Days Gone launched with its justifiable share of issues. The sport’s director, Jeff Ross, has now stated that if Bend Studio had been capable of make Days Gone 2, he’d have been capable of make the “definitive version” of the sport so he “didn’t should essentially apologize for a lot” for any points.
What was fallacious with Days Gone?
Ross defined how each gamers and the event staff had points with Days Gone. One of many extra controversial factors throughout QA testing was the saving mechanic that was hooked up to Deacon’s bike. A few of these points got here from the testing setting itself as a result of the builders had been “evaluating it in a vacuum”, as he defined to ForTheWin. Not solely was there pressure when the testers discovered they couldn’t save a good quantity of progress as a result of they couldn’t get to the bike, there have been additionally complaints about having to restore it. So gamers wouldn’t should cope with survival mechanics like meals and water provides, these had been transformed to repairing bike injury and discovering gasoline.
The sport’s pacing was additionally described as a “gradual burn”. Whereas a few of this was intentional in an try to create an environment much like The Strolling Lifeless the place it will “lull the participant into a way of complacency”, different components had been a results of the cinematics and voice seize being accomplished too early in growth. With no means of adjusting these, the staff was “certain by it” and needed to make do with the prevailing materials.
The dearth of swimming was additionally an engineering constraint that was later defined by Deacon’s worry of water. Throughout testing, they discovered that 75% of self-inflicted deaths had been attributable to drowning. Floor swimming was proposed however would have taken an excessive amount of further time to place in. As such, water ended up performing as a boundary as a substitute.
Lastly, Ross admitted a number of the fight and encounters just like the instant-fail stealth sections had been “horrible”. Once more, the staff needed to cope with the constraints of scripting the AI:
With the stealth sections, we needed to keep the sense of ‘they may shoot on sight’, however we didn’t essentially wish to have a shootout as a result of the participant couldn’t kill them. That was the one factor I might actually work out to do, and we tried quite a lot of stuff. For the sequel, these are the kinds of issues I wouldn’t do. I didn’t wish to do them right here. I sort of needed to, however now we have the info now.
Sadly it looks as if the sequel won’t ever materialise. In different information, Ross additionally went into element about their open-world Resistance recreation pitch, together with that they steered using the Days Gone world for that recreation. Elsewhere, Xbox head Phil Spencer needs there could be cross-platform bans on PS5 and Xbox for abusive gamers, however admits it will be arduous work to implement.
