Co-op has been an important feature in all Saints Row games, so it’s no surprise to know that it’s returning in the 2022 reboot earlier next year. That doesn’t mean the game is only rehashing old features, of course, as a recent Saints Row trailer revealed its new Criminal Ventures gameplay—or essentially how players go about building their own Criminal Empire. Co-op itself is getting tweaked, too.
This may sound like a small thing, but it’s actually a pretty big idea. Co-op is a standard feature in games similar to Saints Row, but oftentimes it’s heavily limiting, done just for fun, and is rather basic. Saints Row, however, seems determined to crank that to 11.
In a recent interview with Game Informer, chief creative office (CCO) Jim Boone and creative director Brian Traficante at Volition discussed how co-op works in Saints Row, discussing even how it impacts single-player. Saints Row features two-player, drop-in/drop-out online co-op, and the joining player looks exactly how they customized their Saints Row character.
Co-op in Saints Row is untethered, allowing each player to explore the entire city without being untethered. When a player begins a mission, the other will warp to them and help. Progression is tracked for each character, including collectibles, customization, vehicles, and all that good stuff, but the progress made on this particular mission is brought back to the player’s game too. As described by CCO Boone to Game Informer, "The game will remember you have played this late-game mission once you naturally work your way to it in your own campaign, and you will not be required to play that mission again.”
As such, players can join each other on any mission without worrying about potentially repeating it later. Saints Row will know that it’s already been done and skip accordingly. This is interesting and unique to the co-op space, and it likely has a huge impact on Saints Row’s campaign and gameplay, as well as the general design of the City of Santo Illeso—and it still doesn’t stop there.
According to Traficante, players will be able to prank each other during Saints Row co-op game sessions. It’s not clear exactly what this entails, but Traficante says, “it’s something totally different that we’ve done before that players are going to absolutely love…when they get together, they get access to the pranking systems, and you can just let your imagination run with ‘what would you to do to prank your co-op player?”
Saints Row still has a few months until release, so there’s a good chance more on the co-op and pranking system are revealed as it gets closer. However, it seems safe to say that it sounds incredibly ambitious.
Saints Row releases February 25 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Game Informer