Days Gone - Sony Bend's biker open world zombie game

#21

I always thought bikies were arseholes. When did they become the good guys? They run the local illicit drug and prostitution chains here with brutal efficiency, how anyone can think that somehow they’re a really nice yet misunderstood group of people eludes me.
Perhaps they can make another game where you can play an SS officer who gets throaty when he talks about his brothers and the Code they shared…
Or a game that features you as a serial killer in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, taking advantage of the terror to satisfy your needs. As long as you have a Code.
Yeah, yeah I’m over-reacting and generalising but I’ve never liked the bikies as anti-heroes theme that is frequently presented in fiction.

Carry on with the game play discussion. The sad thing is, if they create a game with the right sort of dread and zombies I’ll pick it up.

#22

Yeah, the demo failed to express why you would shoot at the zombies for any reason other than to let them catch up with you.

Wait, why would we hate the World War Z zombies? I mean, aside from the fact that they were in a ludicrously stupid movie (thanks, Damon Lindelof!). How are they any different from the 28 Days Later zombies? For the record, I take a big tent approach to zombie mythology.

-Tom

#23

First off, I love that you call them “bikies”. I bet they hate that! But except for Daryl in Walking Dead, who isn’t a biker so much as a redneck who knows how to drive a motorcycle, bikers have traditionally been the bad guys in zombie movies. Consider Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The biker gang (featuring Tom Savini himself!) were the forces of chaos who tore down our heros’ defenses. Humanity would have prevailed if it weren’t for those jerks. I guess the idea is that bikers thrive in the anarchy of a zombie apocalypse.

-Tom

#24

I think Charlatan is mixing up the views of Tom Chick with Simon Pegg’s views on zombies.

#25

Seemed really un-zombie-genre-like to just spray bullets at infinity zombies.

#26

Yeah shooting the barrels to blow some up, sure. But every time he stopped to just mow down a few in the front I wanted to yell at him to just keep running. I did like when he scrounged up the oil filter to use as a silencer though. Have they said anything about loot or crafting for the game?

#27

Since I know a couple developers at the Sony Bend studio, I feel obliged to come to their defense: Most (or all?) of the games they’ve made have not been ports at all, but original games, some of them in existing console franchises.

#28

Ok, maybe I was confusing the hate for Lindelof with the hate for WWZ zombies. Stuff happens!

There definitely seemed to be some crafting-like activities going on in the demo, so I’d be shocked if that wasn’t a big part of the gameplay.

Also, mentioning the silencer reminded me: it seemed cool that he picked it up. And I thought “ah, neat, there’s some stealth involved here maybe…” until it turned out that a fistfight somehow magically called 3.5 million zombies to their side. It would be cool if there was a role for stealthy actions in the game, though.

#29

I just watched that section again. Right after he see’s the guy he’s hunting and shoots the one zombie with the silenced gun, you can actually hear the horde of zombies outside. Then the main character proceeds to:

  1. Yell after the other guy while inside the barn
  2. yell again after he gets on the roof, but cuts himself off mid yell once he sees how many there are
  3. gets tackled on a metal roof, then they roll off onto another metal roof then onto the ground
  4. once they hit the ground the other guy yells out in pain

From there it seems like a zamby chain reaction. I can believe the initial rush, its the huge wave that continues on after, that leaves me scratching my head. I get it’s a demo, but that’s just a huge number of people to have been at a remote lumber mill.

#30

Yeah, my bad, that’s what I meant. They came up with Syphon Filter, but after that, they were purchased by Sony and put to work bringing existing franchises to the PSP and Vita. From Wikipedia:

1996 Bubsy 3D PlayStation
1999 Syphon Filter
2000 Syphon Filter 2
2001 Syphon Filter 3
2004 Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain PlayStation 2
2006 Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2
2007 Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow
2009 Resistance: Retribution PlayStation Portable
2011 Uncharted: Golden Abyss PlayStation Vita
2012 Uncharted: Fight for Fortune

That looks to me like a studio that’s being handed marching orders rather than a studio being given the creative freedom to actually come up with a game. But I freely admit that’s just bias on my part. Still, it reminds me very much of the situation with The Order, where a group that had previously been doing Sony’s handheld scut work was completely lost when it came to creating their own AAA title.

