
“When a developer is working on that, they’re evaluating it in a vacuum. It’s just three minutes out of three hours that the player is going to be going through this.’ 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. You have to float these ideas, you have to test them, you have to even indicate what you think success is. We don’t want to just ping pong between what people say. “As a leader, you have to listen,” Ross explains of the design direction, which was controversial both internally and externally. 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. Hordes of freakers roamed the map, searching for someone to tear apart. 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. This is apparent in the game’s marketing tagline: ‘the world comes for you’. So, where does DayZ’s brutality come into it? The idea was to create an open-world game with intentional friction for the player. In Days Gone, they went with ‘freakers’ instead ( Days Gone’s zombies poop everywhere, you see). In a proper apocalypse scenario, we’d probably segregate them and call them ‘the unwiped’. We’re monsters, and we will do anything to make sure we can wipe our own butts before our neighbors can wipe theirs. If you ever tried to buy toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, you’ll know this isn’t hyperbole. I thought that’s what we needed to capture: humans being terrible to humans. That’s what the players were bringing to that fantasy. “That sounds awesome in theory, but in actuality, it was rough. “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.

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. The survival sim brought out the worst in people. It’s almost more interesting to read about DayZ than it is to play it. 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. Among those was DayZ, a multiplayer survival game where other players are more of a threat than the undead.
DAYS GONE RELEASE DATE TV
Outside of its prestige TV show influences, Sony Bend looked to other zombie games for inspiration. Somebody who’s buying this game doesn’t get that and they’re going to be p***** off.”
DAYS GONE RELEASE DATE SIMULATOR
This is the grocery shopping simulator so we have to have inventory management. If somebody is buying a grocery shopping simulator, you’re gonna have some mechanics that people don’t love. “So whatever core fantasy your IP is trying to create, if players are buying into it, they want it delivered upon. “My design philosophy is you’ve got to stick with your core fantasy,” Ross explains. It was a big deal for the studio – a true sink or swim moment. 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. John, a wanderer who still wears his biker cut and a backward-facing cap at the end of the world. In it, you play as a survivor called Deacon St. Sony Bend’s first open-world game would eventually launch on PlayStation 4 six years after its conception. 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.ĭays Gone was an ambitious project for the studio best known for Uncharted spinoffs and the Syphon Filter series. 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. I was like, ‘Wow, this is a lived-in world.


I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I would do.’ You want to be secure, go to the secure facilities. “They’re homesteading within this massively protected fence and boundary.

“Where The Walking Dead had a great influence on us was the prison season,” he tells FTW. “ The Walking Dead meets Sons of Anarchy” – that was the original pitch for Days Gone, according to game director Jeff Ross.
