PREVIEW – Get ready, we tell you everything!

Not coincidentally the new Sony Bend Studio is the most expected of PS4 for the next times. In this advance of Days Gone we are going to tell you about the novelties that have emerged in the last hours around this open world with zombies to know a little more about their proposal.

Does the world really need another sandbox with zombies? That of the living dead has been a hallmark of the video game industry for many years now, and it seems that with impending games like State of Decay 2 or Overkill’s The Walking Dead the thing is not going to stop in the short term. However, at Sony Bend Studio they claim to have wicks to spare that skepticism.

They assure it in a meeting that they had in exclusive with Game Informer, the prestigious North American magazine, and that has left us the last novelties of the program after several months of silence. An absence of topicality that, as always in these cases, the onlookers on duty linked with a rugged development but that, in reality, seems to be because finally Days Gone will not be launched until 2019. Information that is not official, but that the magazine has confirmed after the latest rumors that pointed to it after an information published by PlayStation USA.

The thing is that, appear in 2019 or not, the set looks good. Deacon St. John may find it difficult to achieve the charisma of authentic Sony flagships like Nathan Drake of the Uncharted or Kratos saga of the God of War saga. However, he seems to have good playable arguments under his arm. His proposal is an open world with living dead set in the forests of Oregon, where our motorcycle is our main ally, and our only goal is to survive.

Easy Rider

As in so many other video games about the zombie apocalypse, more than dealing with an open war between humans and the undead. Days Gone goes about personal relationships. For example, one of the first missions of the campaign is going to take us by the hand of the protagonist Deacon St. John with his partner Boozer. What do we know about the hero for now? Rather little. His image does not look like the most charismatic character in the world, rather a conventional one, but his personality could hide surprises.

That is, at least, the idea of ​​the development team, who want to keep the user stuck to the screen based on being mysterious. “How not to lose the player’s interest?” John Garvin, creative director of the project, is asked from Game Informer himself. The answer is blunt: “Not giving you all the information from the beginning. You will not know too much about Deacon at the beginning of our decision. However, when you finish the game, you will know exactly who it is. ” We already gave you some details about the protagonist of Days Gone at the time, but it seems that they will not let us know much more about him before the launch.

What we are sure of is that the protagonist worked in a biker gang as a bully before the chaos broke out, and it is not by chance that this was a reason for survival for them. At least for Boozer and him, who in this hell act for free. They are not heroes, they are not going to cure the virus. They are simply a couple of friends trying to get ahead. Of course, there have been losses with the pandemic, without going beyond that of Sarah, the wife of Deacon himself, however being tough guys and flying on the roads on the back of a motorcycle has allowed them to survive until now. Because the fact that he is so tied and tied at the level of argument does not mean that we can not leave our stamp, and that from the study is promised that freedom will also be transferred to the argument of the video game and that it will not weigh in a script of Days Gone that promises a great story, according to its people in charge.

Choices

So, at a certain moment, we may have to choose if we leave Boozer himself wounded with a gun and we leave with a lighter one, or we take his shotgun and leave him more “sold.” The thing is that decisions will be difficult, because his rifle will be a real madness and it would make life easier for us, but if we take it away he will remember and change his relationship with us. How much do we value your loyalty? The idea of ​​this example is that, according to Garvin, “this will test Deacon’s fidelity to his friend. They are the kind of decisions that you will have to make, and that will impact the progress of the game and push us towards different endings. Because those kinds of decisions have to be made with care. After losing his wife, practically the only family left to the character is Boozer, his ” band brother ” and one of the few who guarantees loyalty beyond his motorcycle.

In fact, one of the things that have more interest in getting Sony Bend Studio is in making us feel that the motorcycle is something more than a vehicle, it is little less than a character. In fact, having to stop often so that Deacon repairs it will be a constant in our adventure every time an unforeseen event or, simply, our reckless driving will damage it. To make things difficult for us while we do it is the ” infected “, the official name that the National Emergency Response Organization (NERO) has put on the living dead in the universe of Days Gone, or the ” freaks “”That is how they are known colloquially also within the world (I am eager to see how they translate this last term into Spanish). However, it will not lack much-organized rabble that populates the asphalt of the video game, and that they compose five great bands that are as dangerous or more than the own zombies.

