Saints Row Reboot Was Almost A Sequel, Says Dev

thegamer.com:

The Saints Row reboot was initially planned to follow directly from Saints Row 4's ending, but the idea was dropped early in development. This is according to an anonymous worker, who says that Saints Row's development was a crunchy, hectic mess.

In a new episode of Matt McMuscles's YouTube series, What Happened?, the anonymous dev shares their experience on the project, which they say struggled to find its identity throughout development. After it was decided that Saints Row 4 would be left behind entirely, the dev says the team struggled to come up with a solid replacement for the old characters, leading to delays only exacerbated by mass resignations and issues with their publisher, Deep Silver.

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"The original pitch way back in late 2017 was it was going to be a Saints Row sequel/reboot but based on the ending of SR4," says the source, speaking in the latest episode of What Happened?. "It was going to have the same characters from SR4 and it was going to involve the player rebuilding their gang empire back up from scratch since they were in some weird dimension/the past based on the ending of SR4."

This is a very significant change in direction since the decision to reboot the franchise rather than continue with the same cast upset many fans. Still, the reasoning makes sense - the devs didn't want to keep doing the same thing over and over again. After Saints Row 4, they had to take it back to basics, and the original cast had already done basics in the first two games.

However, according to the source, the team struggled to settle on a new theme. This apparently led to a lot of abrupt story changes late into development.

"There was a lot of adjustment on the fly