They didn't spend too much time on the gameplay of the first Saints Row, that game sucked.

That bug shown was hilarious. I watched a bunch of bugs like that on youtube. Oh wait, I can share them now right here:

+ Watch video

I enjoyed the glitches in the first game, they were quite fun. I was among the first group of people to find out how to drive on walls.

Saying that a game is not "bug free" is like hitting the ground when you fall. Its understood to happen, therefore it should not be mentioned unless there is some serious problems. Or I guess there anticipating their game not to go so well. Preemptive explanation? You decide.

They didn't spend too much time on the gameplay of the first Saints Row, that game sucked.

I always thought it was the best of the GTA clones

I loved the first game but the screen tearing was horrible. Worst I have ever seen and I have played Mass Effect for many hours. If that one problem is fixed I will be happy.

Either the game can be forgotten as another mediocre GTA clone or it can be remembered fondly for all its funny little foibles. Like a retarded relative of sorts.

@deathsyth8888:

Maybe they were asked the question?

What is he going to say next? "We'd also like to announce that the release date is April 29'th." Jeez, unless the bugs are going to be terrible why announce this? It just makes them look bad.

No game ships completely bug free.

Best described as a competent GTA clone that... erm... does it really do anything different?

Why not aim for bug free?

Personally, I found Saint's Row took all the annoying, niggly bits of GTA that took something away from the experience and fixed them in a way that makes you wonder why Rockstar didn't think of it ages ago.

Mind you, the story was crap and the attempts at humour fell flat, but in terms of mechanics I think they managed to get it about right.

@Anthropomancer: You obviously havent played it. It may have the same theme as GTA, but its a great game on its own. It improves on a lot of stuff people complained about in GTA, and Volition did it on its first try. That should be embarrassing for Rockstar.

Also ive played the game for over 50+ hours and never seen a glitch.

@One Way Mule: Sure, and when you're starting a new window-cleaning company from scratch why not aim for a $47 billion turnover within six months? The two goals are just as realistic.

If you aim to release a product with no bugs that you know about then the only way to achieve that is to have seriously inadequate testing (there are still bugs, but you don't know about them).

I found a bug in Zack and Wiki the other day; somehow I managed to drop an item in a place where I can't pick it up, so I had to restart the level (well at the time I was totally stuck and would have had to restart anyway but). Console games are usually very well polished but there are going to be occasional minor bugs in everything. I even hit a few crash bugs - screen freezes, sound loops, hard lock - with Rogue Squadron on GameCube.

What they could and should aim for is a low level of bugs, with no known bugs that are critical or highly likely to occur. That's what we expect from console games. I didn't play the first Saints Row, but it sounds like it didn't quite reach that standard.

climb on top of a car and surf it round the city. I will guarantee you will see the one in the picture of this article. I didn't think it was that bad. Frame rate sucked a bit sometimes though.

NoBullet: Now thats wierd.

@NoBullet: Bear in mind I didn't say it was a mediocre GTA clone, but that's the attitude reflected in sales: GTA:SA - 12 million, Saint's Row - 1.4 million.

Am I the only one who finds the phrase, "We're all about iterating the gameplay now..." to be awkwardly phrased? Just sounds weird to me.

@Anthropomancer: Well, wouldnt you compare the sales to the first GTA game, not the last one made? GTA is a well known brand, of course its going to sell more, no matter how crappy it is (vice city).

@NoBullet:

You think vice city is crappy?? WOW

I completed the game and I don't recall any buggy glitches. Which is strange because I usually find the weirdest bugs in most games.

But the bugs were the best part of the game!

Seriously. :D

Actually half kidding since I loved the game for what it was. Plus proper ragdolling made it hilarious during accidents.

I loved the game and didn't really see any bugs, beside the guys in the latino neighborhood all riding around in the air. Other than that it was all good, plus their storyline and characters were better than all the GTAs I had played (GTA3, VC, and SA).

I can't wait for the sequel, so that I can kill Julius for setting me up.

well lets hope GTA IV will be bug free with cheats. if this won't something should.

i'm getting both too :)

I live in Champaign Urbana, where Volition calls home. I have to say that certainly the brightest and most talented students from the U of I do not seek positions with the company. Given such a vast pool of talent you'd think they would have no trouble shipping a bug-free game. Volition deserves it's reputation as a laughable developer - they are as lazy as they are derivative. That said I'm all about working there once I get out of college.

Some of the bugs in Saints Row were so annoying.

I remember once being in a car chase with my car just about to die. Flying into a car park and spotting a car, now as I turned the car went off my screen. I bailed from my car and ran back, expecting to see the other car sitting waiting for me, but no, it was gone. Why why! Where did it go! There was no exit, I flew in over a wall!

/rant

@deathsyth8888: Yeah it always makes me nervous when a dev comes out with a statement like that. It almost sounds like "be warned, this game is fucked and we don't want any shit about it later."

This fella seems like a straight shooter.

I thought the bugs in Saint's Row were part of it's charm.

The only bug that really pissed me off was the one that occured that didnt allow me to finish or cancel a mission that went wrong, so I was kinda stuck in some sort of weird limbo in game and had to reset. :x

Asides from that the invisible car was fun as hell! I forgot how I got that to happen.

Ive fallen through the world in some locations at several times too due to damage / rag dolling.

The buggy saints row video makes me laugh every time I see it. Totally classic.

Wow is this the point that we have gotten to with programmers and developers?? Is it now acceptable to have a "We know that it is going to be buggy and we are ok with it" attitude? Whatever happened to putting out the best product possible and not settling for imperfection?? I dobut that would go over to well at "Camp Kojima".

