“The Walking Dead meets Sons of Anarchy” – that was the original pitch for Days Gone, according to game director Jeff Ross.
“Where The Walking Dead had a great influence on us was the prison season,” he tells FTW. “They’re homesteading within this massively protected fence and boundary. I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I would do.’ You want to be secure, go to the secure facilities. I was like, ‘Wow, this is a lived-in world. 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. That’s gameplay. There’s an overworld.”
Ross recently made headlines after claiming that Days Gone sales surpassed 8 million – a surprising amount for a game that some assumed was a commercial failure.
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Days Gone was an ambitious project for the studio best known for Uncharted spinoffs and the Syphon Filter series. Sony Bend’s first open-world game would eventually launch on PlayStation 4 six years after its conception. In it, you play as a survivor called Deacon St. John, a wanderer who still wears his biker cut and a backward-facing cap at the end of the world. Traveling on his motorbike, you take on missions for other survivors while avoiding freakers – groups of infected humans who wander the wastes looking for people to maim. It was a big deal for the studio – a true sink or swim moment.
“My design philosophy is you’ve got to stick with your core fantasy,” Ross explains. “So whatever core fantasy your IP is trying to create, if players are buying into it, they want it delivered upon. If somebody is buying a grocery shopping simulator, you’re gonna have some mechanics that people don’t love. This is the grocery shopping simulator so we have to have inventory management. Somebody who’s buying this game doesn’t get that and they’re going to be p***** off.”
Outside of its prestige TV show influences, Sony Bend looked to other zombie games for inspiration. Among those was DayZ, a multiplayer survival game where other players are more of a threat than the undead. Because these moments in DayZ are unscripted – they’re in the hands of the players – you might play for dozens of hours and never experience anything like it. It’s almost more interesting to read about DayZ than it is to play it. The survival sim brought out the worst in people. There were groups dedicated to ambushing and killing other players, gangs that would kidnap people and force them to fight to the death, and many other flavors of virtual deviancy.
“They would roleplay terrible, apocalyptic fantasy things like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna tie you up in a bathroom and put fruit in your mouth,’” Ross says. “That sounds awesome in theory, but in actuality, it was rough. It was brutal. That’s what the players were bringing to that fantasy. I thought that’s what we needed to capture: humans being terrible to humans. To me, that’s the apocalypse. It’s not just the zombies. We’re caged animals.”
If you ever tried to buy toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, you’ll know this isn’t hyperbole. We’re monsters, and we will do anything to make sure we can wipe our own butts before our neighbors can wipe theirs. In a proper apocalypse scenario, we’d probably segregate them and call them ‘the unwiped’. In Days Gone, they went with ‘freakers’ instead (Days Gone’s zombies poop everywhere, you see).
So, where does DayZ’s brutality come into it? The idea was to create an open-world game with intentional friction for the player. This is apparent in the game’s marketing tagline: ‘the world comes for you’. Instead of allowing you to travel from mission to mission unimpeded, Sony Bend introduced roadside ambushes where tripwires and snipers could yank you off your bike. Hordes of freakers roamed the map, searching for someone to tear apart. Wolves hunt and attack. Outside of all this, the bike itself acted as the only place where you could manually save when out in the world, turning it into a lifeline – the bike’s limited fuel reserves also ensured you always kept it close by.
“As a leader, you have to listen,” Ross explains of the design direction, which was controversial both internally and externally. “But you also have to filter. We don’t want to just ping pong between what people say. You have to float these ideas, you have to test them, you have to even indicate what you think success is. Because when you’re creating it, you’re like, ‘Okay, here’s success: if somebody falls into this trap once every three hours, and we can guarantee that happens, that’s pretty good. It’s just three minutes out of three hours that the player is going to be going through this.’
“When a developer is working on that, they’re evaluating it in a vacuum. It loses the context of your progression, the save status, your inventory. All the work that you haven’t been able to bank by saving the game at your bike created some interesting tension. But during development, the challenge was people just testing in a vacuum without all of that. It created this ‘what the ****’ type of feature like, ‘I’m being shot off my bike and I have to repair it? Oh my God.’”
When you’re not being thrown from your bike, Days Gone can be a rather plodding game. Ross jokes that another appropriate marketing tagline might have been, “It’s a slow burn.” But that was another thing that was intentional. Just like how The Walking Dead sometimes forgets its main story and crafts an entire episode around a guy securing a can of baked beans or whatever, Days Gone hoped to humanize its characters by keeping things mostly relatable.
