Saints Row The Third Remastered is "genuinely, shockingly impressive

www.thesixthaxis.com

Digital Foundry have cast their eye over Saints Row The Third Remastered, the latest in a very long line of last gen titles to be made over for current gen systems. No one was expecting that much from the remaster but it seems Sperasoft, a team I have never heard of, seem to have done an incredible job. Digital Foundry report that all the main characters, all the secondary characters, interiors, exteriors, and pretty much everything else in the game seems to have been remade with a much higher polygon count. A new texture mapping system has been implemented as has a brand new lighting system, “Virtual everything has been reworked” they comment. The lighting in particular is being a complete overhaul, with global illumination and the game slathered in crepuscular “god” rays, with full HDR support. There’s a cleaner form of motion blur, better looking explosions that have environmental lighting, and they’re throwing puddles and other reflective surfaces into the game as well. It was originally stated the game was locked to 30FPS but that seems to have gone, you can lock the game to that frame rate but there is an option to leave it unlocked. Another change is to the traffic, there are many more vehicles on the road now as the consoles can handle a lot more moving around on the screen. However, not everything has been changed, the audio for the characters remains the same, and all of the licensed music and radio stations remain the same in the remaster – a notoriously tricky licensing minefield to navigate. You also have all of the DLC expansions released for the game bundled in. The recent Switch port was rather ropey and you may recall the original Xbox 360 version was awful and had terrible screen tearing so it’s nice to the see the game running so smoothly. The big question is.. why?  The obvious answer is this is what we could expect Saints Row 5 to look like, but remember Sperasoft made the remaster not Volition, in fact they’ve been rather vocal in pointing out the remaster is nothing to do with them. Maybe Saints Row 5 has a new developer… Saints Row The Third Remastered is out now. Source: Digital Foundry