Plans are underway to resurrect Saints Row, as the design director for the first game, Chris Stockman, has revealed that he’s working on a pitch for a new entry in the open-world franchise that will see it return to its roots.
On the Saints Row Reddit, Stockman said that he had been approached to work on a proposal, which if successful, could be a prequel. “I’ve been asked to create a pitch for a Saints Row prequel. I can’t say anything more than that, but my dreams for this game just became a little more than just dreams,” Stockman said, while adding that it won’t be a VR game that’s being pitched.
In a follow-up with PCGamesN, Stockman added that he’s “attempting to get the band back together” to work on the game. “I want to bring the Saints Row franchise back to its roots. As you know, I directed Saints Row, and I feel the series has strayed way too far away from that. I completely understand why they went that way, but in the end, they kind of painted themselves into a corner they couldn’t get out of,” Stockman said.
This doesn’t mean that Saints Row is definitely coming back, as preparing a pitch and getting it successfully approved are two different things. Former Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield recently spoke about how challenging the process for getting a new game greenlit and funded can be, but that hasn’t stopped him from “making calls” to get Dead Space 4 approved now that its parent company, EA, is planning to go private as part of a pending $55 billion deal.
Released in 2022, Saints Row would be the final game produced by Volition before the studio was closed down in 2023. Embracer Group labeled it a commercial flop, and, critically, the game received mixed reviews. In the aftermath of Volition’s closure, Saber Interactive founder Matthew Karch remarked that the studio had gotten too expensive to maintain.