Another weird one that I ran into and this is not “working as designed”: I was supposed to take out 9 people at an “ambush camp” and for the life of me there was no ninth person. So I saved near my bike and reloaded and boom, there the person was.
I fired this up for the first time and have some mixed feelings early in. Like most big budget titles these days it looks quite nice. It feels like a fairly standard 3rd person story heavy action game. Not crazy about the characters. Scanning the threads here it seems like people enjoy it more the deeper they get into the game.
“Boozer! Boozer! Booze-man! Boozarini! Boozasaurus! Boooooozer! Also some chick.”
There. Now you know everything you need to know about the story and characters, so you can safely skip the cutscenes.
-Tom
Rikki is bae.
Shouldn’t that have been in a spoiler tag :-)
I liked the characters well enough but the game was just kind boring. Definite 7/10 material. I’d rather play Ghost of Tsushima again than finish this one, I think.
Sure - I’d love to do that as well, only - ITS NOT ON PC! AND PS5 IS STILL IMPOSSIBLE TO GET!
Days Gone was great - it was exactly the way an open world game should be, with lots of open spaces to roam on your bike, and the main characters were VERY different from what we are used to, which is a major plus in my book - I really enjoyed it.
QFT. Indeed.
I prefered Days Gone to Ghost of Tsushima by a large amount, which I didn’t even finish. This was the opposite of what I expected, but I think it came down to the game play systems only. Swords and bows definitely got trumped by the wacky antics you can get up to with hordes.
Same with stealth, I would have thought the implementation in Ghost would be my favorite but in practice I eventually found it too tedious. In Days Gone it’s mostly just used to setup hijinks before hand.
I really liked Days Gone, though it didn’t have the sort of pull to get me to play it again.
I think I should have played on normal instead of hard. The zombies can be a pain in the ass. Hey, I thought zombies were supposed to me slow! Is it worth just exploring at all or just stick to the missions? I think there will be plenty of game her without extending it with random stuff. Can you find any locations that are really cool that wouldn’t be found just following missions?
Well, it’s not that kind of game. Elden Ring this ain’t. But more to the point, Days Gone is an open-world game from a studio that had no experience with open-world games. And part of what that means is they’re going to walk you through pretty much every piece of content they put in there. They don’t trust you not to skip their hard work!
-Tom
I wonder what Boozer thinks about that. The Boozman probably wants a little more freedom.
Boozer!
By the way, if I sound like I’m just poo-pooing Days Gone, I loved the zombie stuff in that game. For all my issues with the cringe-worthy writing and the godawful structure of the open-world, you’re not going to find another open-world zombie game that puts as much thought and energy into a meaningful zombie ecology. It was a delight wiping those guys out!
-Tom
I just picked this up a week ago, and have been having fun with it. I feel like a big baby gamer tho, since I ended up restarting on easy, with a mod to make it even more easy. It was just taking me so long to creep my way thru an area, and then end up dieing to 4 bad guys…then basicly start the area over. Turning down the difficulty just picked up the pace, so i wouldnt unistall it.
And im still getting owned by hordes on the regular. Which make videos of guys on hard taking out hundreds of freakers, so much more impressive to me.
The main character also reminds me of an old coworker, look and talk a lot alike, but my coworker didnt mope around as much.
Yeah, that pretty much nails it as a critique. Fun shooting zombies and figuring out how to wipe out nests and hordes, then skip as much bad dialog as you can to get to the next round. The world itself was nicely rendered and locations often felt pretty good, but I agree the lack of experience with open world games like Ubi stuff or even Bethesda stuff really showed.
The story is a lot more interesting in the second half. The first half is marred by the awkwardness that resulted from them removing a bunch of branching choice stuff.
I also think the open world structure is better than Tom gives it credit for. A lot of stuff like bandit camps are only discovered when you are ambushed while riding around on your bike. The location of nests are discovered by clearing out the bigger bandit camps. Quests are organized into multipart storylines that can last the entire game’s length. And there’s a lot of random action that can pop off in the open world.
All fair points, but I still feel it shows that this is Bend’s first open-world game.
But more to the point, I was answering whether it supports exploration. If you disagree with what I replied – and I freely grant you’ve gotten deeper into the game than me – I’m sure @robc04 would be interested in hearing why.
-Tom
I liked roaming the world ok, but I don’t think there was anything that I just stumbled on that was really interesting in terms of loot, story, or gameplay. Everything worthwhile was pretty much tied to missions or otherwise something you were directed to.
I’ve played this quite a bit over the last couple of weeks - about 40 hours, not sure how much I had it idle. I’m in the part past Iron Mike’s where the militia is. I’d give it a 3 out of 5 so far. The action is OK, but not very varied. The overall story is actually decent, but the Boozeman thing is grating. Some of the other characters and dialog come across much better. I can’t say I like playing as Deacon, especially one of the choices he made (using the explosives to blow up the Rippers).
When I looked up the number of quests I forgot it was broken up into areas on the IGN site, and I thought I was just about done. Nope, another area (the one I’m in) and it has a lot of quests. For as nice as the world looks, and the places feel believable - they don’t really do much with it.
I want to see where the story ends up just enough that I’ve kept going, but I don’t really feel the game is going to offer up anything worth while from a gameplay perspective. I think I would have been good if it were condensed to 20-30 hours. I’ve skipped a bunch of the side mission stuff.