Interview with Former Volition Design Director: a Saints Row Prequel, the Price of GTA 6, and More

In mid-October, Chris Stockman, a level designer at Volition during the development of The Punisher (2005) and the design director of the first Saints Row (2006), gave an interview to Esports Insider. The press widely circulated his comments on the price of GTA 6, even though the conversation with the head of Bit Planet Games, a studio focused on VR titles, was far more in-depth. Moreover, that discussion led to some curious consequences.

They’re the only ones that can get away with it.

I don’t think it’s a rising tide that floats all boats. I think that there’ll be a tremendous amount of backlash if everyone switched to $100. Not all games are created equal. I think GTA is the only one that can get away with it, and I hope they do. I really hope it’s $100. I think it deserves to be $100.

The scope and magnitude of this production deserves that price tag, but not everything is treated equally. It would be a disaster if everyone tried to match them.

[Dan Houser departure will change GTA VI] but that’s without knowing how much he contributed as a writer. I think there’s a possibility that you’ll lose some of the edginess or maybe some of the really biting satire that GTA is so good at. That’s a factor that can’t easily be replicated by another writer.

It’s very possible that we’ll lose some of that, and it becomes more, less edgy, I guess, and more straight and grounded in reality.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve always been a big fan of the series. I remember when GTA 3 came out on the PlayStation 2, and I was working at another game company at the time. I brought it into the office, and I loaded it up, and we just sat around it and said, ‘My god, this is the future of games’.

It was just eye-opening. It was so revolutionary. I miss those days. I miss that.

I guess making it an even more massive world than it already is [will bring revolutionary buzz again]. Make San Andreas of GTA 5 look like a playground. Just something incredibly massive.

If the story dynamics changed throughout the game so you can make things drastically different, that would be groundbreaking for a game of this scale.

I don’t think they’ll bring it back, but I remember in GTA: San Andreas, you could eat and get fat or not eat and get skinny, or work out and gain muscle, and I wish they could have kept that in the game to make your character your own.

Honestly, I can’t pick a weakness. I just hope that they offer more choices in the story for how you can progress through the game.

Give us a little bit more player agency so I can steer my character or characters down one direction to change the outcome of things, rather than playing through a very long 50-hour movie.

Player choice is what I would lean towards. We talked about doing that on Saints Row 1. We tried to incorporate a tiny bit of it, but it ultimately ended up as what order you took the gangs down. It didn’t really change anything. If I had been on the sequels, I would have done more of that.

I would have had multiple gangs, but it’d be interesting if you took down one gang; it changed the story structure quite a bit depending on complexity, because that goes down a really deep rabbit hole. Think Mass Effect. It becomes a spider web. That’s the kind of thing I would like GTA to start exploring with elements of a choose-your-own-adventure.

I think it’s just Rockstar Games. They’ve never failed.

I remember back in the days when they’d release that ping pong game (Table Tennis) just to test their animation system before they launched GTA 4. If you just look back into the history of Rockstar products, they’ve never missed. I have a hard time believing they’ll miss this time. They’ve spent forever and so much money.

I almost think they would just rather not release it and just keep pumping out GTA Online content because that doesn’t seem to be letting up.

I think it’s going to do amazingly well. GTA Online 2 or whatever it’s is going to be called will be another 10-year gravy train.

They’re a one-release-every-five-years type of company. That’s crazy. But they seem to have the magic.

They’re kind of the only players in town for this type of game or this type of genre for the big, old, epic games.

It (VR mode in GTA 6) could. I just don’t think it will. Gamers will be expecting visual fidelity that can’t be done with VR unless you’re tethered to a very powerful PC, and I don’t think we’re there yet.

Maybe in a decade, we might get there, but even then, motion sickness will still be a thing. There are already games that are like trying to replicate GTA on Quest, and they all look pretty terrible. There’s no style to them. I think it turns off my generation and maybe the generation just below me.

