Saints Row: The Third: The Thoughts

For someone who can't drive, this tiger is very critical about your driving. He's literally a backseat driver.

It's funny how I don't find myself playing games that extensively these days. I usually want to enjoy the time I spend with it as well and from browsing sites like 4chan's /v/ too much together with I guess growing up and developing a way too critical threshold for fun that I don't seem to find that much these days.

So, what about a game like Saints Row? A series that mimics GTA closely but focuses more on the fun aspect rather than taking itself overly serious. I'll be quick and admit I never played the first Saints Row, I did play the second extensively though, somewhere in the 50-60 hour range which seems quite a lot for me these days. I think I personally only have 3-4 games above the 40 hours played mark in my Steam list though outside Steam I've defenitely spent quite a lot of time in Blizzard games like Starcraft and WoW.

The game is seldom fair when it throws enemies at you. Having a strong arsenal of weapons help though.

I've just passed the 24 hour mark with Saints Row 3, in less than 2 weeks. And I've defenitely had great fun most of that time. I've finished the main story and only got some city takeover in form of activities left to do before I can 100% it so I think I am ready to give some sort of opinion about it.

I'll try to not to compare it too much to Saints Row 2 to begin with.

The plot isn't really something too big of a deal in the game. It has issues in that it doesn't feel central enough in a lot of missions as they simply are introductions to activities. But too sum it up in one sentence. The Saints find themselves thrown into a new city and decide to take it over. Most characters from Saints Row 2 return, even if the arguably best one is killed off-screen before you even touch down in the new city. Otherwise I wouldn't complain too much about the character gallery.  A personal favorite is Kinzie Kensington, a former FBI-Agent and computer geek who keeps on delivering good lines throughout the game.

The game also had its engine revamped from the ground up. It's miles ahead of Saints Row 2's both in terms of graphics and feel. This is probably the biggest step it's taken in the right direction. It also runs good on PC overall, could be better but after SR2's port having it run is a huge step forward in the right direction. The gunplay also feels satisfying, something I usually don't expect from third-person shooters, it could use more variation in guns though as they are too few in total.

And the game itself then? Well, like Saints Row 2 you have a whole city to take over through doing activities, buying property and taking out rival gangs. Doing any of this increases your hourly income (which isn't hourly really) and your control of each district. It also generates Respect which now acts like experience instead of a currency for doing said activities.  The system works and gives you a sense of progression, by the end you'll make around $40k each time you collect the cash which is very much needed because there is a lot to spend money on. While clothes and such aren't expensive, weapon upgrades and the likes are. You'll always want to spend cash to make cash basically.

What could happen?

The activities and city takeover are great diversions really. You'll find yourself often doing them instead of heading straight into mission after mission. There is roughly 50 in total with two endings to the game as well, some choices also occur along the way that don't really have any lasting impact. The missions are also generally well designed. Often it's more of the same, but the scenarios they take place in are very almost always unique. Compared to for example GTA IV where you have a heap of missions but in the end how many of them are unique? The only one that stood out was the bank robbery. In SR3 the "epicness" is thrown over like seasoning in many missions. Big explosions, unique locales and with a rich character gallery makes the main game a enjoyable experience overall. Only issue is that some missions aren't really missions, some might just be a phonecall and quite a few of them are just introductions to activities. So in the end you don't have roughly 50 missions, you probably have more like 30-40.

And then there is the series trump card, at least for me, the customization. Character creating is great, allowing you to edit the face of your PC with great detail. Body customizing is slightly worse than SR2, having been reduced to a triangle slider. Also lacking are animations for walking or different combat styles. Selectable voices return again, 7 to pick from this time, 3 for each gender and a zombie voice, satisfying overall.It's not gamebreaking but it often feels bare-bones compared to SR2's.

The pimp's missions revolves about an awful lot of hoes. He also speaks in auto-tune.

