14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Volition announced during PAX Prime that modding enthusiasts would be able to make use of the brand new software development kit for Saints Row 4 on PC, and they have made good on their promise.
The Saints Row 4 SDK is now live on PC, enabling enthusiasts of the sandbox mayhem the game offered to create pretty much everything they would want to. Considering that the game is already wildly over the top, it's going to be interesting to see what intrepid modders will be up to.
Over on the Saints Row Mod forum, the first part of the SDK has already popped up, and it's causing quite a stir. It comes with tutorials, templates and tools for weapon model modification, and it's using various items from Gat Out of Hell, the newly announced expansion, to illustrate how the tools work.
Up to now, Saints Row 4's modding scene has mostly been into skin creation, as well as modifying some existing assets, giving them a spruced-up look, or inserting slight mechanical tweaks into the game.
If you're looking into setting up your own Saints Row 4 mod shop, you can check out the tutorial on how to replace existing game models with new ones on the forums.
If the idea of bringing all the weapon models in Saints Row 3 to Saints Row 4 seems like something that you might be willing to do on a Wednesday afternoon, the SR4 modding forums have you covered yet again.
Volition has also noted that it plans to release additional tools over time, giving players more freedom and power over the action-adventure video game's content, including the possibility of adding completely new things, and better tools for replacing skins and models.
The end goal seems to be pretty massive, with level editing and mission creation on the menu, but for the time being, the first SDK release only enables gamers to replace guns.
This is not at all disappointing though, since the game is known for its ridiculous take on pretty much everything, and taking into account the fact that the modding community has already managed to create interesting things (like this first-person mod), it's not going to be long until the collective creativity of various talented individuals produces something that nobody has even thought about yet.
Saints Row 4 was released last August for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Volition has just announced that it's heading for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as well, together with all the released DLC.
Furthermore, the developer has announced that a standalone expansion titled Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell will also be released in January 2015, literally sending players to Hell in order to fight the dark lord himself.