I’m going to go on a limb here and say no, but I think there’ll be mods. There are already mods now for VR in GTA V, but I never see anybody use them. Not for VR. It’s entirely playable. It’s not made for it, so you’re going to have some jank, but no one streams it. You’ve got to question why.

I don’t think PC VR is a thing. I don’t think it will ever be a thing other than maybe for the smallest of the markets.

I think there’s a lot of stuff they haven’t revealed. That could be interesting, although it’s very tough. Saints Row 2 did it. You can play the whole game co-op, but it’s a very tough thing to do, especially given how narratively-driven the GTA series is. But if anybody could do it, Rockstar could.

I think there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about GTA VI that we’ll find out within the next six months. A lot.

Why are we stuck? Is it because they want to sell as many copies as possible, and they don’t want to go to different non-American cities? There’s a world of huge cities out there that are very interesting. London. Tokyo. Rio de Janeiro. There’s almost too many to list.

I believe they think it wouldn’t sell if they moved the games away from America, and it cost so much money to make that it’s too big a risk that they don’t want to take. But it’s like they keep mining from the same locales. San Andreas, Vice City, Liberty City, and that’s it. Is that it for America? I know we went to their version of San Francisco (San Fierro) in San Andreas, but where’s Dallas?

I would like them to mine from a different location rather than just dipping their toes in the same three cities over and over and over again.

Naturally, a significant part of the interview was devoted to Saints Row and to comparisons with Grand Theft Auto.

We were very fortunate back then when I joined Volition. They were already in very early pre-production of what became Saints Row. It started out as a PS2 game. Then it shifted into something next gen (the game is Xbox 360 exclusive).

They were really trying to figure out what the game was gonna be, and I came on board, and they said they wanted me to come up with a vision for multiplayer. I remember in the very first meeting, what I pitched was not ambitious enough. I played it safe. They told me it was not ambitious enough. Go back to the drawing board.

I came back with something wildly ambitious. It’s funny, looking at GTA Online now, what I pitched took a very similar route, where I wanted the whole city to be the playground. The difference is you basically had the whole city with your team of 16 players, and then you could split off and go into the modes.

I was most proud of this idea that you could form gangs, which were equivalent to clans, earning money based on your performance. Even if you lost, you got some money and you use that to buy your outfits. I became almost like bragging rights based on your clothing and what you wore.

Every single one of the modes we shipped was a brainchild of mine, they approved it, we got a bit more money for it and then they promoted me to head up the entire project. That was my trajectory to head up Saints Row.

One of my best friends worked at Rockstar in New York at their headquarters, and he worked there during the development of Saints Row. He’s long since gone, but he worked on GTA: SA.

I would talk to them and ask what does Rockstar think about what we’re making? And I can’t even remember the conversations that we had, but he told me that they were aware of what we were doing and that they were keeping a close eye on it.

We did pioneer some stuff in the first Saints Row that all open-world games ended up taking on. We did the first GPS system, where you could lay out a waypoint and it would guide you there. Everyone did it after that.

We got to be on a next-gen platform, launched at a time period where there weren’t a lot of games that came out at the time, and it was new tech. We had day-night cycles. We had a lot of new things that no one had seen in that sort of open world series. I’m not taking sole credit for any of these little bitty things because it’s not like that. We all take stuff from each other.

Rockstar probably thought of us as an annoying fly. They were always the 800-pound gorilla and we were just trying to make something that was the alt version of GTA.

We were just incredibly fortunate to also be a pretty fun game to boot.

Saints Row has always been a bit ridiculous. Even the first one, when we had insurance fraud and stuff like that, which was just over-the-top fun with physics. That was not realistic in any stretch of the imagination.

I think the problem, and I’ve said this before, is that they just kept trying to one-up themselves with the ridiculous content and at some point, where do you go after you’ve gone to hell and fought aliens, where do you go from there?

