Five years have passed since your former Saints crew betrayed you. As you awake from a coma for the first time since that fateful day, you find the Stilwater you once ruled is in disarray. Unfamiliar gangs have laid claim to your territory, rival factions have taken over your rackets, and cash-hungry corporations have laid waste to your once proud 3rd Street home. Abandoned and left scarred with an unrecognizable face, you seek out a plastic surgeon to begin your new life on the streets of Stilwater.

Respect can only be earned in Stilwater, and that requires a lifestyle that reflects your unique personality. Your crib, your crew, and your character define who you are on the streets and how you are perceived. The image you portray is as important as the decisions you make in a city ruled by false bravado and impulsive behavior. The only constant is the need for an identity that reflects your individuality and is backed up by your 12 gauge.

Style and image can only take you so far in a world where actions speak louder than words. Sometimes sending a message to your enemies requires heavy lifting, like that of a rival gang member into oncoming traffic. Respect in Stilwater needs to be taken, and what better way than to grab it from the hands of a gang full of enemies by means of a satchel charge.

The fight to reclaim Stilwater does not have to be waged alone. The Saints once ruled these streets as a crew of brothers, and their return to the top can help be secured through co-operative alliances. The time has finally come to seek revenge against your rivals to reestablish your crew as the rightful kings of Stilwater.

• Reclaim Your Turf: Rebuild the Saints and seek revenge against rivals to reestablish your crew as the rightful kings of Stilwater.
• Make Your Mark: Customize your crib, recruit your gang, and set your swagger using countless combinations of character configuration.
• Demand Your Respect: Protect yourself with human shields, throw rivals into oncoming traffic and zero-in your nut-shot using all-new Fine Aim controls.
• Jack Your Ride: Build your empire with private jets, speedboats, and helicopters or strafe the hood of your rival's monster truck from the comfort of your fighter plane.
• Own Your Hood: Discover both the familiar and strange in a revitalized Stilwater as you taunt, mug and streak your way through the city.
• Grab Your Piece: Send a message to your enemies using an arsenal of rocket launchers, shock-paddles, stun-guns, and satchel-charges.
• Online: Complete the campaign in two-player co-op, or multiply the mayhem with online open-world gameplay.

GCM: Thank you for your time! Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the team behind Saints Row 2.

JT: My name is James Tsai, and I'm a lead designer at Volition. Saints Row 2 was a massive project, and we had a great team that worked very hard on getting it done. There was a great mix of youth and experience; some team members had been with Volition for several projects, others were brand new; still others had worked on various games at different companies. Everyone brought a great perspective and attitude to the game and hung in there during the tough times. After three years of work, we're about ready to get this thing out the door!

GCM: GTA tends to reinvent itself with each new installment, but you've gone for the more direct sequel approach. How accessible is the game going to be for PS3 gamers and those who've never played the first as far as story, characters, and locations?

JT: When coming up with the story for Saints Row 2, our writer and cutscene team made every effort to make sure that the plot was logical and accessible to fans who either did or did not play the original Saints Row. We made it so that the main character was coming out of a coma, which admittedly is not a terribly original story device but one that afforded us the chance to fill in lots of the details for new and old players alike as to what happened in those few years that passed. We also give lots of history on the city in the introductory cutscene and in the attract mode in a manner that works for people either familiar with the original or not. Anyone jumping into the Saints Row universe for the first time should feel completely comfortable.

GCM: From the website, "Abandoned and left scarred with an unrecognizable face, you seek out a plastic surgeon to begin your new life on the streets of Stilwater". This sounds like the perfect opportunity to use the Xbox or PS3 camera and do some face mapping. Any chance of that?

JT: We don't have camera face mapping in Saints Row 2. We talked about it early on in planning phases, but also knew that lots of people like to play with a character that looks completely different as well. Thus, we felt that the best way to spend our time was to continue to expand the amount of customization we were offering so people could fully recreate themselves or anyone they wanted using our in-game sliders and fine tuning options. The number of options, and the amount of control the player has over each one, is really remarkable once you start playing around with it, but there's no support for any console-specific peripherals.

GCM: What did you learn from the first Saints Row that you've incorporated into the sequel and how much input have you received and implemented from the online community?