Clothing has also taken quite the hit. To explain SR2's customization in that department you had the option to pick patterns for alot of your clothes, even adding logos. The clothing above the waist had several layers of clothing. If you wanted a bra, undershirt, sweater and a coat you could have it along with necklaces and wrist clothing. In SR3 you only have one layer apart from optional bra along with the necklaces and wrist/arm clothing. It hurts customization quite a lot and limits you to the stock combos of clothing. Car customization however was as good as it was in SR2, I think it may be lacking in some department but it's not a big issue like the clothing customization.

There are details and details that I could go on and complain about, but as a whole I think Saints Row The Third is a better game than SR2. It's defenitely a good game, one of the year's best and a personal favorite of mine. I look forward to what they will do with the game even if I shudder a bit at the thought of 40 weeks of promised DLC, heck I even bought the current DLC: 3 upcoming missions (okay), shark themed stuff (meh) and cheats (why?). It has a lot to prove in the future. If you are hesitant to buying, then wait and see how all this DLC plays out, you might even want to wait for a possible GOTY edition if that's the case.

So, to sum it up in comparsion with SR2, the better game appearing after the certain area it excels in.

Graphics: SRTT (much better engine)
Soundtrack: Either (depends on your taste)
Gameplay: SRTT (the new engine is overall more enjoyable to play with)
Customization: SR2 (whole lot of more options in regards of everything)
Story: SR2 (much more focus in SR2's with less filler missions)
Content: Either (both have ups and downs here, SR2 has more but a lot of it feels like "too much", SRTT however doesn't have as much which in the end equals less to do in the long run)

This puny looking little girl is quite the badass. Believe it.

Pointless rambling

I did mention something about trying to actually post regulary here. It's been a week since the last post and I really don't have any thoughts to ventilate at this point, but I'll talk a bit about some things instead.

This week hasn't really been dedicated to Mass Effect at all. I did finish the final part of the LP last sunday and it was uploaded later on on monday so I guess that's really the only related news in that department. I'll probably dedicate an entire post to ventilate my thoughts properly about the whole ordeal later on.

So what have I played instead? Well, two titles I've anticipated heavily both got released this week, even on such a fitting day as my birthday: Saints Row The Third and AC: Revelations. I've mainly been focusing on playing the former, dedicating some 12 hours to it over the week, which actually feels quite a lot for me. I very seldom find myself playing games for that long anymore.

I do enjoy long games though. That grand feeling of there being so much to do that I'll be spending as much as days on a single product, that's usually when it also feels like it was worth the price and those 49.99 or so Euro spent become trivial. I usually relate to that actually. Dividing the cost by amount of hours played. I bought ME2 for full price at 59.99 (Digital Deluxe) and have spent 134 hours with it. That equals roughly a cost of 46 cent per hour. A far better value than some other games I've later felt buyers remorse over buying for full price, like Dead Island or The Witcher 2, their sum equaling less than 10 hours of playing at a cost of almost 100 euro.

And then you suddenly feel bad for pirating two games like Persona 3 & 4 and emulating them on your computer only to end up with over 200 hours played altogether. But hey, at least they've convinced me that I'll buy any future product in that series for full price, I almost feel obliged to do that. Some developers are defenitely worth supporting and a smaller one like Atlus seems like a good choice.

And while I am still talking about wasting time, let's go into World of Warcraft. A game I've played for 6 years, with breaks included we'll round it down to 5. It happens to have a lot of costs on the side though, including monthly costs and microtransactions as well as buying new expansions. It's a bit scary to think about how much money has been thrown into that. Still, I defenitely enjoyed the time I had with the game and not the modern day abomination that is Cataclysm. Still, lots of money spent but an almost scary amount of time spent as well. If we disregard it as a social hub of sorts, because let's face it, it's defnitely possible to login just to socialize or not do anything special at all with it. Lots of "dead time" in that sense but we're talking around 300 days played scattered out over those 5 years. That equals playing it for at least 45 minutes a day every day for 5 years.

I don't like where this blog entry is going, I have no idea why I'm writing this or why I think it's a good idea to write an entry without any actual direction in it.

