Volition was working on two Saints games before they were merged
We know the plan was originally for developer Volition to release the Saints Row: The Third‘s Enter the Dominatrix standalone downloadable content before they decided to turn it into a full-blown sequel. So a lot of you are understandably worried that Saints Row IV is just going to be Saints Row 3.5. As it turns out, both titles were under development at the same time before they were merged together.
It was around July last year when Volition decided Enter the Dominatrix wasn’t happening. Jason Rubin who came on board as THQ’s President talked with the studio, and everyone came to the conclusion that it made more sense to combine the two games as there wasn’t going to be enough time to fully element and polish all the features Dominatrix was going to have. This also meant the whole studio would be focused on working on the one game instead of dividing their efforts.
So what of Enter the Dominatrix is in Saints Row IV? “Very little,” according to creative director Steve Jaros. “We had to go and totally gut the story. The story stuff for Enter the Dominatrix was all totally thrown out. All the voice recordings that we did for it all thrown out, we redid the entire story — the game is the full length of, mission-wise, is the same length as Saints Row 3.
“Plus we added a bunch of other open-world [stuff] on top of it. Enter the Dominatrix had super powers, [and] beyond that there’s only a few moments that we really pulled [into Saints Row IV]. And what we did bring in we blew it out so much more. “
For more on Saints Row IV, check out my preview detailing some of the new content you can expect.
