While the Saints Row franchise did appear to emerge relatively unscathed from the whole THQ bankruptcy, there were some casualties along the way. Enter the Dominatrix was initially meant to be an expansion pack for Saints Row: The Third. Unfortunately, with the tight budget THQ had been operating under during its last days,it ended up getting cancelled and rolled into Saints Row IV. The original description of this standalone expansion was that aliens arrived on Earth and imprisoned the leader of the Saints because his or her machismo was pretty much all that was standing in the way of global domination. Not only that, they forced him or her into a computer simulation meant to make people slaves and...heeeeey, this does sound exactly like the description for Saints Row IV. So it looked like the whole Enter the Dominatrix thing was pretty much done as Saints Row IV seemed to have absorbed the idea and fleshed it out into a bigger and better experience.

However, when the question was brought up during PAX in a Q&A session with the developers that we sat in for, they suggested that perhaps the issue wasn't fully resolved. While a lot of the main concepts were merged with Saints Row IV, Saints Row IV and Enter the Dominatrix were initially developed side by side. Because of this, when Saints Row IV absorbed Enter the Dominatrix, there was already a decent amount of work done on each. There were a lot of elements and features in Enter the Dominatrix that they couldn't quite fit into Saints Row IV in a way that made sense. And, for the sake of comparison, things that they did manage to work into Saints Row IV that they thought made logical sense included an alien race abducting the president and a giant mech with rocket launchers, so this stuff has to be truly, truly bizarre. To make sure all of this "really crazy shit" (their words, not ours) makes it to the hands of gamers, they are planning on releasing a director's cut version of Enter the Dominatrix as the first DLC pack for Saints Row IV. The specifics for what will be included have not been revealed yet, but if this qualifies as "really crazy" by Saints Row standards, it is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Saints Row IV has a scheduled US release date of August 20 and August 23 pretty much every where else, so this DLC should be released some time after that.