“I think that gave the game its identity in a way that we couldn’t buy,” Ross says. “Because looking at it with our small team, how are we gonna make this open world and compete against the Rockstars, the Ubisofts, and even the Avalanche guys? Somebody said this phrase which I misinterpreted but still love. It was: ‘go big by going small’. I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s what we got to do.’ I misinterpreted what he meant, but created my own meaning, which was: we go big by going really small and inward. So instead of erring on the side of these big, sexy explosions, rail shooter moments, and all these things, let’s mine the ideas that are kind of low-key, but within the vibe of the apocalypse and people being terrible to one another.”
That’s not to say Days Gone was boring by design, however – many of the game’s pacing issues were due to production constraints. Take some of the game’s early quests, which don’t feel like proper missions at all. In one, Deacon’s friend, Boozer, calls him on the radio, so you jump on your bike and ride across the map to meet him. He’s like, ‘Hey, Boozeman, what’s up? You doing OK?’ And Boozer is like, ‘Yup.’ And that’s it – that’s the mission. Likewise, you sometimes ride to your wife’s memorial site, watch a cutscene, and that’s the mission, too.
“The cinematics and the VO were captured early,” Ross explains. “We were bound by it. We couldn’t go back and reshoot. The beautiful thing about the story is it’s very interwoven. And that’s what makes things impossible to cut. Like, ‘Okay, this thing with Boozer wasn’t a lot of fun. Let’s make it as minimal as possible.’ But we needed it to connect the dots between a lot of this story material, but it couldn’t be lifted out of it. It’s a blessing and a curse, having a story like that. I hate to say the Donald Rumsfeld quote – ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want’ – but it’s true.”
Most of these kinds of quests happen in the first half of the game, with the action ramping way up after Deacon rides over the mountains and explores an entirely new area of the map, leaving Boozer and company behind. And while some of those pacing issues might have been a symptom of being locked in by the VO and performance capture being done too early, some of it was intentional. It goes right back to that prison season of The Walking Dead.
“It was a bit of a calculation on our part, some of the pacing issues early on,” Ross says. “Let’s lull the player into a sense of complacency. They’ll think nothing’s happened in a while and then – boom, that’s when something will happen. You can’t have that unless you do the small things that keep the game grounded in some form of reality. And then it’s intercut with these more dynamic, emergent moments with other humans and animals where the whole world is coming for you. So I think we nailed it. But it all came from that vibe – from The Walking Dead.”
Originally, the team played with a bunch of more outlandish concepts. They floated the idea of strapping rocket launchers and cattle guards to the bike, allowing you to plow through the hordes, but these kinds of things detracted from the gritty and grounded survival situation they wanted to create. On the flip side, they didn’t want to go too deep into survival territory either.
“At one point we did discuss the player having food and water management because that’s what all the survival games were doing,” Ross says. “It was too much for the kind of believability that we’re going for – eating a candy bar that’s going to immediately give you 100 hit points, or whatever. So we basically said, ‘Let’s take the survival mechanics like the food, and let’s move them to repairing bike damage and managing gas.’ One of the things we didn’t message very well was the crappy fuel performance at the beginning. It’s really bad. By the time we needed to formulate this type of reality, there was no more VO to record, we couldn’t pack it into some sort of exposition, like, ‘Hey, dude, it’s two years after the apocalypse, gas is kind of turning to vapor.’ Three years into the apocalypse, you would have terrible gas mileage. If you’re jaded about it, it’s just one more thing to kind of make people say, ‘Oh, this game is terrible.’”
Inefficient fuel isn’t the only thing that pulls you out of the fantasy, however. Picture the scene: you slam the brakes on your bike after spotting a flock of freakers nearby, using gravity to roll down the hill before coming to a stop, wishing the entire time for the presenter of Radio Free Oregon to shut up for literally one second. You swing your leg over the seat and stalk through the long grass, readying your knife as you creep up on a zombie. Suddenly, Deacon begins screaming back at the radio presenter in the most deranged manner possible. The zombie doesn’t even hear it coming. This kind of thing happens all the time in Days Gone. Deacon St. John actor Sam Witwer is an experienced, brilliant performer in animation, games, and television, meaning this likely wasn’t due to his acting ability. So what exactly was the deal?
“This is something I want no responsibility for,” Ross laughs. “We had a creative director who wanted this. We flew back and forth, but he won. And yeah, I think it was ridiculous. Because you know, there’s the movie yell – you’re on a bike and you’re just yelling a little bit, you’re raising your volume, raising the intensity in your voice a little bit in the viewer’s mind. They’re gonna assume that it projected across the distance and the wind. But yeah, we didn’t do that. At the same time, I think it kind of came around full circle. He must have PTSD. If you’re kind enough to connect the dots and look at it through that lens, I think that makes a lot of sense. There’s a case to be made that it is part of his complex mental state.”
