Days Gone: Jeff Ross has been in the press for a while now recently (including for one comment that turned out to be inaccurate: Days Gone, the game he directed, is unlikely to have sold eight million copies).
Ross previously worked at Sony Interactive Entertainment Bend Studio, and he gave a lengthy interview to USA Today about Days Gone and its previously planned sequel. He revealed that once, the team considered food and drinks as part of survival: “At one point, we did discuss the player having food and water management because that’s what all the survival games were doing. It was too much for the kind of believability that we’re going for – eating a candy bar that’s going to give you 100 hit points, or whatever immediately.
So we said, ‘Let’s take the survival mechanics like the food, and let’s move them to repair bike damage and managing gas.’ One of the things we didn’t message very well was the crappy fuel performance at the beginning. It’s awful. By the time we needed to formulate this type of reality, there was no more VO to record; we couldn’t pack it into some exposition, like, ‘Hey, dude, it’s two years after the apocalypse, gas is kind of turning to vapour.’ Three years into the apocalypse, you would have terrible gas mileage. If you’re jaded about it, it’s just one more thing to make people say, ‘Oh, this game is terrible.'”, Ross said.
Regarding Days Gone 2, he added that they wanted to expand the first game’s systems with another layer or two of interactive elements. For instance, the wildlife would have been more realistic. Ross wanted to fix both the stealth and the water, the latter of which being the most common cause of death in Days Gone, he revealed. He also added a few thoughts about what story beats the sequel could have followed:
“Yeah, [Deacon and Sarah] are back together, but maybe they’re not happy. Well, what can we do with that? Okay, we were married before the apocalypse, but what about the future? We would have kept the heavy, strong narrative. We would have kept the bike. And we would have expanded the tone a little bit in a more technical direction, kind of like, “Alright, now we have all this NERO tech – what can we do with it?” The tone would have expanded one ring outward towards some new reality. I think this would have been a little bit more – I don’t want to say Avengers, but something where the player had resources, he had some the remnants of whatever the government had,” Ross said.
After the creative director John Garvin left Bend, the studio opted for a flat structure. No creative leader would have had power, and a committee decided. Ross didn’t find the decision productive. Bend also experimented with corridor shooters (linear games…), which he believes were wasting the work made to create Days Gone. He thus left in late 2020, with the studio working on a new IP…
