Jeff Ross was Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) Bend Studio’s person to be responsible for directing Days Gone, and he was meant to be the director of the sequel, of which he revealed some details.

VGC wrote about the stream where Ross was chatting with David Jaffe, the creator of God of War who no longer works with Sony about the scrapped Days Gone 2 that SIE didn’t approve of. The pitch for it had a large online multiplayer co-op mode, but Ross wasn’t allowed to talk about it as a Sony employee due to an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), which is why he couldn’t confirm if the game had been cancelled.

The online mode was meant to be a shared universe, similarly to Fallout 76. SIE Band wanted co-op for the first Days Gone, but they had to make concessions, which is why it was cut from it. The sequel’s online co-op would have been a secondary mode to the main narrative. Ross then also confirmed that they wanted to address all the criticisms of the first Days Gone with the sequel, but in December, he decided to leave SIE Bend for personal reasons, not because of Days Gone 2.

Why didn’t Sony approve the plans for the game? Ross answered that the team has grown a lot during Days Gone’s development, which also pushed up the development costs. „Sony with these big triple-A games… they’re not cheap games to make. The first Syphon Filter I think cost $1m or $2m. The second one was $2m because we did it in a year. So the return of investment on those is great, [but] for games where you have to sell four of five million copies just to break even… there’s got to be a confidence in the return because Sony doesn’t have the cash that Microsoft does and they’ve got to use it very intelligently,” Ross said.

Days Gone outsold all the games they have made so far combined, but the critical reception made their situation problematic. This shows that money talks and Ross… walks.

Source: PSU