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.

Can this shit even be called a "game"?

It's 2026 and it's still just an interactive bug parade lol.

The only good thing about this game is the character editor & the storry but it's not playable cause of all the bugs. I mean it got a lot of Potential but the developer didn't use it...

Also i'm new to saints row & this was my first experience of the game series & I'm realy dissapointed! Are the other sr games better? Any recommendations?

I don't think he ended up in GTA VI by accident; Rockstar was probably inspired to some extent by the Saints Row series.

I’m playing SR4’s DLC for the first time and you’re telling me they had a way to write AND retcon SR4 and everything after out of existence? The literal first line of Enter The Dominatrix mentions the game as if it was some movie/project….if they wanted to go that route why would you double back on it and act like the DLC didn’t exist? Looking at the saintsgodzilla vid about the reboot makes it seem like that they were gonna do this or even go as far as retconning 3 as well so why even get greedy and kill a franchise that COULD’VE made money if the reboot did well