Content-wise I'm not sure what to do with the channel at this point. An impression like video of Saints Row The Third is something I've thought about, so that idea might come to frutition eventually. Anyhow, I'll write something later on again, see ya then.

Ramblings

Wouldn't you look at that, I'm coming back for some more mindless ramblings.

We're still on the subject of myself, or well, the content I make. If you really want to know things about the actual me, I can reveal that I am currently doing laundry. Think about that for a second.

Or don't think about it. Instead, kick back and don't take anything that's being said in this post with more than a grain of salt.

The last time I talked about presentation, something I thought I had perfected with my FoF videos but still hadn't done so with my current ME2 videos. But why aren't they perfect? Because nothing is perfect. There's always improvements to be done. I often let small frames slip through that bugs me. Watch any dialogue video for this, it can be as little one or two frames (for reference, all my videos are done at 30 frames per second, which means that one or two frames are basically a quick flash). To show you what I mean, I'll just put up a random dialogue video below.

As confident as I am, I'm not checking if an actual error appears in it, but I do know it appears in plenty of videos where a lot of clips are rounded off in quick succession. So any apologies if my example above doesn't have any actual frame errors in it!

We also have the subjects of the LP videos. The production values of these, are well, not very high. I mentioned this in the earlier entry, the care I put into them is me basically trying to make sure that I don't cut out the video in the middle of a sentence. How much production value does a LP need though? Now, I don't even know if I plan on doing any more LP's for a while. These projects to me have felt pretty overwhelming to me to begin with. Even with me not doing a complete playthrough of ME1, the runtime of both LP's combined clocks in on slightly less than 40 hours (last part not yet recorded though). But if I do return to LP's, perhaps one of ME3 if there's no save game editor to help me with content, they should recieve some more loving in terms of editing.

The above is my most popular video. To me, a job I guess well done. Because it's the first video with Hidden Dialogue. It may not have the most content, it may not have the best editing, but it shows everything in a simple and straightforward manner: BioWare clearly had different plans originally for the game's structure. What plans you might ask? Well, every squad member has dialogue for every location in the game (with the exception of Thane and Samara who has no dialogue on Horizon). Any by every location I mean every mission outside of the tutorial.

Naturally, things like this are interesting. The most common question on videos like this are "How do you do this?". Save Game Editing is the short as well as the long answer. This isn't the point though. I am more interested as to why this specific video is popular. Why have almost 400k watched through something I threw together in less than twenty minutes? I quote my previous blog post: "The right content at the right time will generate views on it's own".

Do I market my videos in any way? Do I viral them? I have linked them at a few places yes, but mostly on sites like 4chan where the post won't last more than a few hours at most. I label my YT channel as my website on sites where I have a profile. That's it though. The rest of the "marketing" isn't done by me. And the right content gets viral'd by others. I think I remember seeing links to some of my videos appearing on places like obscure video game forums or even the Mass Effect wikia. Eventually videos will get views simply because I've built up the subscriber base for it.

But the LP's of ME1 and ME2 aren't getting views are they? I'm fully aware of that. They simply are a bit niche and aren't being released at the right time. A lot of my videos still very often get commented on and still generate decent traffic even this long after release. The issues with the LP's are that they have me in them (with me being perhaps not the funniest and experienced guy to listen to along with perhaps too much content altogether) and they are simply being released quite a while after the game has been released. Everyone is looking for ME3 at this point, who in reality goes crazy or really interested for ME2 videos at this point? Not the masses.

But I'm gonna stop rambling now. I need something to talk about for the next time as well. We'll round up with possibly my favorite video. It even has one of the frame errors in it (cuts in too early) and was, believe it or not, released at exactly the right time.

I never really cared much for blogging. It, to me, has always been like a place where your average nobody is trying to make him or herself look like a somebody. That is usually a need I never feel like I have. I don't really need to validate myself towards the outside world about my life or anything like that.