I guess that’s why they had to reboot it, but then again, people love Saints Row 3 and they’re widely considered to be the pinnacles of the series.

Personally, I would consider Saints Row 3 to be the pinnacle of the series because the production values were through the roof compared to the previous two. It was a bit less of an open world and more structured. But even Saints Row 2 started venturing off into crazy territory.

I guess I just never would have done it. I would have preferred to keep things relatively grounded in a pseudo-reality. I was actually against naming it Saints Row because I felt it was too restrictive. Saints Row was a place in the world. It was a neighbourhood in the world. The name loses meaning if you’re not in that area. Maybe I’m overthinking it.

I just feel that naming games is very important. Grand Theft Auto is a brilliant name because you could go anywhere with it at any time, and it still means something. Saints Row, I felt was too restrictive.

I would have gone the route where each game went through different time periods, but you could carry some characters over as part of the same universe, almost like Assassin’s Creed, but not go ridiculous with it like they did. I think that would have been interesting in a gang-themed open world series of games.

I think the Saints Row franchise could still be alive if we’d done that but I could have been totally off base. I just don’t like to play it safe.

I think maybe even Rockstar is afraid to do that now because of what happened to the Mafia series when they did the period piece idea. It was not well received. Mafia 3 was set in the 60s, which was a turbulent period in the USA politically, which may have contributed to it but I like games that are daring and different. I would have absolutely gone down that road.

When I found out that they were rebooting Saints Row (2022), I spoke to an old friend of mine who was my old boss for Saints Row 1. He was the producer, and I was learning about what they were doing, and I thought, man, this is a terrible idea.

What is it trying to be? You’re rebooting it, but why are you rebooting it? There’s a lot of characters in the series that people love. It wasn’t Saints Row at all. Just call it something else at that point. There’s a level of expectations for a Saints Row game, and they missed the mark on all of them.

What I would have done was to take the franchise back to the 70s and do a period piece, a prequel of how the gangs from the first one started. You’re running around with a crew of teens that ended up as the main characters for the first game. You could really go all in on the 70s theme with big Afros, bell-bottoms, and the music of that whole period.

I’d have taken it into a different direction so you’re not competing with the modern-day GTA games. You’re zagging when everyone else is zigging, so to speak.

That’s what I would do [if I had Rockstar’s $2bn]. I would stick with it being an open-world game. I love open-world games. I love making them. It’s just so much fun and so much about the sum of their parts, so to speak. I would say it’s what I’ve been pretty successful at in my career at making them.

What’s the umbrella company that owns the Saints Row IP now? [Embracer Group], if you’re listening to this, contact me. Let’s go. I can bring much of the old band back together who worked on Saints Row 1. I could turn that IP around with a decent budget. They don’t even have to fund it. I could get other outside people to fund it. I could turn the franchise around. I know I could.

It would be a story in and of itself. I’ve even thought about going to my pals and Meta to say, hey what about doing a Saints Row VR project? I think with the technology coming in the future, I think an open world game could work, but it’d have to be heavily stylised. We wouldn’t be trying to compete with GTA, but I don’t think anyone can compete with GTA anymore.

I think you could back it with Quest 4’s technology, and it could look pretty good. It’s not gonna look as good as Saints Row 1, but it’ll be close-ish. You bring Saints Row back to its roots, or go and do the 70s prequel I was talking about and blow it out the box.

I’ve thought about it. To try and resurrect the IP and be the first real quality open world story slash sandbox game for VR, going it in bite-sized chunks that VR is so good at in five or 10 minute core loops. I’ve thought about it. I think it would be amazing, and it would have its own identity.

I’m not trying to one-up GTA, but you could essentially be the GTA 800-pound gorilla of VR. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think I could do it, let’s put it that way.

Two weeks after the publication, the developer stated that he had been asked to make a Saints Row prequel. It would be a more traditional video game, not a virtual reality project.

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