Post by WickedCrustacean on Aug 22, 2023 12:32:20 GMT -5
Days Gone is a Sony Playstation exclusive released in 2019, and ported to PC in 2021. It was developed by Bend Studio, a little known company who previously worked on niche console and mobile games, and then unexpectedly spent 6 years working on this massive open world action-adventure project, inspired among other things by the television series like Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead.
The game revolves around the character of Deacon St. John, a former soldier in Afghanistan who returned to Oregon and joined a Motorcycle Club named The Mongrels. Much like Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, Deacon is a likeable badass, covered in tattoos and capable of engaging in acts of extreme violence, but at the same time, living by a code of honor, defending the weak, and always ready to lay his life on the line for the people that he loves and cares about.
The game starts off with an emotional intro cinematic that lays down the tone and main plot for the rest of the game. It shows Deacon with his wife Sara and his fellow biker Boozer in the midst of apocalypse as the world seems to be undergoing some pandemic that turns people into "Freakers", the game's version of zombies. As hordes of these freakers are overrunning the remains of civilization, Sara gets seriously injured, and Deacon puts her on an evacuation helicopter, but he stays behind to take care of his injured friend.
The actual game starts 2 years later, as you and Boozer are now hardened drifters, surviving by living in the post-apocalyptic wilderness of the Northwest and doing various jobs for the survivor settlements that exist in the area. The refugee camp that Sara was evacuated to was overrun by freakers shortly after the events of the introductory cinematic, and she is assumed to be dead.
Bend Studio is based in the Northwest, and you can tell they put a lot of love into the game, with it faithfully recreating the area where they live. The game area is huge, consisting of tens of square miles of forests, mountains, and remains of civilization. There are several interesting settlements of survivors in the region, a settlement run by a hardcore survivalist/truther, another settlement run by a former prison guard, one where people are trying to rebuild democracy, and a couple of settlements run by a local militia. Besides these the world is full of beautiful mountain vistas, forests, decaying towns and highways, and all sorts of wildlife, from bears and wolves to mountain lions and deer.
The game is heavily narratively driven, with a beautiful love story at the center of it. I genuinely feel like it managed to create one of the, if not THE, greatest romances in video game history. When most modern games try too hard to create shallow vapid romances with pointless gratuitous sex, Days Gone manages to create an extremely touching and emotional tour de force, with a grand total of one (slightly) intimate scene. Aside from the love story, the game is full of other touching moments, scenes of friendship and tragedy, and the entire breadth of human condition.
Aside from the excellent plot, what really gives Days Gone its substance is the high quality of the dialogue and cut scenes. The characters are really well voiced and animated, and the writing is superb, as almost everyone feels like a real person and not some video game character.
The basic gameplay loop of the game breaks down into several activities: combat, motorcycle riding, scrounging, and investigations. The combat is a little unusual, as weapons have fairly large crosshairs that take time to narrow down when you are not shooting/moving. Because of this, it's almost impossible to nail precise shots in regular combat, and you need to obtain the Focus skill. This works similar to bullet-time in other games, as it both slows down the flow of time, and significantly narrows the cross-hairs at the same time. Over the course of the game, you can upgrade the focus ability in various ways, to the point where near the end, you have access to it in most combat situations. This ability makes the combat of Days Gone different from other games, and in my opinion, makes it very enjoyable: it's a lot of fun to draw your weapon, activate Focus, and pop off several headshots.
Another thing that makes the combat fun is the sheer variety of weapons available, and how they serve different roles and offer different approaches. You can use several sniper rifles to pick off enemies at range, or you can jump into the action with heavy duty machine guns and shred hordes of freakers at close range. You can use shotguns or assault rifles, pistols or hunting rifles, whatever you enjoy the most. For situations where stealth is important, which considering the size of nearby freak hordes, is quite often, you can use your knife to take out freaks in stealth, or use your homemade melee weapons for quite kills (usually these involve putting a lot of sharp metal objects onto a baseball bat).
There is also a fairly large skill tree available to upgrade Deacon over the course of the game. It is separated into 3 branches, melee, ranged combat, and survival, for a total of 45 skills you can add. These abilities are very useful and will significantly increase your power toward the end of the game.
Another important aspect of the game is your motorcycle. As mentioned earlier, the game world is massive, and you need the bike to get around effectively. But besides serving as a means of transportation, your bike also serves as a base of operations, allowing you to store extra ammo in its saddlebags, or a quick escape from a rampaging horde. At the start of the game, the bike is very barebones, but you can keep upgrading it over the course of the game, from functional improvements such as a larger fuel tank or more powerful engine, to cosmetic stuff like different looking headlights and paint. By the end of the game, it looks truly amazing. The development studio also deserves a lot of credit for implementing a really fun riding system, and the bike is just a hell of a lot of fun to use, especially once you upgrade to better tires for better traction and a more powerful engine.
