This Week in Games is a weekly column where Vikki Blake breaks down the biggest stories in gaming every week. This week we’re talking about reboots – the good, the bad, and why they’re almost always necessary.
ddespite what the user reviews may tell you – the “awakened” developer had the audacity to let you create transgender characters, which of course has outraged the usual grubby corners of the internet – the Saints Row reboot is ok. Yes, it’s buggy, no, it’s not a particularly cerebral experience, and no, I’m guessing the exhausting story won’t be lining up for a BAFTA this year, but if you’re into shooting (check), blow shit up (check) and generally shoot through a city causing as much chaos and destruction as possible (double check), then it does its job… especially since there isn’t much else at the moment.
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed my time as The Boss in Saints Row‘s Santo Illeso, even though I would never have picked this up if I wasn’t forced to do this for work. all about the “old” Saints Row knocked me out, including the nineties nuts mag-like “lol sex toys are funny innit” marketing. By the time the giant purple dildos came along, I had left the franchise for good. And given the disappointing sales of the series, it seems I wasn’t the only one.
By the time a new one Saints Row announced last year, it looks like the team had a pretty radical rethink. The reboot with “a brand new setting, brand new characters and a brand new tone, all revamped for today’s gamer” was an inspired move. A brave one too. While it doesn’t quite fit firefighters or a substitute high school teacher — the hardest job in the world, I think — it’s not easy to look at something you need to pay the bills and decide it’s a big deal. in need of revamp, perhaps even at the cost of alienating the few people you liked in the first place.
Here’s the thing: I’ve met thousands of developers in the 15 years I’ve been writing about games, and I haven’t met a single one who legitimately didn’t care. I’m sure they exist – damn, maybe the ones I’ve interviewed are just great actors – but I’ve never met one and yes, so have the fine developers I’ve met from the “bad” corporate studios what you just love to hate. A lot of terrible games are made, but few or no developers want to make them terrible. This is why studios like Volition should be supported, not scorned, when they try to correct the course a few years later.
I mean, look at Tomb Raider. While long acclaimed for its lead actress — something that’s still amazingly unusual even in 2022 — I always got the impression that Lara Croft existed because guys wanted to see some big tits on their screen rather than because girls had a super-cool heroine. After releasing games almost yearly for a decade, the series took a hiatus in 2010 and returned with the brilliant Tomb Raider reboot in 2013, breathes new life into a dry franchise, combining captivating mechanics with bombastic adventures.
Assassin’s Creed has not been immune to a reconsideration either. Despite Ubisoft regularly releasing killer-flavored games for the past fifteen years, Ubisoft shut down its development machine in 2016 with a view to reinventing its tried-and-true formula. 2017 gave us Assassin’s Creed Origins – my all-time favorite episode (closely followed by badass Cassandra’s romp in odyssey a year later) – which revised the blueprint of what an Assassin game could be, bringing out more role-playing elements and making the world around you as important as the action scenes.
Perhaps an even bigger success was the reboot of 2018 god of war. While always incredibly well-received – just look at the series’ Metacritic rating – the 2018 reboot will go down in the annals of history as one of the greatest games of all time, elevating developer Sony Santa Monica to the kind of lofty pedestal upon which Naughty Dog stands . The upcoming sequel is one of the most anticipated games I’ve ever known.
All of these franchises are among some of the biggest and best-received games ever made, and I firmly believe this is no coincidence. All made the terrifying decision to take an existing product — some of which were highly cherished by ardent fanbases — and reinvent it, modernizing its control schemes, mechanics, and style and tone to make the world we live in better. to give.
You could call it a money grab. I call it innovation. And Christ only knows that there are plenty of other games that could use a (re)boot up the ass as well…
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