Prerelease:Saints Row IV/Saints Row: Three Point Five

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Saints Row IV.

Saints Row: Enter The Dominatrix, also known as "Saints Row Three Point Five", started development in December 2011, shortly after the release of the massively popular Saints Row: The Third. Beginning its life as a DLC built within the release build of The Third, it had already started implementing the ideas of alien invasions, off-the-wall superpowers, and what was then known as The Saintrix.

Development

Volition began development on Saints Row 3.5 in December 2011. Built within the release build of Saints Row: The Third for the Xbox 360, players were able to traverse the city of Steelport unlike any other - through the use of Superpowers.

Build Number 966362

By February 2012, the DLC was beginning to take shape. Only two months into an eight-month development schedule, new characters had already been implemented alongside weapons, missions and a few rudimentary superpowers. These were incredibly basic additions at the time; characters were named but not modelled, superpowers had no vfx, and the weapons used temp models from the last game. Volition had already seemed to be hashing out the basics of a story within these two months, and by looking at what Three Point Five ended up becoming a few months later, it's obvious that almost all of what Three Point Five contained ended up being used in the next entry of the Saints franchise: Saints Row: IV.

Early Superpower Prototypes

In the February 2nd Build, Superpowers were already being experimented with a great deal. At the time of this build, these included Telekinesis, Super Jump, Stomp and Super Sprint. The Superpowers included had little to no VFX, using white cubes as placeholders, and also behaved a little differently to how they appeared in the final release.

• Telekinesis originally played out very differently, allowing you to be able to "smash cars or anything with ragdoll physics into other things over and over again" and at very close range.
• The Wall Run Superpower Upgrade was not like its final version, rather having the Playa visibly gripping onto the wall and hoisting themselves up.

Missions Present In Three Point Five

As documented in the 10th Anniversary Stream by Volition, the February build had six missions available. Only one of them was fully coded by that time however. The missions present include:

• m01
• m01_b
• m03
• m06_2
• mm_14
• mm_vm01

m01 was the only mission that was fully coded at that time, and offers a valuable insight into how the story of Three Point Five was progressing.

• The first checkpoint would have been to "Kill Zinyak", who still uses the Oleg Brute model at this time. Oddly, the enemies protecting "Zinyak" are Morningstar officers.
• Paul appears. This mission, despite some changes, seems to play out the exact same as Pierce's mission in Saints Row IV.
• The second checkpoint would have been to "Confront Zinyak".
• Seconds later, the third checkpoint would have been to "Survive", presumably against Paul.
• Burt appears, albeit broken, as a temp stand in Homie.
• Fourth checkpoint would have been to "Enter UFO". A VTOL appears.
• When entering the VTOL, the fifth checkpoint appears: "Follow Donny". This is using the original promo spelling from Saints Row 2, but proves that for some reason Donnie was supposed to appear in this mission.

Mission Oversights/Development

• In this mission, Paul is seen as an untextured model.
• Paul was known as "Mega Can", despite being named Paul in the mission.
• Both the VTOL and Paul are bugged, either causing you to get stuck and therefore fail the mission, or having odd animations.
• Burt's Homie model, whilst acting as a stand in for Donnie, is bugged, and gets stuck in an animation loop, or fighting invisible enemies.

Three Point Five Press Video

On February 16, 2012, a short press video was created to show to a very limited number of outlets. This was short but sweet, created with the aim to showcase Volition's efforts at creating a fully fledged DLC for Saints Row: The Third.

Not much was shown that wasn't already present in the build two weeks earlier, besides two new weapon prototypes. At the time, these used models from the third game, but had completely different uses and VFX.

• Unknown Explosive/Missile Launcher: Possibly ended up becoming The Disintergrator.
• Freeze Ray: The Freeze Ray ended up being incorporated into blast, becoming one of the unlockable element upgrades in Saints Row: IV.