Prettiest Looking Game – Guardians of the Galaxy Diego: Guardians of the Galaxy is one of those rare games that makes you stop playing to just take in the sights. Not since Ghost of Tsushima has my finger been so quick on the photo-mode button, snapping away at dozens of screenshots. The art team isn’t […]
More details of what Days Gone game director Jeff Ross envisioned for a sequel to the open world zombie game have come out in an interview with USA Today. This includes how he and fellow director John Garvin planned to continue the story of Deacon St. John and his wife Sarah, the introduction of NERO tech, and Deacon plucking up the courage to figure out how to swim. In the interview, Ross admits that Days Gone was far from a perfect game, with pacing issues, yelling at the radio, and plenty more, but asserts once more that “We have to be able to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run,” while pointing to other first-time games like Uncharted and Batman: Arkham Asylum that grew significantly from one game to the next. In his vision for a sequel, Ross revealed that the relationship between Deacon St. John and his wife Sarah would have been explored further. He said, “Yeah, they’re 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, obviously. And I think 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 of the 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 sort of the remnants of whatever the government had.” Further reading: Does Days Gone deserve a sequel after all? Beyond that, they would have wanted to add to the world to have things like bears rummaging through trash cans, encounters with wolves and more varied AI for both enemies and allies. While swimming would have been included after it was taken out of the first game for causing too many technical challenges and given a narrative explanation. In essence, Ross would have wanted to introduce more lays and systems to the game for a richer tapestry of gameplay. “Systems are very simple,” he explained, “And if they’re simple, they can be elegant and very rich for the player. I knew adding one or two more layers to the systemic elements of it would have been something that we could have wrapped our heads around, it would have led to a ton of richness for the players and a ton of unique open-world moments and responses that we haven’t seen before. Let’s sink our teeth into this and do something even more epic.” Released in 2019, the open world zombie game debuted to a good, though not great critical reception. It was still a sales success for Sony and sold around 5 million copies by the end of the year, but behind the scenes, as the management at the top of PlayStation Studios changed hands, the pitches for a Days Gone sequel ended up being turned down. This, it transpires, was seemingly on a studio management level, as opposed to reaching new PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst’s desk. The decision not to greenlight a sequel made headlines in early 2021, two years on from the game’s original release. Both Ross and Garvin had departed the company in late 2020, and there were reports of discontent at the studio not being able to make a sequel and having to work instead as a support studio to Naughty Dog. Last April, the two of them gave a number of interviews and made podcast appearances that revealed some of their vision for Days Gone 2, such as having a shared open world, and the lack of a sequel became percieved as one of the greatest injustices in video gaming history by those who enjoyed the game. Time has passed, confirmation that Bend is working on a new original IP has come, but then the bandage has been ripped off the wound once again in the last few days as Ross stated that Days Gone sold around 8 million copies within its first 19 months on sale, a figure that’s comparable to critical darling Ghost of Tsushima. This, it seems, was partly an estimate from trophy tracking data, but is likely to be within the ballpark. Either way, it’s prompted fresh discussion of a game that, frankly, is never, ever going to get made. Will this be the end of the Days Gone 2 trail? I guess we’ll find out in roughly 8 months time. Source: USA Today
2022 has arrived and, despite bringing some bitterly cold weather with it, I’m sure we’re all hoping for a more positive year compared to the last two! Considering it’s only the first week of January, there was a surprising amount of news, so let’s dive right into our first gaming round-up of the year… In the News This Week E3 2022 will be online-only once again – Summer Games Fest confirms its return Mario Kart 9 rumours fly after analyst states it’s in “active development” PSVR 2 specs and name revealed along with Horizon Call of the Mountain! Just Add Water CEO and founder Stewart Gilray has passed away Insomniac Games are tweeting about the Chimera again, are they hinting at something? Rumour: The Last of Us PS5 remake will launch this year Rainbow Six Extraction will launch on Game Pass, Ubisoft+ coming to Xbox Ghost of Tsushima has swept past 8 million sales Days Gone might have sold 8 million copies in 1.5 years, according to game director A Skull & Bones associate game director has left Ubisoft GoldenEye 007 achievements appear online sparking rumours of remaster Castlevania NFTs to be auctioned by Konami as part of Memorial Series Amazon’s Fallout TV series will begin production this year Final Fantasy 7 Remake mod concept brings back PS1 camera And if you’re subscribed to various gaming services, January’s updates are live: Xbox Game Pass January 2022 includes Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Outer Wilds and more The January 2022 PS Plus games are now live, download links here PlayStation Now January 2022 line up includes Mortal Kombat 11 & Final Fantasy XII Our Most Wanted Games of 2022 Heralding in the new year, our look at the top games coming in 2022 kicked into overdrive as it entered the final five: #5 – Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League #4 – Dead Space Remake #3 – Horizon Forbidden West #2 – Elden Ring Check out the rest of our 50 Most Wanted Games of 2022 here, and keep your eyes peeled for our #1 game coming later today! Games in Review and Featured Articles As you might expect, it was a quiet start to the new year for the reviews: Exo One – XSX|S, XBO, PC – 8/10 Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel: Dawn of the Battle Royale!! – NSW– 3/10 Never-the-less, Aran was on hand with the first preview of 2022 as he looked at My Lovely Wife that makes you question how far you would go to bring back someone you love. Last up, we finished off the week as we always do with What We Played, which featured Deep Rock Galactic, Far Cry 6 & It Takes Two. Trailer Park See the plane fight from the Uncharted movie in a new 2 minutes clip New Horizon Forbidden West trailer reveals the Utaru and Tenakth tribes AVICII Invector Encore Edition announced for Meta Quest 2 Your Achievements Here’s what you in our community has been up to this week: MrYd has made his way to the third area in Ghost of Tsushima and is loving it. He also enjoyed Deep Rock Galactic, Life is Strange 2 and Sniper Elite VR, but was disappointed with the ‘broken’ Alan Wake. willbuchanan got the platinums for Tomb Raider and Donut County. He’s also completed Maneater and the Lego Star Wars The Force Awakens DLC, and has now moved onto Guardians of the Galaxy. TSBonyman wasn’t impressed by Deep Rock Galactic and had mixed feelings for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – while it looks gorgeous he thought it was a bit bare bones. Luckily, the weekly music jams in Dreams are a familiar home. And Andrewww has been continuing through the main story of Days Gone, trying to avoid the open world fatigue from too many side quests. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you again soon!