Days Gone has been in the news lately because Sony turned down a pitch for a sequel. If you look at the jump in quality between the first Assassin’s Creed and its sequel, or Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2, you can see why it’s something players want. At the time of writing, 142,000 people have signed a petition to ask Sony to make Days Gone 2. For Ross, he says a sequel would have let him “create the definitive version” where he “didn’t have to necessarily apologize for so much”.
“We have to be able to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run,” Ross says. “I just see that as a trilogy. First games – Batman: Arkham, the first Uncharted – are basic. They are a platform to build on top of for subsequent titles. And if you look at a game like Uncharted, you could surface swim in the first game. In the second or third game, you could go underwater. Then in the fourth game, you’re scuba diving underwater. They didn’t start with scuba diving, they built towards it. That applies to every game. Horizon Forbidden West is going to have swimming underwater. It’s gonna have all the things that they probably wanted to do in the first game but just ran out of time. So you create the minimum viable entry and then hope you get to build the second one. Because you’re not arguing over the foundations, you’re arguing over the epic new ideas that you’re gonna be putting into it.”
For Days Gone 2, Ross wanted to carry on with Deacon St. John’s story and explore the relationship dynamics between Deacon and Sarah. “Yeah, they’re back together, but maybe they’re not happy,” he explains. “Well, what can we do with that? Okay, we were married before the apocalypse, but what about the future?
“We would have kept the heavy, strong narrative. We would have kept the bike, obviously. And I think we would have expanded the tone a little bit in a more technical direction, kind of like, ‘Alright, now we have all this NERO tech – what can we do with it?’ The tone would have expanded one ring outward towards some of the new reality. I think this would have been a little bit more – I don’t want to say Avengers, but something where the player had resources, he had some sort of the remnants of whatever the government had.”
That means no more slowly following guys in hazmat suits through instant-fail stealth sections. “A lot of that stuff, like the Skizzo boss fight at the end, is terrible,” Ross admits. “But we had to button everything up as best we could with the systems that we had. Scripting AI was really hard. With the stealth sections, we had to maintain the sense of ‘they will shoot on sight’, but we didn’t necessarily want to have a shootout because the player couldn’t kill them. That was the only thing I could really figure out to do, and we tried a lot of stuff. For the sequel, those are the types of things I wouldn’t do. I didn’t want to do them here. I kind of had to, but we have the data now.”
On top of all that, Ross wanted to push the ecology of the world, allowing bears to dig through trash cans, wolves to roam and hunt more dynamically, and generally give every enemy and ally more varied behaviors. And yes, they would have let Deacon swim in the next game.
The lack of swimming in Days Gone came from an engineering constraint, which the writers then worked into the lore to explain why Deacon was scared of the water.
“The swimming thing in Days Gone, it’s the worst,” Ross explains. “(Writer and director) John Garvin acquiesced to a certain point and just brought it into the narrative. It gave him an opportunity to have character growth too. I think that’s why he really liked it. This character can swim but refuses to, and later makes the decision to do it. There’s a screenwriting principle behind all that. But from a gameplay point of view, I hated it. I’m like, ‘Alright, we’ll figure this out later.’ By the time we circled back around we were probably in the final year when the user testing was coming back, and people were complaining about the water.”
According to the telemetry data, the number one cause of death for players was the players themselves. Ross looked deeper and narrowed it by damage type. Around 25 percent of self-inflicted deaths were caused by people throwing molotovs at themselves, falling from a high place, or blowing themselves up in some way. The remaining 75 percent died by drowning.
“The only way I could figure out how to solve this was we’ve got to put in surface swimming at a minimum, just to give players a chance,” Ross remembers. “Because once they hit that water, it turns to lava. We want to at least give them an opportunity to get away from the lava before it gets them. It was not a popular pitch.”
Ross and the lead designer sat down and drew up a plan, outlining the animations they’d need, as well as the blueprints from physics, the sound effects from audio, and all the other components required to make it convincing enough to ship.
“We spent probably five days in meetings with ten people from different departments, and you’re asking questions like, ‘What is that going to mean for this? What is it gonna mean for that?” Ross says. “But we really just have to try it. So we spent more time in meetings arguing about this and I finally said, ‘Look, we need four hours of this guy’s time. He has been in these meetings for eight hours. What are we doing?’”
Since it was decided fairly early that swimming was off the table, the water in Days Gone acts as a boundary to box the player in. That meant working with the environment team to ensure the boundary held together, even when players tried their best to use the water to break free of it.
“That’s where a lot of the fear in the studio came from,” Ross says. “But we knew we could contain it. It was basically a BandAid on a bad situation that snowballed from a six-year-old problem that we’re finally addressing. It was bumpy.”