In a world of chaos like this, in the end, human beings are grouped as they can. In this fantasy universe, the different groups are the law around here, and we can do some work for them. Not everyone will be friendly, of course, and in fact, one of the missions that Sony Bend has shown to Game Informer is about a leader of one of these organized groups called Copeland. With him, we will start doing our first jobs in the story mode, and we do it coerced because we will be forced to collaborate with him to recover our beloved motorcycle that has stolen his band. It will not make it easy for us, of course, but we have some gadgets in our favor.

Survive in Days Gone

We already told you in one of the three Video Games of Days Gone that we have published to date that Deacon has a survival power. It is a vision that allows us as players to eliminate any possible distraction of the screen in the form of colors and, as if that were not enough, to highlight among them all the enemies that are hidden or the objects that may interest us. After all, a few years have passed since the beginning of the infection, but it has not been enough time for there to be no succulent booty to be found in our numerous adventures.

The fact that there is this special visualization method does not mean that everything will happen to us, we will have to be aware of many other things. “For me, everything turns towards how punishing the user can allow him to learn. It’s what we try to do during the game. We do not want to telegraph everything, “said Garvin to play down the aid. “We want people to have to imagine things and deduce them, but at the same time, they should not be too hard if they do not.” That balance in a video game that mixes open world and survival seems capital in the title. At the moment Sony Bend keeps many cards in the sleeve regarding other special abilities, but they have made it clear that there will be another that allows us to slow down the action under certain conditions.

Improve Deacon

But, is that what will be paramount to survive is to improve Deacon himself. It’s not that he starts off as a zero to the left, he was already a respected guy in his biker group, but from how we started with him to how we ended up there is an important stretch. Why does this happen? The video game has a careful progression system that allows us to improve the resistance or the health of the protagonist, among other parameters, as well as unlock many others that are inaccessible home and that we will have to progressively liberate with the experience and the level we are getting.

Likewise, there will be some weapons that we can obtain through improvements, and that will allow us to be much more effective shooting or, simply, find tools that adapt to a greater extent to our style of play. The same happens with a motorcycle that we can also improve too, for example, consume less fuel, be more resistant or load with more gasoline, among many other things, and that, also, will have abundant aesthetic changes that we can introduce.

Chaos

Moreover, that what happens is usually chaos. The amount of enemies on the screen is still overwhelming, and they will not be a uniform mass since the perpetrators confirmed that in a horde of Days Gone each zombie acts as an individual. It is fascinating that in the study they thought that it would be interesting to implement in their behavior elements such as food or rest, so somehow these incredible masses of infected are very organic and are perceived as alive. Garvin and company explain that waves of zombies like the one we saw in the first gameplay of Days Gone, about 500 undead, are only the beginning of the game, so there will be moments of a real impact if the figures are much higher.

That is one more reason for us to live cramped by their threat because they are the biggest challenge we have to face in the game and also, and especially, because the environments are so loaded with things that it is easy to get distracted or get into a mess and end up “absorbed” by it. The incredible forests of Oregon are recreated with great detail and a density of vegetation that is admirable, so not only that all this contributes to the immersion but it does not lose the opportunity to shoot the difficulty. In reality, the development of an open-world video game is always a bottomless pit of hours and resources invested. Days Gone, in fact, already accumulate five years of production behind his back, because the prism of the game has grown a lot compared to what was initially planned. Moreover, things like that have forced Sony Bend to double its size as a studio.

Not really a zombie game anymore

Nor will they miss the ambush of human enemies, the survivors who are so crazy to get ahead that they become a danger and, basically, all the threats that can be found in a story of this profile. With them, the approach is a bit more strategic, and skills such as marking opponents with binoculars are much more useful than the possibility of doing it with freaks who are much more anarchic and unpredictable.

So what you want to achieve Days Gone seems clear, not being a zombie game anymore. To see if he achieves it, some time is still needed, but the wickers are exciting.

-BadSector-

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Sony Bend Studio

Genre: Action, Adventure

Release date: Coming 2019