#bend studios

Days Gone (PS4)

Developed/Published by: Bend Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment Released: 26/4/2019 Completed: 05/05/2023 Completion: Beat it. Trophies / Achievements: 48%

Two in a row here for me getting burned by “it’s not as bad as people say.” I mean, honestly, what is it about that that attracts me? It’s not even successfully contrarian, because you’re really hedging your bets by waiting to be told something isn’t bad before you try and stick your flag in “it’s good actually” territory. Plus, what is it I’m really holding out for? Something that I can class as “not bad” or “quite good”? (And that’s quite good in the British sense.) I mean, is it really worth my time watching a movie like Renfield to think “it’s not as bad as people say” rather than filling in, say, a Kurosawa I haven’t seen?

But of course, you can’t eat Michelin star restaurants every night; sometimes you’re going to want a (impossible) whopper.

The problem with things like Days Gone is that it’s like eating a whopper that’s six miles long. And I know that the Whopper comes in a round bun, so if I wanted a bun that made sense giving it extra length I probably should have gone for the (vegan) chicken royale, but I could probably eat a six mile long vegan chicken royale because they’re brilliant. And they already put about six miles worth of mayo on them.

To dig my way out of that riff… why are games like Days Gone like this? So grotesquely, illogically distended? I know exactly how they pitched this over at Sony HQ. A man walked in and said “What if State of Decay, rather than a game where players generated their own stories, was as relentlessly scripted as The Last of Us. And it played exactly like Red Dead Redemption 2.”

And before the man at Sony could respond the man pitching said “and the horse is a motorbike.”

It’s not a horrible idea, even if the influences are worn so apparently on the game’s sleeves that you almost wonder why you’re bothering. I mean the combat is literally Red Dead Redemption’s right down to the “focus” mechanic, and they’ve even got Red Dead Redemption’s random events and even animal hunting in it (which is crap, and thankfully you never need to bother with it.)

(A big aside here however to note that this is yet another piece of media with anti-wolf propaganda featuring the animals as creatures who attack on sight even though wolves sensibly stay the fuck away from humans. Also being forced to murder some bears in this can fuck off too.)

Anyway. Moment-to-moment, Days Gone plays perfectly well in a textbook case of “it’s not as bad as people say” once you actually get your weapons and bike and character upgraded a bit… which is another thing I’m going to complain about. What’s the point in having upgrade systems in your game if it just means the first five or ten or however bloody long of your game you’re stumbling about with a character that just feels crap to play? But once you get there–which takes far too fucking long–the shooting is fun enough, driving around is smooth, and you find yourself quite easily locked into the classic open-world “there’s always another box to tick off” loop.

Where it falls down, really, is that there isn’t… always another box to tick off??? The game has a really baffling way of doling out missions meaning that I often had only one mission on the whole map I could do. I actually thought I was completely screwed about a third of the way through this because the only mission I had to do was a motorbike chase and my bike was woefully unequipped because I didn’t have enough “trust” with the camp that would upgrade my bike to actually even really keep up with the enemy I was chasing. Thanks to my incredible skills, of course, I did beat it and then suddenly about six missions all appeared, but for many players that might have been it.

(If you want to hear something ridiculous about the way the game doles out missions, you basically can only get them when you’re riding on your bike outside of the camps, meaning that you’ll be in a camp with nothing to do, drive outside, suddenly get a radio call from the people inside that camp, and have to go right back. I know why they do it–what if you got the radio call while standing in front of the NPC in the camp–but why can’t you just get the whole task on the radio? You drive back and they just tell you what to do! They could have done it over the bloody radio!!!)

The pacing here is just so incredibly off. Trust with camps takes an age to grow because doing a mission might get you (literally) 400 points of the way to 25,000, and handing in bounties or hunting animals gets you like… 3 points each.

Later, of course, you realise it’s this way because the game unlocks its signature experience, “horde hunting” in the endgame, and you’ll be killing so many zombies that you’re swimming in points. However that means you’ve played almost the entire game unlocking almost nothing.

Horde hunting, actually, is the perfect example of how Days Gone just doesn’t quite get it. Hordes are all across the map through the whole game. The game doesn’t introduce the idea that you can defeat them until the end of the game. The hordes that are in the initial areas are smaller–sometimes as few as 25 zombies–and would be perfect to learn from.