JT: Reaching out to our online fans is becoming an increasingly important part of development for us; the boards over at saintsrow.com are always buzzing and we like to talk to people there and get their ideas about what they like to see in open world games. They're also a great sounding board for our own choices and decisions, where fans are unafraid to tell us honestly if they like something or not. Members of the team here are the ones who actually moderate and talk on the boards as opposed to some guy sitting alone in his home-office that we outsourced the job to and has no idea what the game is about.

But anyway, we had a big edge with SR2 when you look at everything we learned from SR1. From a technology standpoint, we had an established engine that we could work off of, so we were able to start prototyping gameplay right away and had a platform from which we could investigate rendering and streaming improvements to make the game prettier and faster. In terms of the overall game design, we added lots of new activities and diversions, really blew out our customization options to go beyond just player appearance and now include things like gang customization and personality customization, and added lots of new vehicle types like motorcycles, airplanes, helicopters, boats, and jet skis.

GCM: Two-player co-op sounds awesome. Does the story or gameplay change in this mode, and is this a drop-in co-op or do you have to restart a special campaign mode?

JT: Co-op play in Saints Row 2 is fully enabled from the word "Go" and is set-up for user-friendly drop-in and drop-out options. You can play through the entire game with a friend from the start, or they can jump in to your game even if you're halfway through. All of your progress is bound to your own save file, so if they leave later you can keep going and both of you will retain the credit for any missions you've completed and any items and rewards earned. They can join up later and play more, or you can hook up with someone else - we wanted everything to be as smooth as possible.

GCM: What was one of your favorite elements of the first game that has made it back into the sequel, and what is one of your favorite new features in Saints Row 2?

JT: I'm happy to see insurance fraud is back in as an activity. We know people had so much fun with that in the original, so we added more fun stuff like the adrenaline meter and ragdoll aftertouch control to give the player even more potential for painful hits and collisions. On a stranger note, I've found I really enjoy killing the members of the development team who made it into the game as hit list targets in the Hitman activity, especially myself. That's some bizarre existential shit right there.

The co-op play is hands down the part of the game I'm most looking forward to seeing people embrace in Saints Row 2. It brings an entirely new perspective and dimension to the action, and it makes the game incredibly social. Laughter and jokes abound when you're playing the game with a friend.

GCM: Saints Row had a kick ass soundtrack and awesome radio stations. What do you have in store for us in the sequel as far as stations and the type of music (licensed artists and songs)?

JT: Saints Row 2 had a bigger budget for its music that Saints Row, and with it we were able to do a lot of fun stuff with the radio this time around. Our audio team put together a very diverse play list, featuring several different stations dedicated to their own genres of music.

I'm something of a metalhead, so I'm happy to see we got some very cool bands on our metal station, the Krunch. There's nothing like running over pedestrians with groups like Lamb of God and As I Lay Dying rattling your skull with a badass bone crunching riff. But for other people, we've got hip-hop, R&B, electronica, rock, funk, classical, reggae, alternative, easy listening, and an awesome 80's station that should definitely bring back memories of hair with too much gel and rhinestone studded jackets for some of our fans.

GCM: Explain a bit about the open-world online gameplay. What kind of online content can we expect; gang wars, territorial acquisition, street races?

JT: You can play Saints Row 2 on-line in two separate ways. The first is the co-operative play mode mentioned earlier, where the entire story campaign and city can be explored with a friend, beginning to end. I can't emphasize how much fun we had testing the game at the office when playing cooperatively.

The other on-line option is actually our competitive multiplayer side of things, with the focus on the Strong Arm mode as the centerpiece. It's a team-based, 8-player mode where two gangs will try and outscore each other's cash totals in a battle for one of seven neighborhood levels. You can score some cash by doing things like killing your opponents, but the real high value stuff comes when you complete activities within the level. So there's a very cool "game within a game" that's occurring within the overall scoring framework that leads to a lot of strategy; do you try and complete the activity, disrupt the other team as they do the activity, or try and earn money other ways?

For those yearning for a more traditional competitive multiplayer experience, we also support a 12 player mode called Gangsta Brawl, which sets players loose in some really cool environments to do classic deathmatch or team deathmatch contests.

GCM: So how much has Stillwater changed since the first game (or in the 5 years of game time) as far as size and complexity?

