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What to do!? With the Saints Row sequel, much as I felt while playing the original, that this game, more so than many other open world games, has a real tendency to drive me to distraction. By that I mean that when playing a Saints Row game I cannot help but get wildly off track from the main thrust of the game—the central storyline—because of the additional offerings that this game has in terms of alternatives to story missions.
This tendency is an unusual one for me. While I am pretty much in love with the open world genre and especially its criminal iterations, I generally find myself mostly drawn to focusing on playing out the main narrative, and, while I often dabble in the additional possibilities that an open world offers, I am by no means hung up on 100% completion ratings and the like. I never gave a damn about wasting my time finding all 100 graffiti tags in San Andreas for example. But, more fundamentally than that, I find little that interests me in playing around in GTA‘s open worlds once the credits have rolled despite the offer that those games likewise have offered me to “do whatever the fuck I want.”
While Saints Row 2‘s final line is a nod to the sense of freedom that the sandbox style is supposed to grant the player, I am not as certain that I believe in the purity of that statement regarding this particular game, at least in terms of what most open world games are often intended to offer in that regard.
Like a GTA game, Saints Row 2, alongside its main plot line, offers a living world with a host of additional criminal activities that allow the player countless distractions from the linear portions of the narratives. Unlike GTA, though, what Saints Row 2 terms “activities” are fairly well fleshed out mini-games that are necessary, at least in part, to drive the main storyline (the protagonist must develop a criminal reputation in order to take on the main storyline missions—performing at least some activities then becomes a necessary requisite for proceeding in the game as success in these activities results in the heaviest production of reputation points), but they also serve to provide some really helpful unlockables to the character that make the storyline missions much more manageable.
In other words, while GTA often offers “side missions” that give a player something else to do and maybe produce some minor gain for the player overall, Saints Row 2 makes these “distractions” necessary to some small degree but also extremely helpful in advancing the game on the whole by providing the player unlockables that make the game easier. Minor unlockable benefits in this game include things like discounts for weapons, food, and clothing. More essential unlockables exist, though, like faster health regeneration, unlimited ammunition for certain weapons, and the unlimited ability to sprint.
While I enjoy open world games, I find myself, as a player, generally drawn more to “gaming”, I think, than “play”. This would explain my limited attention span for playing games like anything in the Tycoon series or playing The Sims in a pure sandbox mode. I like when a game gives me a set of rules, and I feel some accomplishment when I can figure out a way to achieve the goals established by some external authority. I like to “solve” a problem designed by someone else. While I am drawn to the open world design of games, I believe it is the atmosphere created by experiencing a world, more so than the liberation of being able to set my own course in such a world that makes it so enticing.
What I am getting at is that I think that this is ironically what I find so distracting about the seeming “side missions” in the Saints Row series. Firstly, while some of the activities are fairly simplistic arcade-style shooting exercises; there are some good “games” in the mix. These are missions that force the player to come up with a strategy for producing a certain amount of monetary damage in the city in a limited amount of time require some plotting and planning. Don’t get me wrong—none of these games are Chess or Soduku or somesuch, but they do require a little bit of solid strategizing. And secondly, because these seeming “distractions” have really useful long-term functions in the game, they become fulfilling exercises for someone who prefers a little more game in their play because they improve the effectiveness of later gaming needs.
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