Diversity was never the goal of games like SR. The game was about inner-city street gangs and the diversity exhibited was simply a side effect of the game trying to represent the cultural make-up of its more real-life setting.
Yeah, that is what you could say is basically natural diversity, I don't think anyone has ever had an issue with that.
Any and all discussion about diversity surrounding this series is moot, in my honest opinion. The series roots were much more diverse than the shit they just showed, and the series has progressively white-washed its cast. Whether that was all in the name of progressivism is beside the point, however, the devs themselves pose this to be true when they claim the reason they moved away from the inner city gang culture setup was because of "cultural appropriation" (which is entirely meaningless in this context).
This is actually a good point, looking back it does seem the later games had less minorities in the main cast as the series went on. That dev comment doesn't make any sense tho; it's not like there aren't white gang members in inner cities, and regardless of their color things like hip-hop culture permeate in all of them so how is it cultural appropriation to have that in the game? It would've been Volition's own fault if they were whitewashing the Saint's Row cast over time, that was their own choice.
Regardless, of whether the devs' intent was to chase a more Fortnite-like aesthetic or not, the game is irredeemably worse off for it. Fornite for one doesn't even have a distinct visual identity. It's generic as sin. So styling your game in that manner makes little to no sense at all. But it's seemingly becoming a contagion across the industry. So many new games are announced and shown with utterly shitty art that's insufferably generic, totally uninspired in every way, and entirely lacking in stylistic character, originality, or novelty.
Only Japan and now South Korea can save us.
There's still good Western devs around that are doing unique things with their art styles, although IMO most of them are from the indie scene. Replaced for example looks really good and doing some neat things visually for a 2.5D action-adventure platformer. And it's not like I lap up just anything that's non-Western for the sake of it, there's some Japanese games for example with trash art styles or IP that have seemingly fallen into trappings of Western corporate censorship (Dead or Alive).
But yeah, for some of these bigger Western AAA games these corporate-driven choices in aesthetics combined with dumb censorship of "male gaze" is really hurting them more and more with time, causing unnecessary damage to themselves. Really weird of Volition to already take a combative tone with the audience peeping this game out, if they're this overly defensive already they must be scared of what they have to show later on and know on some level more people will reject it.
I don't think I've ever seen such a negative response to a rebooted series. Did Sonic 2006 get this much hate?
Not at its reveal no, reveal response was very positive. It's when the game came out when it became a joke, and later a meme.
However Sonic '06's issue were due to technical failures and questionable artistic choices but nothing inherently "political" as in driven by hyper-partisan Western political culture war circus antics (mainly because that didn't exist at the time)
Muh-norities is my guess. It's usually the common thread between all the games that evoke this kind of reaction. That's gender and ethnic minorities, to be exact. But some will try to convince us that this is only coincidental.
Again, though, Saint's Row as a franchise has always been diverse, and I'd like to think the majority of the backlash is from fans who don't like the Fortnite-like, super Gen-Z aesthetic.
While I'm sure there are some extreme anti-SJW/alt-right infiltrator types trying to gin it up as "woke diversity", that is but a small fragment of it, at least for now. Give it a couple of weeks to see where the online discourse goes and if we start seeing some usual spots and talking heads playing up the game being bad now because of "wokeness" or diversity or stuff like that, then we can start saying the backlash has turned into politicized toxicity.