Is Days Gone One Of The Most Underrated Games Of All Time?
Bend Studio’s post-apocalyptic open-world romp was released with a lot of fanfare but was met with indifference. Since through word-of-mouth it has garnered a cult following.
Days Gone puts you in the motorbike boots of Deacon St. John deep in the Oregon wilderness, some two years after a pandemic that saw much of the world’s population succumb to a virus that transforms them into highly aggressive zombie-like creatures known as ‘freakers’. These aren’t the slow, shambling monsters of George A. Romero films or The Walking Dead, they are quick, reminscent of the zombies from 28 Days Later and the game’s tone is blend of these, with a sprinkling of Resident Evil, all liberally seasoned with The Sons of Anarchy.
Because Deacon and his partner in crime Boozer are bikers who eschew the fortified camps of survivors that society has devolved into and instead live as drifters ‘out in the shit’, negotiating the dangers of the wild, surviving through their wits, nail-studded baseball bats, pump-action shotguns and of course their trusty motorbikes. Dreaming of a better life in the north, they work as mercenaries trading the ears of the freakers they kill for resources from other survivors in camps.
A Diffcult Birth….
Days Gone was intended to be a big hit on the scale of The Last of Us. Like that legendary game it is a Sony exclusive, a flagship release for the behemoth gaming corporation and was released with significant fanfare in late 2019. By that point it was already a year overdue after being in development by Bend for over five years.
At the start of the process Bend thought its 50 existing staff would be sufficient to bring the game to fruition, but that proved amibitious and the workforce ballooned out to over 130 to complete it. Even with that extra person-power on release the game was far from the finished article, be devilled by bugs and glitches.
After being heavily trailered in the run up, the game was hotly anticipated and unit sales were initially brisk, but the hype train quickly left the tracks as news of the state of the game spread. Days Gone is not the first game to have this issue, famously big names like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76 suffered in a very similar way. But Fallout was a well established series, and Cyberpunk was developed by CD Projekt Red of Witcher 3 fame, so arrived with a lot of good will from the gaming community.
Days Gone in contrast was a brand new I.P. and came from a studio whose last big hit was Syphon Filter in 1999, and in the intervening time had been mainly devoted to developing spinoffs for handheld consoles. Sales quickly dipped, and the game failed to hit its expected targets.
“Oh, damn rain. If it’s not the freaks, it’s the goddamn rain. Why, is it always raining?”
Games these days are expensive, and gamers are understandly circumspect with how they spend theirs. To shift the sort of numbers Sony expected you need a real buzz emerging around the game to persuade them to part with their cash and with its buggy launch Days Gone spectacularly failed to generate that. Buggy games feel unfinished and rushed, which they usually are to meet the tight deadlines demanded by studio executives, and make a for a frustrating experience to play, if they are playable at all.
But gamers are also realists: bugs can be looked past, often ironed out by rapid post-release patches, and be compensated by a compelling story, interesting gameplay and sparkling reviews. However Days Gone’s launch issues were compounded by a distinctly lukewarm critical reception. The general consensus was the game lacked engaging characters and narrative, and the gameplay repetitive in an uninspiring setting.
The question always remains is how long do critics spend actually playing the game before judging it. You usually expect 10-20 hours of gameplay from a traditional linear game’s campaign. With games like Days Gone that expectation becomes significantly more open-ended. By 2-3 hours in a standard game will have introduced the protagonists thoroughly and advanced the story significantly, with a boss fight under the belt and several levels or areas already completed.
The pacing of open world games are very different, and for the first 2-3 hours of the game you are just barely keep Deacon alive in a very hostile environment. This was very apparent when I tried to play the game a second time immediately after finishing my first playthrough. This was before the studio had addeda NG+ and despite having 60-70 hours in the game it was incredibly hard, with no bike, no boosters and only weapons I could scavange. It was eye-opening just how slow and difficult that early game is.
So it is not hard to parse why critics immediately after release were negative towards the game. It is not really until the mid-point when you arrive at the third camp, Lost Lake, that the pace really starts to pick up and the story take shape, as well as Deacon being able to take on larger numbers of freakers. This is not a defence of the game: structurally it is unbalanced and requires a little dedication to make it through those early moments. If a reviewer only dipped in for the first 4 hours they will be reviewing all the worst parts of the game.
I remember there were other factors at