I will be delighted if I’m wrong!

-Tom

#31

They have been shackled but I really liked their PSP & Vita games. I’m very eager to see what they do on a big boy system with no restraints.

Here is an extended video with more action:

BTW The Order was a damn shame - it had the potential for greatness but they really committed to their awful narrative. With some more combat arenas and a few more mechanics it would have been received much better.

#32

They have been shackled but I really liked their PSP & Vita games. I’m very eager to see what they do on a big boy system with no restraints.

Here is an extended video with more action:

BTW, the Order was a damn shame. It had the potential for greatness but they really committed to their awful narrative. With some more combat arenas and a few more mechanics it would have been received much better.

#33

Well, you should be able to play a dude tomb raider. But fine. I am SURE the guy biker will be am interesting Geralt-ish kinda collect -sex-cards kinda guy. With tattoos. He looks very respectful of woman generally, as is the future post-zombie earth. Sarcasm aside, he at least looked as though he was being nice to his GF on the bike. Pre-apocalypse, that is.

Game did look good in that clear-weather pacific northwest kinda way. Plus post-apocalyptic.

#34

It must be an Australian thing-
biker= someone who likes motorbikes and rides them a lot.
bikie= someone who has to be in a gang and takes pride in how awful they are. I had a friend whose brother joined a bikie gang, got the wire-brush tattoo but then decided to leave the gang. It did not end well.

#35

This looks interesting and would be a compelling reason for me to purchase a PS4. I have a few observations though.

Seems like it is Ammo Wasting Simulator 2017.
Harley Davidson type bikes with modified exhausts seem like a really poor vehicle choice in a zombie apocalypse due to noise.

Also Golden Abyss was phenomenal. Amazing what the studio could do on the Vita platform.

-Todd

#36

Hey guys, remember, they are not zombies…

The key difference is that the creatures in the gameplay trailer, called Freakers, are alive, and zombies are dead.

Ya…

http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/days_gone/features/article/days_gone_e3_breakdown.html

#37

It’s weird to me that this game is getting more chatter here than Horizon ever did or the new God of War when I thought it looked pretty humdrum compared to those two.

#38

Well, obviously, otherwise spraying bullets willy-nilly into them would’ve had no effect.

#39

Looks like every other AAA open world game. It’s got the GTA3 minimap, beautiful and excessive mocap, subtle camera change on bike mount/dismount etc etc. I imagine the world is stuffed full of collectables and aide quests that you can spend hours completing instead of focusing on the cinematic ‘main quest’. It could easily be titled Last Of Shadows Assassins Uncharted Just Cause Dark Knight Theft Auto.

Yet, for all of our uncanny valley levels of bobble headed mocap, throwing four Molotov cocktails at explosive barrels inside of a wooden barn is an ok thing to do.

#40

Holy crap, that was one intense gameplay video. I had little interest in the movie trailer, but the gameplay trailer has me a lot more interested – but I have a bunch of questions, the answers to which will affect my interest level greatly:

Mainly one:

  • are there an infinite number of respawning enemies, or can you actually clear out the horde by whittling it down like he seemed to be trying to do? I know it’s the norm for zombie-type games, but respawning enemies are really annoying to me and greatly affect my interest in a game. I’d love to play a game like this, with that many enemies, if you could actually clear out areas other than through scripted moments.
  • but if they do respawn, what was the point in the machine gunning of the enemies rather than just running? Is it a necessary tactic or they’ll outrun/overcome you?

That gameplay looked crazy intense though. One of the only games I’ve ever seen that I’d consider watching a Let’s Play type video because that video was actually more exciting than anything in the Dawn of the Dead remake or WWZ (which it seems most like, given the horde behavior). I thought from the cinematic trailer that it would be more like an open world Last of Us.

The music was also excellent, and really contributed to the mood.