Anyway the best bug ever is the Assassin's Creed gaurd humping the wall, stopping to see if anyone is watching, then going to town on the wall again.

@Mr.SithNinja: Its not a "bug" its a "feature" ;D

Actually I shit you not, thats what I was told by a studio I worked with once.

@HurdieGurdie: You really shouldn't show your negative opinions about a company in which some of the devs, or their friends, actually read the site if you're planning on applying there some day. Duly noted.

And believe me, U of I, and "vast pool of talent" are not on the same page.

That said, yeah, that game was buggy. :)

@Mr.SithNinja:
I think its extremely unfair to put such a demand to make games out so quickly, and yet expect them to be 100% bug free. With today's games, it is impossible to have a completely bug free game. Thousands of lines of coding going to work to make your game run and yet we appreciate very little. There will always be bugs that testers will not find, and I've seen some bugs take months before they are discovered by the public.

But also, bugs are usually funny as long as they don't screw you up when you really are trying to accomplish something. I can tell you the most fun I had was playing keys to the city crackdown, where my friend and I would spawn to ramp trucks and it would send us a thousand feet into the air far above even the tallest skyscrapers in shai gen and I even got a video of it somewhere. And yes I had a few bugs happen to me in Saint's Row, but I was never doing anything important and usually it just made me laugh or enjoy it that much more. I expect Saint's Row 2 to be entertaining as the last one, so what if they copy GTA? The last one actually did plenty of things GTA didn't, and improved upon it in some ways, I'm glad that this happened because it forces Rockstar to do better. I had plenty of fun with SR, and when GTA IV comes out, I'll have fun with that, but I still plan on playing SR2 as well, therefore I'm the ultimate winner, because I'm having fun =D

@JohnnyLA: well i hope you aren't applying to uofi anytime soon!

@Covert_Knight: Just because some bugs turn out to be entertaining dosn't mean we should come to expect and excuse them. At $60 a pop I expect quality. I know no game is "perfect" but to send out a press release while the game is still in production saying that there will definately be bugs in it and we hope you enjoy them is ri-goddamn-diculous.

Maybe if it was a yearly released game (like any given sporst title) I MIGHT buy into your argument about pressure to get it out, but even then the ammount of glitches and bugs in Madden 08's PS3 version was unforgivable. (yes i am still bitter about that one)

@Witzbold: I have absolutly no dobt about that one. :D

How can you play SR for that long and NOT find a bug? I found one like 10 minutes into the game... stand on the roof of any moving car and press Y. You instantly appear inside the drivers seat without any animation of boarding the vehicle... made even more funny when someone is already driving, cuz they run away scared... presumably from the shock of being forcibly teleported outside their car without warning.

One thing that absolutely shit me about GTA was the gunfighting system, SR was superior. When you have a good controller, you don't need auto-aim. And as mentioned before... even though the game was very unpolished, because it tackled the few flaws that GTA has, and even answered a few of the "what would next-gen GTA feature?" questions, it has made Rockstar go that extra distance in delivering a higher quality product.

Far be it for me to judge but after GTA III, the way they just hammered that same engine with only minor additions here and there was downright lazy. Don't get me wrong, I still fire up San Andreas once in a while but the amount of games they pumped out with that dated engine is astonishing. Competition would be a good thing for Rockstar.

"Sure, not all games are bug free. It's just some games are more bug free than others."

Animal farm reference?

@Witzbold: Most said motto around the water cooler at the testing offices I worked at.

The bugs (for the most part) were a large part of the charm of the game. Well, the 'other half' of the game. I take an Assassin's Creed perspective of Saint's Row. On one hand you have the story based missions and overall objective of the main characters, etc, etc, but the other half of the game for me is always called 'dicking around on rooftops.'

SR is no exception. Nailing that tricky landing to escape the po-po in some of the 5-star missions were just as rewarding as driving around on my 3 legged meter maid kart on the metro line, occasionally getting out to rocket the train off the tracks or picking off civilians with the sniper rifle at 100s of meters away. Almost like getting two games in one.

@Relapse: The car disappearing? Not a bug - that'll be character/vehicle streaming.. It's annoying, but a result of a design choice when deciding how to deal with streaming in vehicle types / meshes and textures. There are better ways to do it, but that's a fairly cheap, easy to implement method.

Kudos for the game company telling us this. Videogames are never 100% bug-free and they will always have a bug or two that the developers forget to take out.
I personally loved Saint's Row too. The game wasn't half bad..I just don't understand what there is left to expand on. I mean like? We are king of the streets by the end of the game and there really isn't much left to do..

@RememberThe.357:

The game didn't suck. It was clearly an exceptable substitute. The game had its problems but then again what game doesn't.

Not to mention quite a few of the side missions were rather fun.

I hope the 2nd one works a bit more on the characters though.

A big thing to remember here is that there will never be a way to foresee problems that come along when a game goes into a retail environment.

For a game of this size, an average test cycle is 5 months with a team of lets say 35 testers. Let's say the average work day consists of 10 working hours (accounting for overtime). Thats 150 days at 10 working hours totaling 1500 hours. Multiply that by the 35 testers, and you have 52500 total man hours in test, which we can round to a smooth 50k to account for resource losses.

Compare that to the number to the number of hours that gamers will play the game just on the day the game is released to retail. Let's say the game is popular enough to sell 30k copies on the first day. I assume a lot of people are like me and play a new game for about 2 hours after booting it for the first time. That's 60,000 hours played by consumers on the first day, about 10,000 more than the entire test cycle. There's bound to be something that the test teams missed.

Now imagine SonicTeam said that about a Sonic 2007...

hopefully it's not as shitty as True Crime NYC. ugh!