Saints Row IV Bollocks

published: 2024-12-08
tags: gaming

Last Tuesday, my good friend hangmansjoe and I were trying to decide on a game to play. I'm not sure what brought it up but we were talking about Saints Row IV for a bit, remembered how fun it was, and decided to play through it again in co-op.

Now, it's been many years since either of us played and I'm not sure of the exact timeline of events but the original dev studio has since been bought and shut down. At some point the original version of the game on Steam was replaced with the "Re-Elected" version which brought in cross-play support and seems to also now require a fucking Epic account login but that's not the most annoying part. No, they somehow managed to completely destroy the ability to actually play multiplayer!

It all seemed well after initially having to sign into an Epic account for no reason, but the joy of this wonderful game was not to last as we got our first of many, many, seemingly random disconnections. At first I assumed this related to me running Linux somehow so I gave it a go on GeForce Now, but the disconnects continued. Turning to the Steam forums, this problem seems to be incredibly common. A few people mentioned that they thought it was related to when there's a large difference in each player's FPS and that enabling VSync had helped. Why not try at this point?

We got about an hour and a half in before a disconnect this time, though given how random they were, I can't actually say if it really helped or not. We played on three separate days before giving up.

I tried to see if we could just the old version of the game and it turns out, surprisingly, they did leave that option there. If you right click on the game in your list, go to "Properties" then "Betas" and you'll find it listed as sriv_legacy beta. Great you can play the old version! Except... I never bought the DLC, we really wanted to play through some of that, aaaand... you can no longer buy it. Your options are to have all the DLC in the "Re-Elected" version but awful network problems or play your old version and have no option play all the content if you hadn't purchased it before the game versions were swapped out.

Saints Row IV is a great game and it's ultimately a minor enough problem but it's still irritating. Just leave stuff alone, especially old perfectly working stuff for fuck's sake.