So, ironically innit, that I'm making a blog after writing a paragraph like that? I'd be the first to say yes in this case. I mainly want to vent out thoughts and discuss things regarding my YT channel. It will revolve around it, perhaps ideas I have for future videos or just ramblings in regards to it.

This is my first post, last time I even tried to blog I think I made two posts. That blog is still out there somewhere, on some Google Account that was hacked by the Chinese or something (true story, probably had a keylogger a few years ago that tracked my password changes, Google confirmed that IP's from China were accessing the account). We'll see how long this lasts.

As of writing this, it's a Friday evening. It's the 11/11/11 no matter where you are on the world, even if you use a stupid date system involving putting the month before the year. About two hours ago I finished recording yet another Mass Effect 2 session. It clocked in on slightly more than an hour and I am sort of dreading on how I am yet again supposed to edit it down to 5 parts without interrupting any sort of flow I may or may not have.

My process of video editing for this whole journey has been very simple. The issue really boils down to me not enjoying the sound of my own voice, or well, I get critical about it and just end up feeling slightly awkward. Did I just say that? Could I have delivered that line better? Well of course I did, and of course I could have. But having an absolutely perfect product? Is that something I want? I enjoy being able to improve upon things. I'll talk more about how I see on improvement in the next paragraph, but while still on the subject of me editing my Mass Effect adventures, it comes down to me simply checking out the audio peaks  in the editing window. Simple as. A clip can at most be 15 minutes, if I can then I will defenitely try to make it 14:59 minutes long. However, peaks usually don't allow this. More often than not I have to avoid having the clip end in the middle of me talking, cutting through dialogue in game is something I find okay though.

While on the subject of improving, we sort of need to go back where I came from. I started out probably as "early" as 2008 by throwing together Frets On Fire videos. Frets On Fire, FoF for short, is a engine more than anything for rhythm based music games. A Guitar Hero clone you might say. The editing for these videos were simple, but I improved later on, giving my videos a in my eyes, wonderful look. The video below is the "pinnacle of my editing skills" in regards to FoF.

Quality in 720p, a generally slick look and a stable framerate. I hate bragging, but I think these videos are great in terms of presentation. Of course a lot of work went into getting it to look like this as well though that isn't something I will go into detail on. Sadly, this did come to a end eventually. Copyrights became more harsh, I still have plenty of videos like this in my uploads, most of them also have copyright infringements. Guitar Hero as a general was dying out as well, I'd need a new audience and stage.

At that point I had just had my most successful YT channel to date get banned. I was starting over and this was early 2010. I had just pirated Mass Effect 2 and just thought of it as a way to get some easy views. The right content at the right time will simply generate views on it's own without me promoting it (another subject for another blog entry).

This was my first clip. I've returned to it unintentionally a few times (mostly video tests). It was released in the weekend before ME2 was released in the US. It may not have generated many views, and still hasn't; it's a plain gameplay video showing nothing special. It did start to rebuild a subscriber base though as I threw out more videos. The game was new, people were going crazy for everything about it. Videos like the first meeting with Legion or the meeting with Ashley on Horizon quickly rose in popularity.

Were I talking about editing or my personal history with the channel? The first one I assume. But there is of course a connection there. Videos were getting more complex, and just having the presentation be in 720p wasn't enough. It is, in the end pretty bare bones, and often a bit repetitive when you watch through a hidden dialogue video. The pacing did improve over time, where it went to a point where it became a lot more fluent and enjoyable to watch. These videos however didn't really bring me the most "success" if you can call it that. Below are two examples of the "current pinnacle" of needed editing in my videos.

The dialogue video is currently the only video to have those subtitles in the top hand corner. But it removes the need to show me picking the acutal options, making for better pacing and timing. There isn't much to say about the Jack video either, but it shows very well the editing level I aspire to have in my videos. A well presented video with decently edited content.

If pacing was an issue when it came to blog entries then this one would be way too long. It defenitely is. I'll save subjects to talk about for later, have a nice 11/11/11 wherever you are.