The first horde the game expects you defeat, because it’s tied to a mission? Three. Hundred. Zombies.

It is absolutely idiotic. It’s not even a well designed encounter! The second horde you face in the story mode has a very clear path that they can chase you along lined with explosive trucks that kills basically all of them? The “end boss” horde has a train tunnel you can easily funnel them into! 

The thing that should be the most fun and rewarding thing in the game you don’t actually do throughout the game unless you know to do it without the game telling you, so by the time you get to do them, you’re probably too fucking bored of the game to want to. I know I was.

(And even then only the story mission hordes get marked with a life bar, so if you’re facing one randomly early in the game you have no idea if you’re actually completing part of the game until the “horde defeated” dialogue comes up. Which it might not, because there’s no leeway, and if you miss a random straggler or they clip out of the world or something (I did face some geometry issues) you’re fucked. And never mind if you’d like to practice on an earlier easier horde before doing that mission once you discover it, because you’re locked out of the earlier part of the map.)

To finish giving this a kicking, I have to say the Last of Us this ain’t. This has the most ridiculously po-faced and predictable story I’ve seen in a game in a while, mistaking a hero who comes across as a petulant arse as a rebel (well, when he doesn’t come across as unhinged, his breathless bloodlust when entering enemy camps is laughable). There’s too much simplistic edgy shit that the writers mistook for profound (damn… man sure can be inhuman to… man) and the game’s main plot, “Our protagonist is sad because his wife is dead… or is she?” is genuinely embarrassing.

I mean, I don’t know where to start with it. I know the writers would swear blind we’re supposed to be laughing along with the game during a flashback where our hero gets married in a backwards ball cap and his new wife says “Promise to ride me as much as your bike” but every other flashback sequence is so saccharine to cry irony there is beyond disingenuous (and I know it’s a callback.) And the game’s classic open-world rug-pull (there’s more map!) leads to a sequence where no character’s motivations make any sense at all. Why aren’t these characters talking to each other, you wonder? Why did our characters make these decisions in the first place???

I did laugh at the game’s “oh no my best friend is dead” fake out right at the end though. It was like Danny Aiello at the end of Hudson Hawk. “Yeah! That’s probably what happened!”

Speaking of that best friend though, (spoilers) a huge chunk of the game is about how he’s sad about how he’s lost an arm and can never ride a bike again. There’s a mission where the protagonist wants to fix it and I thought “oh, he’s going to find the material to get him a device that will help him control a bike one handed” but instead he… makes him a knife arm.

One armed people can ride motorcycles. This game is so stupid.

Will I ever play it again? There are four post-credit missions that absurdly the game makes you wait 8 in-game days to see all of because I guess they assume you’re having at ton of fun playing it more. I wasn’t, I slept in a bed for eight days and then laughed at the cut-scene promising a sequel that will never come via the silliest cliffhanger I can imagine in context.

Final Thought: The weird thing about Days Gone is that you could easily say to me “well, the reason you didn’t like this that much is that you finished it. You should have just played it till you were bored and then stopped.” Except for the fact that the game doesn’t hit the sweet spot of “not as bad as people say” until you’ve played it for ages to get upgraded and shit. This is another game with a new game+ that seems absolutely insane because why would you want to do everything over again. There’s no reason this campaign wasn’t ten hours long, forcing me to specialise in my first playthrough while keeping the upgrades and improvements flowing at a speedy clip and then letting me play the game again doing different things if I want to. No one wants six miles of whopper. Give me six miles of individual whoppers and I’ll think it’s a bit wasteful but I’ll happily eat a couple and move on with my life.

Many PlayStation studios are having a tough time right now, but it’s the ongoing mugging of Bend Studios, the makers of Days Gone, that I feel worst about. According to a new report, the team is about to be hit by layoffs yet again. That’s according to journalist Jason Schreier who has apparently learned that the team will be getting rid of around 40 employees, totally about 30% of the studios…

We’re around a month away from Days Gone Remastered launching on April 25, a shiny new edition of Bend Studio’s somewhat overlooked open-world zombie game. If you want to know the details of how to upgrade your copy of the game for $10 to the new edition, check out my quick guide here. The new edition will, of course, have upgraded graphics but it’s also coming with some new content. And it’s…