![]() By making the action ramp up slowly, there’s a progression, and the action hits because there’s something to contrast it against. This, too, was a conscious design decision. Ross jokes that a more appropriate marketing tagline might have been: ‘It’s a slow burn’. This might make it sound like you’re constantly under threat in Days Gone, but that’s not the case either. It created this ‘what the f**k’ type of feature like, ‘I’m being shot off my bike and I have to repair it? Oh my God.’” But during development, the challenge was people just testing in a vacuum without all of that. All the work that you haven’t been able to bank by saving the game at your bike created some interesting tension. It loses the context of your progression, the save status, your inventory. “When a developer is working on that, they’re evaluating it in a vacuum. We don’t want to just ping pong between what people say. “As a leader, you have to listen,” Ross explains of the design direction, which was controversial on the development team. Whether it’s ambushes along the road, running out of fuel, or being chased by a horde, the world doesn’t let you get complacent. One minute you’re out enjoying your bike, and the next you’re eating dirt. The game’s marketing tagline says it best: ‘The world comes for you’. This manifests in-game as intentional friction – survivable setbacks. Remember the toilet roll shortage? He’s right, we’re animals. I thought that’s what we needed to capture: humans being terrible to humans. That’s what the players were bringing to that fantasy. “That sounds awesome in theory, but in actuality, it was rough. “They would role-play terrible, apocalyptic fantasy things like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna tie you up in a bathroom and put fruit in your mouth,’” Ross says. ![]() Its other influences came from video games like DayZ, a multiplayer survival game where the real threats are other players, who will kill you over a can of baked beans. You gun across wild Oregon on your motorbike, avoiding and fighting hordes of freakers (read: zombies), while scrounging for scrap, petrol, and news on your missing wife.ĭays Gone. The game sees you play as a biker at the end of the world. Creating an original game set in an open world and with high production values was a monumentally ambitious goal, it took six years from conception to launch, and we’ll likely never see a sequel. When Days Gone was in development, Sony Bend was a studio best known for Syphon Filter, a series that was popular on the original PlayStation. These guys live here and then they go beyond the gates to find stuff and run into all kinds of trouble.’ There’s a loop there. I was like, ‘Wow, this is a lived-in world. Want to be secure? Go to the secure facilities. “They’re homesteading within this protected fence and boundary. “Where The Walking Dead had a great influence on us was the prison season,” Days Gone director Jeff Ross explains. Take a TV show about biker gangs and brotherhood, sprinkle in some zombies, and make it open-world. The original pitch for Days Gone was simple: “The Walking Dead meets Sons of Anarchy”.
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