Pimp Lean
The broad, over-arching goal that Volition has for Saints Row 2 is a simple one when you get right down to it: make the game bigger in every respect. That means more character customization, a larger playable area in the new Stilwater, more variety in vehicles and missions, more gangs, more dialogue, more ways your up-and-coming thug du jour can brutalize the locals and... you get the idea.
First we got a demonstration of the elaborate character generation system, which doesn't have to be all that elaborate if you don't want it to be. There are sliders for virtually every single geometric measure of the human body (it puts Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man to shame, really), but you don't have to fuss with all of that if you don't want to. Saints Row 2 will come equipped with basic presets to get you started (or finished, if you're not into character customization).
Beyond the look of your character, you can also tweak other aspects of your digital persona. Under the "Personality" category, we found a variety of behavioral modifications could be made. Among these, Walk Style stood out to us the most and served as a means of altering the custom's thug's roll... so, you could have your dude pimp-strut around the 'hood or walk around as though he were covered in invisible bugs presumably harassing him/her over his/her fondness for crack cocaine (this walk is called "crazy style" for obvious reasons).
In addition, you can set up common responses to things that happen in the world that interact with the new respect system (respect being the Saints Row 2 equivalent of experience points in the RPG world). For example, you can select a specific taunts for your foes or compliments for your bros. You can even customize your character's voice, altering the tenor and pitch of his/her speech... In contrast to the original Saints Row, your character will actually have stuff to say this time out.
All of these customizations are totally optional, of course, and you can choose to skip the whole process or just individual portions of the process by randomizing your character's cosmetic attributes. On the flipside, Volition wanted to be sure to put as much customization into the character creation system as possible because the team finds that people really like making characters based on celebrities or fictional characters and they wanted to be sure that fans would have all the tools they'd need to build a digital version of Ben Affleck, Ving Rhames, Jessica Simpson or Jet Li.
