According to a financial report released by publisher THQ Nordic today, developer Volition is working on an all-new entry in the Saints Row franchise and has been doing so for some time. Once a simple GTA-clone, Saints Row has since gone on to forge its own path in the gaming landscape by adding unrealistic but entertaining mechanics like alien VR simulations, ragdoll insurance fraud, and superpowers.
THQ Nordic says they expect to launch a minimum of two AAA games before March of 2021 and strongly hinted that one of those would be a new Saints Row, which also has a movie coming from director F. Gary Gray. The publisher revealed that Volition was “deep in development” on the franchise’s upcoming new entry, a statement that was immediately confirmed via Volition’s official Twitter account, with the developer stating that this upcoming game would be “Big, bold, and very badass.”
Saints Row has not had a legitimate sequel since 2013’s Saints Row IV, with only spin-offs like Gat Out of Hell and the heavily-inspired Agents of Mayhem keeping the franchise in the public eye, for better or worse given their reception. THQ Nordic, who recently acquired development companies Milestone Interactive and Gunfire Games, describes this new Saints Row as the first full entry in the series since Saints Row IV. In the financial report that revealed the game, CEO and co-founder of THQ Nordic Lars Wingefors said that they are “Looking forward to our most exciting years ever.”
In the same report, THQ Nordic stated that, in total, the publisher has over 80 games currently in some form of development throughout their owned studios and a little more than half of those are still yet to be announced. CEO Wingefors said the company has a solid game release schedule set in place and that many marketing activities would be taking place soon, strongly hinting that next week’s Gamescom would hold some surprises. For their part, earlier this month Gamescom announced at least 15 world exclusives would appear during their show, and listed THQ Nordic as one of the publishers in attendance.
A new Saints Row game is a curious proposition. After the escalating nonsense of Saints Row: The Third and the off-the-walls superhuman craziness of IV, the series has come quite far from its original interpretation of street gangs and satire. A common complaint of the franchise’s newer entries is that the cars and personal stories became overshadowed by bombastic action set-pieces and by the ability to literally leap over skyscrapers in a single bound. While there is not yet any word on the direction this new Saints Row sequel will take, it will be interesting to see whether the team at Volition decides to scale back and tell a smaller story or create something even more ridiculous to try and top what they have done before. Maybe they’ll let Dave Chapelle finally do his version?
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Source: THQ Nordic
