Saints Row IV is out now, and unlike some other open-world crime games that shall go unnamed, developer Volition released the game on PC and is planning to fully support that platform’s active modding community.

Volition is still working on the official mod tools for Saints Row IV, and it plans to release them soon. That delay, however, didn’t stop dedicated Saints Row fans from already releasing a handful of awesome mods.

“Personally, I think one thing that has been particularly exciting is that the modding community was able to take information we have provided for Saints Row 3 and use it to release several mods for Saints Row IV on the launch day,” Volition studio director of programmers told GamesBeat. “This includes a mod that provides 51 additional cheats to the game.”

And PC Saints players are craving more mods. The unofficial — but Volition-approved — Saints Row Mods website reported a 30 percent increase in registrations following the release of Saints Row IV. Activity on its message boards also increased by 292 percent.

With all that in mind, we’ve gone ahead and asked Volition to help us pick the best mods so far. We’ve collected our favorites combined with Volition’s in the gallery below:

Gallery: Gallery

Above: <a href='https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sandbox-for-saints-row-iv.4651/'>Sandbox +</a> opens up more of the game to sandbox play. This enables players to explore the Washington D.C. and Zero Dark Thirty levels at their leisure.<br /><br />It's still a work in progress. The mod's creator, IdolNinja, is still adding functionality, but you can install it and use it to instantly teleport to all kinds of different locations.<br /><br />And yes, you can run up the side of the Washington Monument.<br /><br /><a href='https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sandbox-for-saints-row-iv.4651/'>Get it.</a>

Image Credit: Saintsrowmods.com

So, Gamespot's been giving out codes for Saints Row Initiation Station, which is a character creation demo for SR:TT. You can access it early with these codes, but by Nov 1st when it comes out properly, im sure the disappointment will be slightly more widespread..

I figured id go through all of it, and give as much information as i can, along with my opinions.. but yeah, itll turn pretty sour towards the end. Ill start from the top of the menus, and go straight down. Its not all bad, but its.. its.. yeah, not good.
(by the way, im planning to add pictures to this later, but i dont have time to mess around with my capture card right now.)

Sex:
The male character's skin and definition, even on the skinniest possible morph, looks very good actually.. It looks pretty realistic, and doesnt look like its made out of clay anymore.
However, the default female character looks EXACTLY like a barbie, and i mean EXACTLY. (except she has brown hair)
Her skin is practically a solid block colour and she has no definition at all, no matter what setting. No real definition or detail on the face either.. it just looks like somebody plonked a sphere in max and coloured it peach. The age setting can sort of address it a little, but stray slightly too far, and youll look like a lizard all over.
Ive found it very difficult to make a female character in this demo and it not turn out looking like a barbie doll's clothes fell off, or Barbie's Gothic Steampunk Playset!

Build:
The build options are now a single triangle, which is ok.. the morphs are definitely better than they were, but now youre unable to make a character that is both muscular and fat to any degree. Youre either muscular and skinny, or youre not muscular at all.. never burly.

Skin:
Much better.. far more options and lots of weird ones if you want them.. You can actually have proper black skin now too, which annoyed me in Saints Row 2.

Body Mask:
3 faint tan line options.. not sure quite what use these are, but theyre there for you if you wanted them.

Age:
This looks really strange now..
It has no effect on the bodies of muscular males, gives a weird looking six-pack to any other build, and makes females look like lizards.

Sex Appeal:
I was looking forward to this, because there would finally be a game in which males are actually males and not all born eunuchs. It works ok.. shows up on some trousers and not others, and they were a little lazy with some of them.. (you can easily see the 9 vertices they selected and moved outwards and didnt do much more, like some of my early Sims 2 work.)
..it basically turns female characters into cartoon characters, but it works well with some clothes. Its a good feature overall.

Face:
These options havent changed much, some of the sliders go up in 3's and 5's now, but thats not really noticeable. Theres also a nice selection of facial features.. black eyes, moles, scars, etc. ..and you can have 10 on at once.

Hair:
Its.. different.. its kind like Rock Band's hair, or maybe Fable 2/3's hair.. solid, cartoony hair.. it looks pretty good, and theres a decent selection.
However, you can only have one colour now, no primary and secondary. There are 4 'iridescent' colours, that on certain hairs has a two colour effect, but you can only choose from Black/Pink, Black/Green, Black/Light Blue and Black/Grey.. and so far ive only seen this effect on 2 hairstyles.

Facial Hair:
Its all been merged into one Facial Hair category, no more combinations of sideburns, moustache and goatee.. and there arent that many.

Eyebrows:
This is basically the same as before.. Episodes of dharam veer serial.