Days Gone being a survival type game, there is also a fair amount of scrounging involved. Your bike constantly needs fuel to ride (if you run out, you will have to use your feet to very slowly get it somewhere with fuel), you need ammo, you also need a lot of crafting materials to create things like bandages for healing, molotov cocktails for combat, remote bombs, and also scrap for repairing damage to your bike or melee weapon. So you will spend a lot of time going through the game world and scavenging things from abandoned cars and houses.
As part of some missions, you will also conduct "tracking", similar to the detective sense in Witcher 3. You basically find some thing to examine, then follow the trail from it to the next thing, and so on. It's not particularly deep or interesting, but provides some change of pace from the other activities.
The game consists of many missions that you do. Some are main story related, and many are side missions. The side missions involve you doing work for one of the settlements in the game, whereby by doing them, aside from getting experience and some reward, you also raise your reputation and trust level with that camp. Getting higher trust levels allows you to buy better gear from that camp (weapons, motorcycle upgrades, etc). The side missions themselves follow a few templates, and do tend to be somewhat repetitive. There is one where you get a Bountry Hunter task and hunt down some criminal and kill or capture them. Another one has you clear out a marauder/ambusher camp. Another has you track down and save some disappeared civilian. These templates are not great in number, and since they repeat quite often, I can see this being one of the reasons why someone wouldn't like the game so much, but for me, it wasn't a big issue because I enjoyed the basic gameplay loop, and it made sense in that setting, that you as a drifter would have a lot of these types of tasks.
Besides the writing, another thing that really makes Days Gone shine, is how alive the world feels. Everywhere you go, there is something dynamic happening. In one place, you might randomly run across a giant freaker horde. In another, you will see a Rager bear (infected bear wrapped by barbed wire) take on 10 freaks. Mountain lions chasing deer while themselves being chased by freakers. Random ambushes on you by marauders and bandits, where their sniper takes your bike out with a single shot, followed up by 5 of them bum rushing you out of nowhere. Coming across civilians hiding in cars while being attacked by freakers, where if you save them, you can direct them to one of the camps for reputation/financial gain. Marauders shooting it out with freaks in towns. Getting into a firefight with bandits, and the gunfire attracting a zombie horde that overruns the town. There is just always something going on, which is great for an open world game.
The game is not perfect, I can certainly see the repetitive nature of side missions and the unusual quirkiness of combat turning some people off. But on the flip side, I genuinely believe this game has some of the best writing and characterization of any game I've ever played, and working through its complex plot brought me a lot of hours of entertainment. Combined with the rather well done gameplay, Days Gone is one of the best games I've played in the last several years, and should be at least tried by anyone with any interest in open world gaming.
The game revolves around the character of Deacon St. John, a former soldier in Afghanistan who returned to Oregon and joined a Motorcycle Club named The Mongrels. Much like Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, Deacon is a likeable badass, covered in tattoos and capable of engaging in acts of extreme violence, but at the same time, living by a code of honor, defending the weak, and always ready to lay his life on the line for the people that he loves and cares about.
The game starts off with an emotional intro cinematic that lays down the tone and main plot for the rest of the game. It shows Deacon with his wife Sara and his fellow biker Boozer in the midst of apocalypse as the world seems to be undergoing some pandemic that turns people into "Freakers", the game's version of zombies. As hordes of these freakers are overrunning the remains of civilization, Sara gets seriously injured, and Deacon puts her on an evacuation helicopter, but he stays behind to take care of his injured friend.
The actual game starts 2 years later, as you and Boozer are now hardened drifters, surviving by living in the post-apocalyptic wilderness of the Northwest and doing various jobs for the survivor settlements that exist in the area. The refugee camp that Sara was evacuated to was overrun by freakers shortly after the events of the introductory cinematic, and she is assumed to be dead.
Bend Studio is based in the Northwest, and you can tell they put a lot of love into the game, with it faithfully recreating the area where they live. The game area is huge, consisting of tens of square miles of forests, mountains, and remains of civilization. There are several interesting settlements of survivors in the region, a settlement run by a hardcore survivalist/truther, another settlement run by a former prison guard, one where people are trying to rebuild democracy, and a couple of settlements run by a local militia. Besides these the world is full of beautiful mountain vistas, forests, decaying towns and highways, and all sorts of wildlife, from bears and wolves to mountain lions and deer.
The game is heavily narratively driven, with a beautiful love story at the center of it. I genuinely feel like it managed to create one of the, if not THE, greatest romances in video game history. When most modern games try too hard to create shallow vapid romances with pointless gratuitous sex, Days Gone manages to create an extremely touching and emotional tour de force, with a grand total of one (slightly) intimate scene. Aside from the love story, the game is full of other touching moments, scenes of friendship and tragedy, and the entire breadth of human condition.
Aside from the excellent plot, what really gives Days Gone its substance is the high quality of the dialogue and cut scenes. The characters are really well voiced and animated, and the writing is superb, as almost everyone feels like a real person and not some video game character.