JT: Stilwater has grown up a lot in the time between Saints Row and Saints Row 2. We packed the city with as much development as we could think of, far more than could realistically be accomplished in five years but since it makes for a better game we felt confident it was the way to go. The city is now 50% larger, with several new districts to explore on the west and northern sides, and also islands and underground areas to go through. There's great diversity in these additions, with things like a nuclear power plant, underground mall, prison, university, trailer park, and so on being just some of the examples of the new additions. But we didn't neglect the older parts of Stilwater either, with every district getting some alterations or a facelift or, in some cases, complete reconstruction.

GCM: You guys have obviously played GTA4. How did Saints Row 2 change in design or content after seeing what Rockstar had done? Did you try to capitalize on any missed opportunities?

JT: By the time GTA4 was on shelves, our feature set in Saints Row 2 was locked down and we were already moving team members onto their next projects. Games of this size take a long time to make and it's therefore difficult to stop and pivot development on a dime...you can liken it more to being on an ocean-liner than on an agile motorcycle. Five months may sound like a lot of time at first, but when you think about having to dedicate time to bug fixing, to go through approvals with Sony and Microsoft, and to allow for manufacturing and shipping, it's really not much at all. So putting in new stuff was never a real option for us, and we probably would have messed up a lot of the game's balance and introduced several bugs had we done so.

GCM: You guys took a few shots at GTA4 for all their diversionary mini-games. What kind of extracurricular activities can we look forward to in Saints Row 2 if we can't bowl or shoot darts?

JT: Saints Row 2 has loads of fun extracurricular things that you can do to take a break from blowing away gangs during the missions. You can join an underground fight club, satisfy your inner daredevil with car surfing or base jumping, blow up everything in sight while riding an ATV in our trail blazing courses, race against other drivers in a variety of vehicles, steal cars for chop shops, assassinate people from hit lists, devalue property with raw sewage, and so on. There's so much to do, plus all those favorite activities from SR1 are still there as well.

GCM: Who was the marketing genius to get Gary Busey involved in promoting this game, and is he as crazy in real life as he appears on screen?

JT: The stuff with Gary was just one of many great ideas that our PR team came up with. It's been fun to see people react to it, since a lot of other promotional or marketing ideas never see the light of day and die in the brainstorming room. I never got a chance to meet Gary personally, but our PR coordinator, Craig Mitchell did, and he definitely had some funny stories. I think it's safe to say that Mr. Busey comes exactly as advertised.

GCM: Did you guys put anything in the game to really push the boundaries of the M rating, and more importantly, did the ESRB ask you to remove anything to get an M rating, and if so, what?

JT: Working with ratings boards is a complex process. We knew we were going to try and get an M-rating from the first day of the project, so we were pretty loose about what ideas we'd let go in early on. A lot of the stuff pushed the bounds of good taste even farther than most of what you see in the game. But over time we actually pulled lots of the really tasteless stuff ourselves, which really tended to be more along the lines of cruelty and crassness as opposed to overtly sexual things. We had stuff like luring homeless people onto buses with the promise of free food and then doing...not very nice things. In the end, most of us figured that even though we already punched our ticket to hell there was no need to accelerate things any further, so we didn't include it in the game.

GCM: What kind of Achievement Point rewards can we find on the 360? Any favorites? And will the PS3 support Trophies?

JT: We have a full complement of achievements for the Xbox 360, some of which you'll get for the expected things like beating mission arcs or completing all levels of an activity, but many others which will pop up as rewards for doing goofy things or experimenting in the world or messing with pedestrians. My personal favorite is one of the secret ones, but word of it seems to have leaked out in previews already. Let's just say it takes me back to some of my more shameless musical roots. Trophies came a little too late for us to be able to add support for them on the PS3, but we do have a global multiplayer "Badges" system that allows players to earn recognition for certain accomplishments and play styles, like going on kill streaks or using certain weapons a lot, and so forth. These badges can be collected by the players and displayed in-game.

GCM: Thank you again for your time! Do you have anything to add that I may have missed or something you're particularly proud of in this game?

JT: The scope of Saints Row 2 is really tremendous; people are going to get a lot of value out of this game. Doing just the bare minimum of things to complete the game's storylines will still take average players a long time, on the order of 20 hours or so. If players want to do even more of the activities or find all the last special upgrades or vehicles for their collection, you're looking at a very long and rich game world in which they can be immersed. We're really proud of the game, and can't wait for it to hit stores this October.

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