Makeup:
This has a lot more options in it, particularly eye makeup.. theres also a separate section for blood and plasters, and you can have tiny coloured dots on your fingers.. they call it nail polish, i cant see any nails ^^

Personality:
Somehow, this has good all wrong.
There are 3 voices for each gender and a zombie voice. Males have a standard(?) American accent, a high pitched, squealy Black American Guy voice, and a guy who cant decide whether hes a London stereotype or an Australian stereotype (its really weird this time, not like SR2's which was pretty clearly Londonese.. this guy says both English and Australian catchphrases, and changes accent for pretty much everything he had to say) ..Females get, American, Russian and Mexican. The zombie voice is a zombie voice.
Its in the taunts and compliments where this goes downhill.
There are a large selection of dances, and not too many other choices really.. However during these dances, the character says a usually completely unrelated and random phrase.. such as saying 'Nice Outfit!', before breaking into this dance:

..and 'Hey! We've gotta catch up', just before breaking into a 15 second long dance called 'Apache' ..which i believe is this:

..it makes no sense, and not in a good way.

Thats it for the IAD section.. and now for the depressing part.. Clothes.. :/
I believe there will be more clothes than there are in this demo, and there are already rather a lot here, but most are from the one shop called 'Planet Saints'.. so it looks like therell be a wide selection and youd think that would be a good thing.. but its not..

Hats:
Theres lots of hats, plenty of giant animal masks.. Fl studio 11 producer edition reg key. no real complaints here, other than the fact there there are only 2 under-hat hairstyles now.. If you had long hair, dreads or not, you get a pony tail.. if you had short hair, you get a flat, texture-change-style hair.

Glasses:
Theres only one with any transparency.. the rest are all solid, block coloured lenses.. minus the three that doesnt have any lenses.

Mask:
Horray! a separate mask section.. with only one mask it it.. there could be more though.

Upper Body:
Undershirt/Overshirt/Coat were combined into this section. This alone reduces what you can do with your character heavily.. there is not a great selection of clothes.. its difficult to make a character individual despite the sheer number of items there are.
The clothes are bulky for no real reason, like in wrestling games.. Tank tops, jackets and pretty much anything that isnt skin tight is about 3 inches thick.
The worst part, is that you still, despite all the merging, only have a maximum of 3 colours to change. Theres a waistcoat, shirt and tie combo in which the tie, tucked underneath the waistcoat, and the actual waistcoat have to be the same colour.
And finally, there are no longer tucked/untucked options, all upper body items so far are untucked.. a major limitation when you trying to make something look remotely smart, or at least adult.. and no 'Style' options either.
Oh, and hoodies are effectively dresses.

Bra:
A lot of these are the same, but with different designs that could easily be changed with the old Style option.. but this is only one shop in the game, so theres probably more.

Necklace:
This is a merge of all the chains, pendants and medallions. Chains are now skin textures (Tidus in Final Fantasy X was the last i remember seeing that) and have preset medallions/pendants that, unless your body is completely flat, usually clips through your chest or is also noticeably a flat texture, basically.

Backpack:
Hooray a separate backpack option! ..none of them have straps..

Lower Body:
Lower body isnt actually merged with underwear, but it does however completely overwrite it. No matter how visible your underwear would be in whatever lower body item you choose, the underwear magically disappears.
Theres not much to choose from in this demo and its where a lot of my attempted characters have just not been to continue.. again, hopefully therell be more stuff in the actual game.

Its difficult to make denim look good. Textured clothes have been all but abandoned in this.. where before you could see each groove in jeans and cargo pants quite clearly, that simply doesnt exist anymore. Alongside this, there arent any colours that really look like denim.. they look more like blue trousers than denim in most cases.. In my experience, this has usually resulted in having black trousers.. and often entirely black outfits. This is also a problem on some upper body pieces, but its a lot more noticeable here..

Shoes:
Now includes socks. But, most shoes dont have any socks, so sometimes its noticeable that youre not wearing socks depending on what lower body you have on.. its not great..

Underwear:
Pretty much the same situation as the Bra section.

Ear Piercings:
Theres a great selection of mostly different earrings.. no left or right option, so unless its predetermined by the item, you have to wear both.

Face Piercings:
This hasnt really changed much.. you can have any colour you want now, rather than just gold/silver/steel/bronze.

Left Wrist and Right Wrist:
This section retains most of the items from SR2, however you can only wear a watch on your left wrist now.

Hands:
Merge of gloves and all rings. You can no longer select which hand to wear gloves on.. and you can only select a predetermined set of rings.

Outfits and Suits:
These work just like they used to.. Suits no longer remove all your other clothes though.

That about covers everything, except tattoos (which now have transparency) ..as you can see, theres a lot of downgrading here. Im less excited about the game now, and i leave the other side of this demo generally disappointed that my future characters are going to look like Tony Hawk's characters. This game better be good in every other area, otherwise i see no other reason to mutilate what was a great customization feature.
Im surprised that people dont seem bothered, but hey, the game can be fun regardless i suppose.

If youve got it already, share your opinion on the Initiation Station..
if not, well.. you can rant with me if you like :D
if theres grammar errors, tell me.. im a terrible typist.

This just in.

StBishop:
Just quickly, OP you may want to add this in. The FAQ on the site says it's 80% of the clothing which will be available in the full game.

..thats not good.. >.>
lets just hope the other 20% contains all the bits i need to make some better looking characters, eh?