Actually in the Before Time when Saints Row hadn't yet been saddled with such hot garbage as Steelport, there was Saints Row 2's Stilwater, with amazing features including, but not limited to:
-multiple separate islands
-an elaborate highway system
-suburbs
-marinas
-corporate highrise district
-industrial district
-drive-in theater
-campus district
-trailer park
-cemetery
-ghetto
-underground shopping mall
-casinos
-police stations
-hospitals
-prison
-nuclear power plant
-airport
-caves
And each of those areas had their own pedestrian types, with not only unique voiced lines but animations as well. And the protagonist had unique animations and dialogue for those places too. And you could enter so many buildings. Not just during missions, either. Just whenever. It was ridiculously ambitious and high budget.
Hard to believe Saints Row has fallen so far that there are people now genuinely suggesting Saints Row never had anything particularly good in the overworld department. Stilwater is one of the greatest open world cities there has ever been.
It's weird, I recognize Stilwater had a lot of impressive variety in its locations, but I don't remember ever being that impressed with the open world. SR2 came out the same year as GTAIV, and I remember at the time being so amazed at how dense and "alive" Liberty City felt. It felt like the closest thing a video game had come to recreating a massive modern day city and giving the sense that pedestrians were just going about their daily lives (of course they were just scripted NPC's but to me they somehow felt more than that). Stilwater may have had more variety in locations than GTAIV's LC, but for whatever reason I never thought it as much more than a 'decent urban open world' that perhaps lacked the polish of Liberty City. Had I played it before GTAIV I wonder if I would've given it more of a chance.
Open world aside though, if you asked me what game I had more fun with, I'd take Saints Row 2 over GTA IV any day. To me, one of the themes that's carried on from GTA vs Saints Row is Rockstar puts on an absolute masterclass on open world design. The open world is every bit the "star" of those games as any of their main protagonists (perhaps even more so). And to me personally, that's perhaps made other urban open worlds like Volition's feel less impressive by comparison. But what I love about Saints Row from 2 onwards, is the game is very much focused on enabling the player to have fun. Whether it's customizing your character however you want (love how picking a certain body type for your character doesn't lock out different gendered voices) or causing mayhem, the series has had me covered. I know some still like SR2 the best and that's totally fine, but I suppose I'm more in the Jeff Gerstmann camp in feeling that the series really found its consistency in humor in 3 and that's why I probably remember the more recent games more fondly. Steelport may not be the best made open world, but damn if I didn't have the most fun I've had in video games playing through the story missions of SRTT and SRIV. And of course, if people liked SR2 the best, then that's cool too.
Don't mean to derail a thread on Agents of Mayhem too much so I'll go ahead and stop there. Just like discussing different open worlds in games. If the PC version of SR2 is running better now on more modern hardware, I'd actually like to give the open world another shot one of these days to see if my opinions on it today are any different than 2008.
