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Just finished a playthrough of Saints Row The Third Remastered an hour or so ago (as of beginning this post), which I started a week or two ago, so I thought I'd install and start a game of Saints Row IV. First time playing either of these games. I'd played the original Saints Row on the Xbox 360 over a decade ago, though I never beat it, and though I do have Saints Row 2 on Steam, I decided to just skip it and go straight to The Third. I played as a female Boss with the Laura Bailey voice, naturally. It was pretty cool. I didn't do every little thing, like completely taking over all the territories or finishing all the shitty Escort or Snatch or Trail Blazing or Professor Genki side missions or whatever, but I did complete all of the main story missions and the main DLC missions (said DLC came with the version of the game I got).
Now, for the reason for the subject line of this post. While The Third ran with no problems for me (despite Steam reviews for Remastered claiming otherwise), with Saints Row IV I couldn't even get past the title screen main menu. The fucking game would freeze every few seconds. I looked online and saw a bunch of banal solutions like "verify your game files," "run in compatibility mode," "update your graphics drivers," and so on, but the solution that actually worked (or, at least, seems to have worked, though I haven't technically started the game itself yet) was one I found in this reply to this Reddit post.
So, apparently, when it was first released, Saints Row IV had some kind of telemetry thing that would presumably check every little bit. Ostensibly, it "worked" "fine" when the game was new and didn't cause any issues. But then, that whole thing apparently went away. And now, when you first install the game but before manually editing the Windows hosts file to block that shit, the game tries to phone home, and then fails, which causes the game to freeze for several seconds, every few seconds. Adding the "127.0.0.1 sr3.hydra.agoragames.com" line to the hosts file appears to have resolved the problem, though, at least for me. One would have thought that the developer/publisher of the game would have had this shit fixed themselves, but apparently not.
I'm not as incensed as I could be, right now, given that I found a fix, but I'm still too tired and pissed off to actually try the game itself, at least for tonight, anyway. Also, I'm not sure if there's a way to transfer one's Boss from SRTT into SRIV, and if not, I don't feel like going through character creation (which will be a female Laura Bailey[1] Boss again, of course, or as close to my SRTT Boss as I can get her anyway) again right now. And it's after 4:30am as I wrap up this post, so to hell with all of it for now. I'm going to bed.
(EDIT, the next day) Yeah, the game seems to work fine now. I did have to recreate my Boss in the character creator, but she basically looks the same as in the previous game. Perhaps a bit less janky, which is good.
The game is basically an entirely different genre than the previous games, or similar games like GTA or whatever. It's still open world sandbox and all that, but in this one, you very quickly get superpowers, which kind of make cars and even guns obsolete, or at least it has so far. (/EDIT)
[1] - I literally stopped the car on the sidewalk before reaching the waypoint and let that play out when I got to that mission. Spoiler: in the end credits for SRTT, they played all of the various Boss voices singing it at once. And, spoilers again (for me as well, this time), there are some other sing-along scenes in SRIV, too.
Now, for the reason for the subject line of this post. While The Third ran with no problems for me (despite Steam reviews for Remastered claiming otherwise), with Saints Row IV I couldn't even get past the title screen main menu. The fucking game would freeze every few seconds. I looked online and saw a bunch of banal solutions like "verify your game files," "run in compatibility mode," "update your graphics drivers," and so on, but the solution that actually worked (or, at least, seems to have worked, though I haven't technically started the game itself yet) was one I found in this reply to this Reddit post.
So, apparently, when it was first released, Saints Row IV had some kind of telemetry thing that would presumably check every little bit. Ostensibly, it "worked" "fine" when the game was new and didn't cause any issues. But then, that whole thing apparently went away. And now, when you first install the game but before manually editing the Windows hosts file to block that shit, the game tries to phone home, and then fails, which causes the game to freeze for several seconds, every few seconds. Adding the "127.0.0.1 sr3.hydra.agoragames.com" line to the hosts file appears to have resolved the problem, though, at least for me. One would have thought that the developer/publisher of the game would have had this shit fixed themselves, but apparently not.
I'm not as incensed as I could be, right now, given that I found a fix, but I'm still too tired and pissed off to actually try the game itself, at least for tonight, anyway. Also, I'm not sure if there's a way to transfer one's Boss from SRTT into SRIV, and if not, I don't feel like going through character creation (which will be a female Laura Bailey[1] Boss again, of course, or as close to my SRTT Boss as I can get her anyway) again right now. And it's after 4:30am as I wrap up this post, so to hell with all of it for now. I'm going to bed.
(EDIT, the next day) Yeah, the game seems to work fine now. I did have to recreate my Boss in the character creator, but she basically looks the same as in the previous game. Perhaps a bit less janky, which is good.
The game is basically an entirely different genre than the previous games, or similar games like GTA or whatever. It's still open world sandbox and all that, but in this one, you very quickly get superpowers, which kind of make cars and even guns obsolete, or at least it has so far. (/EDIT)
[1] - I literally stopped the car on the sidewalk before reaching the waypoint and let that play out when I got to that mission. Spoiler: in the end credits for SRTT, they played all of the various Boss voices singing it at once. And, spoilers again (for me as well, this time), there are some other sing-along scenes in SRIV, too.