Despite that road testing the studio’s suspension, Ross was excited to try again and refine the template the team had created with Days Gone. As a designer, the experience taught him a lot and he was ready to apply those lessons to Days Gone 2.
“I was really looking forward to building on top of that,” Ross explains. “I would add more systems. Systems are very simple. And if they’re simple, they can be elegant and very rich for the player. I knew adding one or two more layers to the systemic elements of it would have been something that we could have wrapped our heads around, it would have led to a ton of richness for the players and a ton of unique open-world moments and responses that we haven’t seen before. Let’s sink our teeth into this and do something even more epic.
“But then we started considering linear corridor shooters and I’m just like, ‘This is not testing me in any way, shape, or form.’ One of the things we would have to prove would have been improving quality out of the studio, but that wasn’t my problem. As a designer, there’s nothing for me, this is boring, I have nothing to bring to it. I was not interested in the new titles. For myself as a developer to play, I’d love them, but not to make them. And then the studio had changed so much. John Garvin was gone. It was a completely different place.”
After Days Gone wrapped, Sony Bend changed its structure entirely. There’s no vision holder in a creative director position, instead opting for a flat structure. “We moved from a singular creative director to a creative committee,” Ross explains. “And committees aren’t cool. You would have been able to create a more collaborative environment where people can contribute ideas, but unless there’s structure to it, it’s just going to be chaos. And that was the new direction the studio wanted. I was like, ‘Hey, it doesn’t even have to be me. It can be anybody, but we need one person where the buck stops.’ And it wasn’t happening. I like to collaborate and get people’s ideas, but somebody has to make a call on direction.”
Sony Bend decided to make these changes partly because of developers’ negative experiences while working on Days Gone. In an interview with David Jaffe, director John Garvin admitted that his personality was what led to him being fired from Sony Bend. Even company-mandated management training didn’t cool his temper any.
“John is on the record regarding his behavior,” Ross says. “John’s brilliant, by the way. He’s great most days and then sometimes there’s an awkward interaction. I think people were afraid sometimes to go out on a limb and do stuff, not because it would get them in trouble, but because the place can be really critical. That was always too bad for me, I didn’t love that. When everybody wants to contribute ideas, and there’s a guy who’s responsible for idea regulation, it creates hostility. It takes an advanced, sophisticated, mature work environment for that type of dynamic to work well. But yeah, I think the people that had bad encounters, they would say, ‘Hey, what the ****.’ I will say – here’s a big defense for John – most people who accused him of being a dick were being dicks in the encounter. It’s a two-way street.
“The creative director should always find a way to be receptive, but sometimes people just say, ‘Here’s my idea, why isn’t it in the game yet?’ You have to be able to listen, but not just oscillate between multiple ideas. You have to have a strong singular vision and let these ideas augment it. When somebody wants to change the direction of the game and says, ‘We should make this linear,’ I will tell them why we’re not making it linear. And they’ll call me an a-hole.”
Ross recently made headlines because of a tweet claiming that Days Gone sold over 8 million copies. He saw a tweet from Sony that celebrated Ghost of Tsushima hitting the same milestone and wondered aloud why the same hadn’t been done for Bend’s game. He wasn’t being critical of Tsushima, but he didn’t understand why the two games seemingly had different expectations for success. Ross believes it comes down, at least in part, to critical reception. The game currently sits at a 71 on Metacritic, a site that aggregates review scores from the top games media publications.
“I really do feel that Days Gone should have been an 80,” Ross says. “79 to 82 was what I thought it would get on Metacritic. I think that the technical issues set us back 10 points. The studio director argued with me on that, but let’s just look at it from an objective point – let’s just say that we got to 70, now divide that by three for tech, creative, and design. You lose one point here, you gain one here. One of the points that we lost was due to creative decisions, but a lot of the points that we gained were because of creative decisions. The technical stuff is not subjective. You should run at 30 frames per second.”
On PC, the game sits at 76 on Metacritic, and many of the technical issues were solved by the time it launched on Steam. “It’s still got some of the fundamental bugs, but performance ones are solved,” Ross explains. “It’s the same game, but the response is completely different. When I blame technology, it’s a studio-wide thing. It’s because we had a technical design department, we had a technical art department, a lot of the game systems were authored by non-engineers. So it’s a studio-wide thing. This is one of the things where the leadership at the top needed to bring everything together in a way that they weren’t naturally doing.”
According to PlayStation Studios boss Herman Hulst, Sony Bend is currently working on “a new IP that they’re very, very passionate about” and “they’re building on the deep open-world systems that they developed with Days Gone.” Time will tell whether the new studio structure helps resolve some of the issues that made Days Gone evaporate like second-hand gas three years into the apocalypse.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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