Remember this year's Saints Row (opens in new tab)? Perhaps Volition hopes not, which may explain why the studio recently released a full copy of "Saints Row 4" (opens in new tab), which includes all DLC for the story and cosmetics, and even introduces cross-play between the Steam, Epic, and GOG versions of Re-. It may also somewhat explain why we decided to fully upgrade to the "elected Edition".

Unfortunately, the upgrade seems to have backfired, as players are now reporting a myriad of bugs in the new version of SR4: both the Saints Row Steam forum (open in new tab) and subreddit (open in new tab), broken saves, crashes, and mods that don't work are full of players complaining about mods that don't work. There have also been hundreds of negative Steam reviews (open in new tab) since the update; if it has succeeded in washing the taste of "Saints Row (2022)" from players, it is only because it has become even worse.

SR4 publisher Deep Silver says it is investigating the issue and urges anyone encountering the bug, which has not yet been reported, to contact them via their website (opens in new tab). For now, a kind Steam user has written a guide (opens in new tab) to revert back to the pre-upgrade version, but note that it's a bit of a painstaking process.

It's certainly a shame; SR4 was an excellent game, unlike its successor. Rich McCormick gave it a high score of 90% in his 2013 (i.e., 10 years ago) review of Saints Row 4 (opens in new tab), praising its "heartfelt love" for the video game medium, as opposed to the cinematic pretensions of GTA. Hopefully this will be rectified sooner rather than later. After all, it is the last great game that Volition made.

In other Volition news, the studio was recently absorbed by Gearbox (opens in new tab) after a lackluster response to this year's "Saints Row" Volition's parent company, Embracer Group, has announced that the studio has the merger, touting it as a move to give the studio "an experienced management team in the U.S." and "create future success." Not an auspicious start, but to be fair, the new management team probably had little time to walk through the door.