of <45, and constant crashing issues. I bought that one in good faith, yet it was manifestation of a bad port. So no, I'm not playing any volition games before they make pc only Freespace 3.
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Like GTA4 you needed ridiculous hardware to play it. I got the ridiculous hardware after a while and bought it for 2 euro on steam. Best purchase ever.
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My PC runs SR2 far better than it runs GTA4. I’ve never had any problems at all with SR2. I even tried the “obviously designed for controller” hotkey setup with both a controller and mouse and keyboard, and found it to work better with a mouse and keyboard.
The only thing that annoyed me about it was using the phone, which was not given anything approaching a PC control scheme. But then, you had to use the phone all of about three times in the game if you were being completionist.
I’m not sure I was playing the same game, now.
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I find their comments about this one being ‘done right’ really infuriating. For a start, you shouldn’t have to tell us this time your game won’t be shit. Second, if you are aware of how bad the second game is, then fucking fix it! I still own it, I would still like to play it and I’m not even considering buying this game when they left the last in such a state.
Then again the Xbox version of SR2 was also horribly broken. I bought the game on PC, it didn’t work at all ran terribly and crashed all the time. So I picked up two copies on 360 to play coop. It ran really badly, crashed even more than the pc version and I had to give up on it too.
It’s a shame, I’ve completely lost all faith in them as a company. In my eyes they are completely incompetent developer incapable of finishing a game.
EDIT- I recently upgraded to a faster quad core from my old dual core. It runs better, but still completely unplayable. Also, unlike GTA 4 the graphics are absolutely terrible and don’t justify any performance hit at all. It looks like it was developed for last generation consoles, it should run as such.
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Most ironically, the horrible port for SR2 was by PC heroes and DRM champions CDProjekt. And yet they still couldn’t make it perfectly compatible with Windows 7 and abandoned it after 2 patches. I had no problems with Red Faction Armageddon on the technical side, just the fact that it was a terrible game nobody asked for (herpderp lets turn our open world game into a corridor shooter) soured it for me.
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I’m sort of heavily anticipating and also dreading the amount of games that come out.
I mean I still have way too many games to play and too little time to play it, I was actually relieved when Mass Effect 3 was pushed back because I thought it was too soon to release a game after the second especially to make it as content rich as the previous titles all while developing a fantasy RPG series and a high budget MMO.
Skyrim I cannot wait for and Battlefield, but its games like this that I love that unfortunately are just releasing at such a busy period that means I will either buy it and not play the damn thing or leave it to a sale because I know I won’t play it. Which is silly because I should be anticipating this just as much as the others.
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Same. I still haven’t had a chance to play Deus Ex HR but have this, BF3 and Skyrim on pre-order.
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The brave new DLC world that we’ve suddenly found ourselves in means I rarely if ever buy a game upon release. I’m still smarting from Dragon Age: Origins shattering its meticulous imagined world when it tried to pick my pocket halfway though.
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Albatross: Maybe it’s time to buy what you can play, not what you want? It’s kind of liberating, and it opens the door to discounted games in the otherwise dead January
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That’s what I normally do, it’s just circumstances beyond my control have prevented me playing any games for the last few months, so it was a lack of suitable gaming hardware rather than time that’s resulted in the backlog.
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Now if only they would let us buy it on Steam, eh?
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Try having a go at THQ about that, not Volition. Anyway, it’d be £35 on Steam at launch. I would bet money on it.
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Am I missing something here?
I have it pre-ordered on Steam…I can see it in my library?
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@Item!: It’s blocked from the Steam store in the UK.
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It’s a Steamworks game so no matter where you buy it from, you’ll have to register it on Steam anyway. So is it silly that you can not buy it directly through Steam in this circumstance? Yes. Absolutely. Will it hurt you to visit a different store? Nooo.
Well, not unless your local mom & pop games store has a serrated revolving door.
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Dammit, was planning to get saints row 3 on PS3 (lets face it, its the sort of game that is suited to kickin back and letting other players play as well), but feel i should get it on PC now to support this kind of thing (both the game and the urine extracting)
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Well, considering the fact that it is possible to hook up your pc to any kind of huge monitor/tv and that everybody should have attached one of those xbox-controller-things anyway by now (they really add to the experience in some games, and most games support them quite well)..there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t be able to do just that (sit back on a couch or whatnot and hand the controller to someone else) on the pc.
There’s actually no good reason for consoles to exist at all these days ;)
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What Christian said.
Although I disapprove of Christians.
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There is no way i am delving into the cable jungle to rewire my computer to my TV ,I think there might be spiders in there…. (actually i think there might be, we have an agreement, they stay away from me, i don’t hit them with anything ) :P
I know it can work, but my GFX card isn’t for that, also out of hdmi ports, media pc takes up one!
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@Christian except the price and lack of configuration.
Console can by no means compete with PC in the game quality, it’s just worse in every aspect and everything you can do on console, can be done on PC.
However, for 100$ you can get Arcade XBOX 360 which will run Saints Row 3 and other games. You can’t get a PC for 100$ that could do the same. Even on the same low resolution, low FPS quality without any multisample AA etc.
Also, even tho Steam is extremely easy to use, the PC in general needs way more additional setup than a console, which is basically put the disk in and hit A until you get to play.
I’d say there’s a reason for the casual gamers and students to get a console, for more dedicated gamers with a job? Not so much.