Update: Game Director Jeff Ross has explained on a live stream that his figures are not from Sony’s official internal tracking, instead figuring out numbers from internal trophy telemetry that aligned with the 5 million sales announcement in 2020 and allowed him to extrapolate from trophy data available on external sites. In a stream Ross said (transcribed by PushSquare): “Where I got my data from, I had access to a lot of telemetry, and I could see stuff and when we were at 5 million copies – when we were announced at 5 million copies – the telemetry data was at 5.8 [million]. There are basically resells or shared discs. I was actually using an external website – I think they’re offline now – but they were using trophy data and it lined up with our internal telemetry data so for me, it’s like, ‘good enough.'” While this does cast doubt over Ross’ original statement, one of the key takeaways is that there is a link between sales and trophy data that means you can get a rough extrapolation one way or another. When the game’s industry is often quite coy about sales figures (unless it’s a major milestone), it’s good to know that even developers are happy to perform similar napkin maths to figure things out. Ross says that he stands by his numbers. The original story follows. Days Gone managed to sell over 8 million copies within its first year and a half on sale, according to the game director Jeff Ross, but despite this matching Ghost of Tsushima’s new milestone, Sony’s “local studio management always made us feel like it was a big disappointment.” Ross was tweeting in reaction to the new that Ghost of Tsushima had sold over 8 million copies, and is widely seen as a success story thanks to continued interest in the game, the PS5 upgrade and Iki Island expansion, and positive critical reaction. However, Days Gone while sold a similar figure in its first 19 months, the general response to the open world zombie game was more muted – we scored it 6/10. Sony Bend pitched a sequel in 2019, but this was shot down by Sony and eventually led to a bit of fallout as he and fellow game director John Garvin departed at the end of 2020. It seems there’s still some bitterness about this as Ross took to Twitter. “At the time I left Sony,” he tweeted, “Days Gone had been out for a year and a half (and a month), and sold over 8 million copies. It’s since gone on to sell more, and then a million+ on Steam. Local studio management always made us feel like it was a big disappointment.” He added that it “Definitely didn’t generate God of War numbers, but neither did Ghost… or Death Stranding,” While the decision making at Sony not to greenlight a sequel has never really been clarified from their side of things – except that Bend is now working on a new IP – it certainly feels that Days Gone’s critical reception factored in. In follow up tweets to commenters, Ross drew upon other games from Sony’s library in response to other tweets, mentioning that not every Sony franchise started with universal acclaim, when compared to Days Gone’s 71 Metacritic score. “I was planning on building on top of the original for a kick-ass sequel. Even the first Killzone got a 70 on metacritic, but the sequel roared back with a 91. You gotta crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.” Further reading: Does Days Gone deserve a sequel after all? The other suspicion is that Days Gone suffered from a protracted development cycle and a few public delays, all of which will have expanded the game’s budget – Ross previously admitted that the budget ballooned. In the here and now, Ross noted that they actually had a comparable development period to Ghost of Tsushima. “[Sucker Punch] worked on [Ghost of Tsushima] for 6-7 years, and had an open world engine, and a team who understood open world. We had to do all that from scratch, and we made the game in 6-7 years, depending on how you measure.” While it might seem like and apples to apples comparison, there’s a lot more that Sony is able to consider. For example, not every one of those 8 million sales is going to be equal once factoring discounts. Ghost of Tsushima has held a premium price for longer, especially when accounting for the enhanced PS5 release that helped fill some gaps in the 2021 lineup after upcoming games were delayed. Priorities can also have changed in the games Sony execs want to produce, and while Days Gone was developed under Jack Tretton and Shawn Layden’s leadership, incoming boss Hermen Hulst could have wanted to push for more standout and unique feeling games. The good news, as was revealed last year, is that Sony Bend is able to continue on. No they aren’t working on Days Gone 2, but they are pushing ahead with a new IP that can hopefully meet both sales figures and garner more critical acclaim. Source: Twitter
