Everybody on the Saints Row 2 team loves action games. Some if it was just personal taste as well. Some of it was your classic design analysis, just play it for hours and hours and look at the situations where it works and the situations where it doesn't work, and address those problems. Some of it was looking at the combat system in Saints Row 1, really talking to fans, reading their feedback that they sent us via e-mail or on our message boards, and really seeing what they liked and didn't like, and realizing that these are improvements that we can and should put in. JT: Figuring out the feature set, especially with characters in Saints Row 2, was really a combination of all of those things. How did you guys approach including those upgrades? Did you go with Saints Row 2 and decide that this is what the game should have? Did you look at the original and feel that these features were missing? Or were these ideas that simply didn't have time to get into the original? WP: We've been playing Saints Row 2 for a little while, and there are lots of little improvements - grabbing a human shield, dual-wielding weapons - that weren't in the original, and you don't realize it until you go back to the original and try to do those things and recognize that they're missing. That's what you guys are leaving us with the story? OK, we'll go with that. I was working on Saints Row 2, and when I found out that they did that on Saints Row 1, I was pretty surprised myself. It also creates some mystery, and we found that the cliffhanger really was one of the best ways to do that.
We needed to make a very compelling story but one that is still accessible to people who haven't played the first, so we have to bridge that gap between people who did play the first, those who didn't play the first, and create a good entry point. It was something that kind of came up along the way when they just realized that we were going into Saints Row 2. It also wasn't something that was planned from the very beginning.
It's not my intention to have players play this game and get pissed off at the ending, but the whole essence of ending Saints Row 1 on a cliffhanger wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision. JT: Saints Row 2 will definitely have its share of surprising moments in the story, but I don't want to say whether we're going to do anything that would be a cliffhanger of the scale that you saw at the end of Saints Row 1, at the risk of doing a spoiler. WP: The story was pretty intricate in the original, and it looks to be just as intricate in the sequel, but we've got to ask, who thought it was a bright idea to nearly kill off the protagonist at the end of the first game, and are we going to see something like that again? The scope of planning that's gone into Saints Row 2 has been pretty massive in terms of coordinating with both the Saints Row 1 team and just making all the stuff for a game that large. We had that advantage of being able to see what they were doing in terms of technology, what they were doing in terms of design, what their art was looking like so we could establish our own art and design styles, figure out what they were doing with the story, and really get a head start on that right away. It's been the plan from the very beginning to make Saints Row a franchise, so we began Saints Row 2 more than a year before Saints Row 1 was even on store shelves. WP: When did you start working on Saints Row 2? Did you start before you finished Saints Row 1? Or did you kick around the idea of a sequel after you completed it? I'm James Tsai, one of the lead designers of Saints Row 2. WP: Who has the honor to speak with us? State your name, rank, and occupation!
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