The basic gameplay loop of the game breaks down into several activities: combat, motorcycle riding, scrounging, and investigations. The combat is a little unusual, as weapons have fairly large crosshairs that take time to narrow down when you are not shooting/moving. Because of this, it's almost impossible to nail precise shots in regular combat, and you need to obtain the Focus skill. This works similar to bullet-time in other games, as it both slows down the flow of time, and significantly narrows the cross-hairs at the same time. Over the course of the game, you can upgrade the focus ability in various ways, to the point where near the end, you have access to it in most combat situations. This ability makes the combat of Days Gone different from other games, and in my opinion, makes it very enjoyable: it's a lot of fun to draw your weapon, activate Focus, and pop off several headshots.
Another thing that makes the combat fun is the sheer variety of weapons available, and how they serve different roles and offer different approaches. You can use several sniper rifles to pick off enemies at range, or you can jump into the action with heavy duty machine guns and shred hordes of freakers at close range. You can use shotguns or assault rifles, pistols or hunting rifles, whatever you enjoy the most. For situations where stealth is important, which considering the size of nearby freak hordes, is quite often, you can use your knife to take out freaks in stealth, or use your homemade melee weapons for quite kills (usually these involve putting a lot of sharp metal objects onto a baseball bat).
There is also a fairly large skill tree available to upgrade Deacon over the course of the game. It is separated into 3 branches, melee, ranged combat, and survival, for a total of 45 skills you can add. These abilities are very useful and will significantly increase your power toward the end of the game.
Another important aspect of the game is your motorcycle. As mentioned earlier, the game world is massive, and you need the bike to get around effectively. But besides serving as a means of transportation, your bike also serves as a base of operations, allowing you to store extra ammo in its saddlebags, or a quick escape from a rampaging horde. At the start of the game, the bike is very barebones, but you can keep upgrading it over the course of the game, from functional improvements such as a larger fuel tank or more powerful engine, to cosmetic stuff like different looking headlights and paint. By the end of the game, it looks truly amazing. The development studio also deserves a lot of credit for implementing a really fun riding system, and the bike is just a hell of a lot of fun to use, especially once you upgrade to better tires for better traction and a more powerful engine.
Days Gone being a survival type game, there is also a fair amount of scrounging involved. Your bike constantly needs fuel to ride (if you run out, you will have to use your feet to very slowly get it somewhere with fuel), you need ammo, you also need a lot of crafting materials to create things like bandages for healing, molotov cocktails for combat, remote bombs, and also scrap for repairing damage to your bike or melee weapon. So you will spend a lot of time going through the game world and scavenging things from abandoned cars and houses.
As part of some missions, you will also conduct "tracking", similar to the detective sense in Witcher 3. You basically find some thing to examine, then follow the trail from it to the next thing, and so on. It's not particularly deep or interesting, but provides some change of pace from the other activities.
The game consists of many missions that you do. Some are main story related, and many are side missions. The side missions involve you doing work for one of the settlements in the game, whereby by doing them, aside from getting experience and some reward, you also raise your reputation and trust level with that camp. Getting higher trust levels allows you to buy better gear from that camp (weapons, motorcycle upgrades, etc). The side missions themselves follow a few templates, and do tend to be somewhat repetitive. There is one where you get a Bountry Hunter task and hunt down some criminal and kill or capture them. Another one has you clear out a marauder/ambusher camp. Another has you track down and save some disappeared civilian. These templates are not great in number, and since they repeat quite often, I can see this being one of the reasons why someone wouldn't like the game so much, but for me, it wasn't a big issue because I enjoyed the basic gameplay loop, and it made sense in that setting, that you as a drifter would have a lot of these types of tasks.
Besides the writing, another thing that really makes Days Gone shine, is how alive the world feels. Everywhere you go, there is something dynamic happening. In one place, you might randomly run across a giant freaker horde. In another, you will see a Rager bear (infected bear wrapped by barbed wire) take on 10 freaks. Mountain lions chasing deer while themselves being chased by freakers. Random ambushes on you by marauders and bandits, where their sniper takes your bike out with a single shot, followed up by 5 of them bum rushing you out of nowhere. Coming across civilians hiding in cars while being attacked by freakers, where if you save them, you can direct them to one of the camps for reputation/financial gain. Marauders shooting it out with freaks in towns. Getting into a firefight with bandits, and the gunfire attracting a zombie horde that overruns the town. There is just always something going on, which is great for an open world game.
The game is not perfect, I can certainly see the repetitive nature of side missions and the unusual quirkiness of combat turning some people off. But on the flip side, I genuinely believe this game has some of the best writing and characterization of any game I've ever played, and working through its complex plot brought me a lot of hours of entertainment. Combined with the rather well done gameplay, Days Gone is one of the best games I've played in the last several years, and should be at least tried by anyone with any interest in open world gaming.