After much talk about the customization options that Saints Row (2022) has to offer, out comes the Boss Factory to let to actually try at least some of it out. As such, this is hardly a review of the actual game and its customization arrays, but that shouldn’t stop you from having some fun. Share your Bosses with the world at large, download others, and get freebies when you link your account.

Do check out our interview with the developers here for more insight into building Santo Ileso, as well as our write-up about the game in a hands-off preview.

OPTIONS

These settings are only for the character creation, and I would expect the full game to have a boat load more of tweaks to fiddle around with. What I do like is that they provide short descriptions to the settings, as well as a bar showing VRAM usage to make it easier to tell how much you can estimate the creator to tax your setup.

The basics include:

• Master volume
• Display mode
• Resolution
• Refresh rate (60 / 144hz)
• Vsync
• Graphics Quality Preset
  • Advanced Display options
• Brightness
  • Brightness Options (HDR / SDR offsets)
  • Scene brightness

As for Advanced Display options:

• Frame rate cap: 60Hz / Uncapped
• Antialiasing: FXAA / TSSAA 8x / Off
• Scene detail: Low / Medium / High
• Shadow quality: Low to Ultra
• Post processing: Low to Ultra
• Effects quality: Normal / High
• Texture cache size: Low to High
• Texture filter quality: Anisotropic 1x to 16x, Trilinear
• General reflections: Low to high
• Planar reflections: Normal / High
• Screen space reflection: Off to High
• Global illumination quality: Low / High
• HBAO: Off to Normal

THE MAKING OF

So, I played around making a reasonably ordinary-looking Boss, and also a simulacrum of Shrek, as one does. I assume it’s because it’s more of a working demo of Saints Row‘s customization system, there are still things I can nitpick regarding its breadth and depth. From my little dress up time, I wished I could tweak things like sleeve length, specifying colour channels, and the material which I couldn’t try now. Yes, there are items with multiple colour channels, but it doesn’t colour the area I do want to change.

The engine has some limitations, in which choosing advanced skin types disables other customization options. Pardon the scuffed Shrek, I gave it a shot.

Should you want to have any body marks, e.g. scars, tattoos, and the like, you’ll need to change the modesty settings in the Body tab as it’s Forced Underwear On by default. If you forget to do so, your Boss’ clothes will flicker in and out as it does the rendering, then puts your boxers back on. I’m not about to list every single available item as that would take far too much effort, and besides, I’m sure that list can only grow.

Last but not least, there’s the “Personality”. The selections are basically some voices for the general “tone” you want to go for, and some emotes. For more customization, being able to change the pitch of the voice will be welcome.

CLOSING

At the end of it, it’s a taster of the customization promised for Saints Row (2022). I’m hoping the relative nitpicks I have with the versatility will be addressed in the full game, or be added later on. There’s only so many situations the team can account for all at once; it’ll be better for them to release a good game first.

I’ll look forward to all your weird and wacky Bosses flooding social media. I’m sure there’ll be something. Saints Row Boss Factory will be available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S and PC via the Epic Games Store.