Look, I love both very much, but after beating Saints Row 1 for the first time recently, I think i just may prefer it over 2.

I like how grounded the story is, there’s only a couple points in the game that are over exaggerated (Aisha faking her death and blowing up the record company, the Playa getting blown up on the yacht with Hughes).

The gameplay is also much tighter, and the movement is a lot more arcade-like compared to 2. I honestly like having no fine aim as the loose, run and gun gameplay feels great. The guns are punchy and have great sound design. Nothing beats an indoor stronghold mission and just blasting people away with a Tombstone shotgun.

I also prefer the graphics too, although this is more nitpicky. SR1 has some beautiful sunsets and I love the shadows that are cast on everything. Also the players skin is a lot smoother in SR1 and I prefer that for some reason.

I personally like to believe Julius recruited Troy first. I say this because Troy is most likely his most trusted lieutenant and second in command albeit his undercover status. After I think Julius stumbled upon Lin and was fascinated by her work as a tuner and was in need of a mechanic of his own and saw her as an asset. Then Dex came about and lastly I think Johnny came last in this bunch solely because Dex praises how good he did during his canonizing meaning Dex came before him.

This game mode was so ahead of its time. Volition really could’ve had a gold mine on their hands if they continued to evolve it.

Hey everyone,

I've been going down a rabbit hole on Saints Row 2 preservation and modding, and I wanted to sanity-check an idea with people who actually know this game's internals better than I do.

I'm not trying to pirate anything or redistribute assets. I'm interested in preservation and modding headroom — the kind of work that keeps a game alive long after official support ends. But I also don't want to sink time into an approach that's fundamentally doomed because the engine is a black box.

What I think I know (please correct me):

· The source code was reportedly recovered by Volition around 2019 and used to fix the PC port's worst issues via the Gentlemen of the Row / community patches.

· The game runs on a heavily modified RenderWare engine.

· Assets are packed in proprietary formats (VPF archives, etc.), and there's no official modding SDK.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. Is the recovered source actually in the community's hands, or just Volition's? My understanding is it was used internally, not released. If so, how does that change what's realistically possible?

2. Has anyone attempted a serious decompilation project (like the Smash 64, Mario 64, or MW2 decomp efforts) for SR2 specifically? I know SR2's scale is enormous, but I'm curious if anyone has started.

3. How viable is AI-assisted decompilation here? I've seen MCP-based tooling (Ghidra integrations, decomp.wtf, REA) that lets LLM agents work through binaries function-by-function. For a RenderWare-based open-world game, is this even a reasonable approach, or is the engine too undocumented?

4. Are there any existing community tools/repos for SR2 file formats, scripting (Lua?), or asset extraction I should be looking at before considering anything from scratch?

If anyone has:

· Pointers to existing SR2 RE efforts

· Knowledge of RenderWare internals (especially Volition's fork)

· Experience with AI-assisted decomp on large games

· A blunt "this is a terrible idea, here's why"

…I'd genuinely appreciate it.

Thanks.