Days Gone director Jeff Ross has been the subject of many headlines recently owing to his statements regarding the game, its never-realized sequel, and how it was treated as a “big disappointment” by upper management despite selling eight million copies in its one and a half years in the market. He is not yet done revealing more, it seems, as Ross spoke in an interview admitting that one boss fight in Days Gone was “terrible,” and that several pacing issues in the game were due to the budget constraints.
In an interview with USA Today, Ross shares his experiences on some of the AI and boss fights in the game, stating:
“A lot of that stuff, like the Skizzo boss fight at the end, is terrible. 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.”
Of course, this is all conjecture now after he revealed recently that the game’s sequel was dead in the water with the departure of Shawn Layden from Sony. He did, however, goes on to share a bit of the studio’s troubles with budget constraints. In particular, the interview highlighted earlier quests in the game, which seemed to be barebones in comparison to others:
“The cinematics and the VO were captured early. 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.”
It would have been very interesting to see how Ross and Bend Studio tackle the potential sequel, but for all intents and purposes it would seem that there is no Days Gone 2 on the horizon. In related news, Ross also mentions that he was not interested in another Syphon Filter game, and you can read the details on that here.
Source: USA Today
This dude is just not going to stop crying about this game, is he? No wonder Sony doesn’t want to work with this dude. Days Gone was mediocre at it’s best moments and bad at it’s worst. It’s selling nearly as well as Ghost of Tsushima doesn’t mean it’s equally is good, it just means a biker zombie game has a wider audience than an artistic samurai game based around Mongolian invasions few outside of the region, or history buffs, even know about. And we’re also relying on the sales figures being accurate from him, I’ll wait until I have Sony’s sales numbers and until Ghost is on Steam and sells another few million copies. Also, I only got Days Gone on a big sale, I never would have paid full price for that. Remember that was the other reason he was crying that there wouldn’t be a sequel. My man here needs to just own up that Days Gone was okay, but not worthy of an even bigger sequel, then he needs to embrace and understand the weaknesses in the game’s design and adjust for whatever his next project is. Instead he’s just lashing out to anyone that’ll listen and showing he’s learned nothing. He even blames his budget. If a feature can’t be implemented on your current budget then yank that feature, don’t half a#^ it. Do you know how many incredible games have come out to universal praise that faced time and budgetary restrictions? Fallout New Vegas was made in less than two years by a staff that had exactly one person that knew how to use the Creation Engine when pre-production started and it’s considered the best in the series by the majority of people that have experienced them all. Just go away, put your head down, shut up and get better at what you do.
Its just piss poor excuse after piss poor excuse….The open world online sequel sounded like garbage. Its not amazing that it sold 8 million in like 3 years and LMFAO at comparing it to Ghost of Tsushima which sold millions in weeks…..The game was dropped to $40 within the first 6 weeks of release…
I liked Days Gone it was pretty good, FAR from amazing or great, you had to get past the first few hours before it started to get good. But this dude needs to quit with the excuses, they made a pretty good game and had terrible sounding garbage ideas for the sequel, when all they literally needed to do was continue the story and polish everything from the first game. It didn’t need co-op, it didn’t need always online connected worlds