Days Gone coming to PC

I released a mediocre game that nobody bought, then I got fired for screaming at employees. So f#ck you guys

John Garvin was speaking to game designer David Jaffe on Jaffe’s YouTube show, where he was asked if he’d heard anything about any “meaningful uptick of engagement” with Days Gone since the game was added to the PlayStation Plus Collection on

“I do have an opinion on something that your audience may find of interest, and it might piss some of them off,” Garvin replied. “If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen gamers say ‘yeah, I got that on sale, I got it through PS Plus, whatever’.”

“And when it was just Chris [Reese] and I in a very small studio, that kind of heatedness was fine, but by the time you get to a 100-person studio you can’t have one of the directors losing their temper, you know. And I’m not a great people person anyway, and it’s not like they didn’t try, I was put through training a couple of times, like ‘hey, here’s how you go out to lunch with people more, and be a better director’, and dude, I just kinda sucked at all that.”

The guy straight up admits to being an asshole. Have to respect that. The bitching about piracy and not paying full price of course further cements that image.

I waited until it was half off myself because of all the mediocre reviews and the PS5 was coming out. Ended up loving the game, minus the story in the beginning. I didn’t care for or like either Boozer or the protagonist. Boozer at least has a little redemption near the end with some self reflection but the main character is an asshole all the way through.

The gameplay made up for all of that, and despite the length of the game I played all the way through happily. They did a good job with balance and upgrades designed to keep you playing. Eventually the story also pulled me in, though again you will never like the lead.

So maybe Sony Bend had some internal inspiration for the unlikeable characters. :-)

Honestly, that does explain some of the horrible writing. During the cringe-worthy meetcute, the main character a total dick to his love interest. Like it was written by someone who doesn’t know how people who like each other actually talk. I’m not the least bit surprised it passed muster for the guy in that interview.

Basically, Days Gone is just like Horizon: Zero Dawn. A solid open-world design that insists on the stinking up the joint with actively bad storytelling all up in your face because a) it takes itself too seriously and b) it has no idea how bad it is. Deadly combo.

-Tom

At least Aloy occasionally has a wry, self-deprecating comment to toss in, like she, too, wonders why she’s in this Lifetime movie.

Day Uno!

I thought the relationship writing felt really naturalistic. Especially later in the game.

Game sold like 7 million copies. It just wasn’t in the 10m plus cub with Horizon or Spiderman or Uncharted.

I would agree. I think the characters at the beginning are quite unlikable. But things open up a lot more as the game progresses. The characters get a lot more nuanced (Especially some of the mains. Being vague because spoilers). I think the biggest flaw in the story is that they were not able to write a compelling villain.

As mentioned above, the gameplay is pretty darn good. I usually peter out with a game at around the 10 hour mark. With Days Gone, I was happy to play it through to the end. And I ended up doing nearly all of the side quests. Contrast that with a game like RDR2 which I completed and liked as well. But I was done with the game many, many hours before the credit roll. Lots of bloat and filler in that game IMHO.

Anyway, back to Days Gone. I ended up liking it a LOT more than I thought I would.

Did the dude say anything that people didn’t already know? What else is Sony going to care besides money?

If you want a game to be a success / have a sequel, well, yeah, buying at full price is the best single possible thing you can do.

It’s also probably the dumbest thing a customer can do, now that games apparently are better some months down the line, and discounts are frequent and oh yeah, there are more quality games than anyone has time for, not to mention that now games apparently should require hundreds of hours to finish / shouldn’t even be possible to finish.

Why the game didn’t sell well enough, dunno, but probably because zombies are kinda generic when compared to other stuff.

The game certainly has its hooks in me (playing on the PS5). I think it’s because the world feels so raw and dangerous. You can be standing there fueling up your motorcycle, enjoying the soft rain, and then you look behind you and in the foggy distance you see a horde of 100+ zombies slowly crossing the road… and one of them notices you. It’s quite exhilarating.

Btw what difficulty is recommended for most immersive experience? hardest one?

I think they added a survival mode that restricts fast travel and eliminates some HUD stuff. I’ve heard good things about that.

Oh I didn’t know about this mode, I’ll have to check it out. I’ve been purposely avoiding fast-travel anyway. I did run out of fuel only once so far and it was quite a journey making it back to camp!

I’m a big fan of survival modes, but it’s a really poor fit in Days Gone. The map is clearly built for the player to fast travel between settlements, without much in the way of dynamic events or a world that responds in any meaningful way to criss-crossing back and forth. And once you learn where gas cans respawn, fuel usage is just pointless busy work. It doesn’t feel at all like a survival mode. It feels like a “pad the playing time with tons of pointless travel” mode.

I would advise anyone considering survival mode, especially for your first playthrough, not to bother.

-Tom

I disagree.

https://twitter.com/BradGrenz/status/1127776577448579077

Well that just confirms that you should fast travel, duh!

Apart from anything else the PC port has the best graphics menu known to man. DF hold forth:

Couple of bugs but very good port apparently.

I’ve been watching a guy stream this and it looks totally up my alley. I’m not sure that I’m in for $50 but I’ll definitely pick this up down the road.

It’s a a bit of minor mistake he keeps calling it the PS5 version that he’s comparing the PC to, there is no PS5 version. There’s a PS4 version with PS5 optimizations that let it run at 60FPS/High Res, but it’s kind of a boost mode and otherwise is just the game as it was on the PS4Pro. A real native PS5 version I suspect you would have saw some of the improvements that showed up in the PC version like the lighting stuff. You can tell if it’s not a PS5 version because you can install/run it off an external drive which you can only do for PS4 games.

It was a first person Sony title right? Maybe there’ll be a PS5 version too.