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Initial costs of a 360 are definetly lower. But the reason I disagree is that a 360 needs to be upgraded, or replaced after dying (I’m on my 3rd). Then there is the massive cost of games, the subscription to gold. I’m certain that my 360 has been more expensive than my pc.
Then there is the fact that pretty much everyone owns a pc also. Why not just add an extra 100-200 quid onto the budget of that and make a gaming pc.
People look at the price of a gaming pc straight up. Not working out how much it costs on top of the pc you would have bought anyway.
EDIT- In fact I know my parents spend more on pcs that are incapable of gaming far more regularly than I.
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<3 THQ & Volition
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Was that a gameshow where you could shoot your wife…must buy
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Also, flying kick to the face of people in fursuits.
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And a guy in a fursuit ironically being a furry gunning down big, hard looking blokes with a brightly coloured minigun. (With hearts on it, if I can do that.)
You hear me, Volition? I’m going to be terribly disappointed if your game does not have a minigun with hearts on it. Even CO has that!
(Yes, I’ve done this in CO.)
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I love this sort of cheeky stuff, it just sad that it actually is funny ie the market is in such a sorry state that this becomes a parody on it.
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I am that outraged by this fair treatment of PC gamers. I am going tO cancel my pre-order immediately.
I actually might cancel my order at Amazon, seeing as both Batman and Skyrim qre both due around this time as well. There is only so much open world gaming i can take in a month.
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You should schedule canceling your pre-order, and then postpone it.
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I’d cancel Batman and stick with Skyrim and SR3, personally.
SR3 will be fun, Skyrim is Skyrim, Batman is out in November (No idea when) and will likely be the worst of the three *plus* you get a pre-order bonus with SR3 and not with Batman.
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Is this another one of those ‘my point, your head, whoosh!’ scenarios?
I know you’re doing the fanboy thing for Bethesda here, but every Bethesda game has been a buggy mess and Skyrim will be no different. (We’ll see who’s laughing on release day, when you’re in the threads and complaining about the bug that’s stopping you from completing a certain important quest/the game.) This is Bethesda we’re talking about here.
It has nothing to do with the engine, it’s just Bethesda. Bethesda cannot Q&A to save their lives. We all know this. Fallout 3 had a bug where 35% of the world would cause a hard lock if you simply walked into it. That’s the most epic bug I’ve ever seen, in the history of gaming. It took incompetence to a whole new level. This is just what they do, it’s their thing.
Now, once modders have had the game for a year, so that they can fix it up and start releasing really interesting content for it, then it’ll be good. But the first 12 months of Skyrim are going to be hell, jus tlike hte first 12 months of Fallout 3 were. Fallout 3 was the sort of game where you were better off just forgetting about it for a while and coming back a year later.
It’s honestly naive to think that anything has changed.
In summary: I’m not saying that the game won’t be good, but I am saying that the game will be bugged to hell and that you won’t be able to enjoy it until all those bugs have been ironed out. (And I wouldn’t trust any publication to tell you about the bugs, either. Not a single magazine mentioned the game breaking Fallout 3 bug, for example. The bug that was worse than the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines game breaking bug.)
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…Wulf, really. We don’t need the same freaking rant of yours everytime someone so much as mentions Bethesda or Skyrim.
Really.
No, really. We got it the first 300 times you ranted in one topic, let alone the other times.
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One week later:
“Sir, remember when we had that meeting explaining why that press release was a bad idea…”
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What worries me is that this version still looks like a 5-10 year old console game(in the videos at least).
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I can’t wait for SR3 – few games offer the same amount of crazy fun these days – but there have been some distressing rumours that large chunks of content have been removed from the game to be sold as day-one DLC. I hope it’s not true.
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Isn’t that a default rumor these days?
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well, they did make the man-a-pult, something that featured HEAVILY during previews, trailers and hype, a preorder only thing
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It’s not preorder only, everything they’ve shown is apparently available in the game at some point. Buying the game early grants you that stuff right away.
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and where did you get that ? its pretty clear to me their are preorder only, you dont get them without preordering
a forum mod hinted it might be available as a DLC in the future here
http://www.saintsrow.com/fr/forums/topic/47684
but in his words “For those asking, if you want the Man-a-pult at launch, you need to pre-order Saints Row: The Third.”
they also seem to have plans to DLC our pants off post release
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Nice. Now if they could fix the fact I apparently am supposed to pay $89.99 for it instead of $49.99
http://www.steamprices.com/au/app/55230/saints-row-the-third
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Try GamersGate. When it releases, they’ll give you a code that plugs into Steam.
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I broke down and preordered from d2d UK where the game can be had for 29,99£. Not sure if Aussies can order from them, but it works fine for me in Austria.
If it doesn’t, try the RPS Data Smuggling Ring
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Ubisoft lol
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Satirical, I like that. This makes it more likely I’ll buy this game.
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I LOL’d at the “unforeseen development problems, shipping issues, inclement weather, or zombie apocalypse” part.
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Please let the PC port be decent this time around. Please!
I’d rather see the PC version delayed for 1-2 months than having a crappy port like SR2 again.
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@Derppy what the f*** are you talking about? Who plays a game like SR3 on console? I mean, i have a 2000$ PC and all consoles with over 50 Games, but are you a beggar that you are talking about “100$ Xbox run SR3 on max. which 100$ PC cant do…” FFS, i think everyone who have a ultra PC like me knows, that bullshit consoles like Xbox are worse at all on games like SR3. Please, go begging and buy a PC and stop talking bullshit that console is better than PC.
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