Due to the number of changes made in this special neutered edition of Saints Row 4, Australian gamers are effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Co-op is ”incompatible” with uncensored copies.
Deep Silver and Volition would have ”very much preferred” to give fans the same experience but the Australian board is rather, ironically, anal about anal probes.
New Zealand is free and clear as they’re set to receive the international edition of the game. Only the Xbox 360 version of the game will be region locked, leaving savvy Australian’s the option of importing Saints Row 4 PC and PS3 copies from, say, a little island nation just off the coast.
The official Saints Row 4 Facebook outlined the differences in the Australian version. ”For this version, we had to cut one optional Loyalty Mission from the game,” they explained. “Loyalty Missions are optional side missions that you can do with your homies. This mission in particular involves alien narcotics in the simulation, which eventually have a positive effect in terms of gameplay. As you cannnot depict any positive effect for using narcotics in video games in Australia, this was the reason the game was refused a classification.”
”While we are very proud of all our different missions, we do feel that Saints Row IV on the whole remains largely the same without this single optional mission, and we also feel that you deserve to know what you are getting in Australia,” they continued. “Due to the changes we were forced to make, this version is different than the version rated by rating boards like the ESRB, USK, and PEGI, which is why it will be incompatible with those versions in co-op.”
Co-op was likely to be limited to people on friends lists anyway so it shouldn’t affect too many. Still it’s disappointing that any limits have been imposed. Saints Row 4 releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 August 20th in the US, 23rd in EU.
