THQ owned us at the time, and the first Saints Row was a flagship title for them. It did not have a low budget by any stretch of the imagination. It was an early 360 exclusive, and the first open world title on the console.

what exactly inspired the name 'saints row'? as the title for the franchise? what goes into thinking about specific gangs/groups in the games, i found STAG in SR3 to be a nice interesting part. though the deckers seemed like they were missing something that was a wow factor.

The title came from one of the neighborhoods in the game. We talk about that (and a lot more) here: volition.tumblr.com/post/999… Gang design is a team effort, from writing, to artists, to gameplay designers. There is always a lot of fine tuning and evolution during development

though im not sure if you are able to answer this for the future but. in the past with saints row being mostly co-op, one thing that i havent personally seen in many games is being able to progress through the story with a friend actually appearing in a cutscene or being noticed

We can't comment on anything about the new game yet, sorry.

thats fine, but to shift the focus to the question with it being in the older games, why was it that only the main character (which could be customized id say a million different ways was only shown?)

As opposed to both players in a cutscene? It wouldn't make any logical sense story-wise. The player is THE Boss in the story. There are not two, and trying to account for both SP and co-op play with different cutscenes would be insanely expensive.

i meant more of like a pre-existing character with just different features (in terms of customization), so like say the co-op player would take control of shaundi with some modifications of their own to the overall appearance to add the comedic effect of customization

What kind of performance hit would it take? NPCs are baked assets to improve performance. Customization is a very heavy memory hit which consoles are limited. Ultimately is the player experience with this feature really worth it? 2/2

Thank you for giving me another perspective, but as with some cases with consoles or PCs there are exclusives, and I kind of thought well as a optional download for people with strong systems. Appreciate you discussing this though. Thank you for all your time have a nice day :)