Saint's Row dev criticizes GTA IV, says it 'lost a lot of the fun'

5:42 AM on 08.05.2008   |   Jim Sterling

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If I have one problem with Saint's Row 2 developer Volition, it's that they won't shut up about Grand Theft Auto IV. Rather than letting the work speak for itself, it seems that the team has to constantly pick at the game it shamelessly copied in the original Saint's Row. The picking, however, continues anon as producer Dan Sutton has provided his insight into what went wrong with Rockstar's latest jaunt around Liberty City.

"The encouraging thing is that a lot of people seem to be in favor of Saints Row," stated Sutton.  "I saw on the internet comments that a lot of users seem to feel that GTA IV went to the realistic gameplay and lost a lot of the fun experiences from games like San Andreas."

"They really slowed it down for this one. They made it really realistic. It's an awesome environment but I think they lost a lot of fun factor. We've seen that on a lot of forums. "It's been months since it came out and multiplayer's kind of held on to that. There are still some things you can go back and do like the hitman stuff, there's some racing activities you can do, you can shoot pigeons if you want... but beyond that there's not that much replayability."

Saint's Row 2, of course, has promised to be a lot more over-the-top and silly, which is a great direction to go in and could have really helped to distance Saint's Row 2 from GTA IV ... had Volition not constantly closed the gap between the two games by talking about Grand Theft Auto the whole frigging time. It'd be like the writer of one of those Fighting Fantasy books comparing their work to the ol' Holy Bible -- even if your book's more fun, you'd do well to distance yourself from such mainstream competition.