By: Mark Wilson

We go to Volition's studio days before the release of Saints Row

I live in the middle of manure and cornfields, which generally isn't the most conducive locale for video game journalism. Aside from the college students, local citizens aren't really the gaming types. Most people go out for lunch or drinks in downtown Champaign, IL, without realizing that one of the top video game developers in the world is just upstairs. Last Friday I visited Volition to talk about their Tuesday release Saints Row and find out what a video game company is like days before a major launch.

In short, it's empty. Jacques Hennequet, producer on Saints Row, explains why.

"We have a lot of very tired people."

Saints Row has been at some level of production for three years. Originally slated as an Xbox 360 launch title, the game was pushed back twice for quality control, during which time the project staff inflated from 70 to 160 employees. We relax in Hennequet's shared office as he explains what development was like on Volition's first "open world" title. I appreciate his French accent.

"It's very easy to break that game, and it was a nightmare to test," Hennequet explained. "We discovered a big bug pretty late. If you load the game 32 times, not 31, without having restarted your machine, you will freeze...given enough people, it could happen."

Volition's "Grandma's Boy" setup

In a non-linear game (or 'open world' as Volition calls it), because there is no set path for a gamer to take, normal cause-effect bugs are tougher to come by. Often, bugs could involve 13 separate steps. Sometimes these steps were not entirely affiliated with Saints Row itself, but with the console menu and Marketplace content as well. It is this painstaking process of bug checking that has made the whole Volition team sick of what they see as constant GTA-clone pigeonholing.

"You're going up against the most successful game of all time and you're trying in one cycle to essentially catch up with what they did in six...you know it's not gonna be easy," Hennequet said. "That's why it grates on me...when they say it's just a clone. Can someone show me the clone button?"

"We really looked at GTA very carefully from the beginning. We analyzed it and went, ok, this is a great game, but there are things in it that annoy us. How can we make it better?"

So the Volition team set out to improve GTA in four steps.
1. Improve combat controls
2. Allow direct restarting if the mission is failed
3. Make the city easier to navigate (GPS)
4. Have every action a player takes impact their advancement

"I thought, [GTA] is a great series of games, but they've never fixed [these issues], and I think they've never fixed [these issues] because they never had an incentive to do so," Hennequet said. "This is not at all a cold, calculating let's make some cash and run attempt. This is a first step into something we're genuinely very interested in which we call open world game design...unless we do it in a genre or an area that [THQ] thinks they can make their money back, they're not going to fund it."

But THQ has hope, as Volition currently has two games in early development, with a third beginning after Hennequet's vacation. All three titles are planned as open world games.

"We have some pretty exciting stuff planned for open world," he said. "No one's going to be able to say 'it's a clone' this time." And he laughs. Mark Wilson

Hit up sister site Gizmodo for more on the technical power of the 360.

Ok, this is random, but we found it on their gaming shelf and thought you should know.

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