Upon the 2006 release of Saints
Row, the words that seemed to be on everybody’s lips were “GTA Clone”. And when you look at the most general
structure of Saints Row, there is a
vague similarity. You are playing a sandbox game set in a city area where you
go around killing people in 3rd person. While at its most basic level it is similar to a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (the
latest GTA game out at the time that Saints
Row was released), the differences are quite numerous. Unlike in the GTA series, in Saints Row, you were an active member of
a gang (the 3rd Street Saints), and your main mission was to go
around the city and claim land for the Saints from the other gangs (the Vice
Kings, Los Carnales, and Westside Rollerz). Because of the fact that you were in a gang, there was a
much higher sense of comradery than in the GTA series. Sure, you had friends in San Andreas, but Saints Row went as far as creating a “Homie” system where you could
recruit a fellow gang member to help you on a mission or stronghold
takeover. On a different level,
the protagonist in Saint’s Row is
largely silent for the whole game (he/she maybe has 3 lines of dialogue), so
there is really no characterization.
What I mean by this is that you could place any person into the position
of the protagonist in Saints Row and
it wouldn’t change, because the only thing that you really know about the
character is that he or she is part of a gang. With every GTA game (starting with GTA III), you play as a
named character and learn a lot about whom they are and the struggles that they
go through, which is extremely different from Saints Row. Yet
despite the differences, the easy categorization was to say it was like GTA,
but GTA was better so they did not need to play Saints Row. In order
for Saints Row as a franchise to
survive, it needed to differentiate itself from GTA.
Luckily Saints Row 2 was
able to do this partially due to what GTA IV did to itself. With GTA IV, there were some funny
parts, and the humor was still partially there, but overall the story was much
more serious, Hard Times in Liberty City through the lens of Niko Belic. So all that Saints Row 2 had to do was amp up the humor a bit, and the
disparity between serious GTA IV and
ridiculous Saints Row 2 would
separate them as products. While
they would both still be sandbox games, the tone of Saints Row 2 would be much more different. They also may have benefitted from the
fact that Saints Row 2 came out 6
months after GTA IV (Saints Row 2 in October and GTA IV in April), but they did amp up the
humor and ridiculousness and that helped to differentiate them as two separate
products.
