I, like a lot of people I assume, am reviewing this game because its director decided to post an absolutely unhinged theory for why it did poorly - which in this case is 8 million units sold because I guess half a billion dollars in sales on a first party game sucks ass these days. Just so, you know, there's one more voice in the potentially eternal record of why this game "flopped" that counters his.
Normally I'd be inclined to at least finish games like this, because I enjoy trophy hunting on PlayStation and am willing to endure bland open worlds and middling mechanics while listening to Well There's Your Problem, or Lions Led by Donkeys, or [INSERT PODCAST]. This should be the perfect game for me to engage with.
Instead I played it for most of an afternoon and uninstalled it. The problem, despite John Garvin's insistence, wasn't wokism or bugs, but fundamental design hiccups that impede upon the game's core experience, creating a clunky, frustrating open world hybrid stealth game instead of a focused experience.
To Garvin's point, I suppose, I did not play the entire game. However, four hours of Days Gone will see you well through the first half dozen or so missions, and if that's not enough to hook me when there's no one saying "ah but it gets good later" then I'd suggest some facet of its design has failed. And that's just if it didn't grab me. Days Gone's suspect motorcycle mechanics, overzealous resource restriction, and generally rote encounter design were also there pushing me away.
What got me however, was a classic: poor autosaves. I like to roam around big games, so I'm a perfect canary in a coal mine for bad autosaves as design that doesn't account for the freedom of the player or is inconsistent will invariably always see me lose a lot of progress. Days Gone was, in my experience, one of these games. This combined with a bug to punish me to the tune of about half an hour of exploration, hence the uninstall.
There's a somewhat random mechanic involving a snare that starts a mission. I can't tell if it's a recurring open world mission, or simply a one off that can start in multiple places, however instead of the snare functioning as intended (Deacon passes out and is transported to a small stealth encounter) nearby enemies killed me as I was yanked up into a tree as I ran away by a trap only denoted by a pile of leaves on the ground in a forest full of ground cover vegetation.
I suspect you're not supposed to be able to die there, but I found a way and respawned halfway across the map and a couple encounters from where I ended up, sighed as I exited to my PlayStation's system menu, and uninstalled the game without even bothering to close it first.
I stopped playing Days Gone because the save mechanism broke, managing resources was too cumbersome, it's kinda clunky, and it's willing to betray my trust that the game's mechanics are fair or consistent - which isn't necessarily impossible to pull off, but wasn't what I wanted out of a game only half intended to focus on.
I never even saw Deacon look at a butt, to my memory, and wouldn't have cared much if I had because it's fundamentally unoffensive. I'm absolutely baffled that a grown ass man thinks a carbon copy of a joke that has existed in every semi-premium network TV drama for the last 20 years is what sank his decade late to the party gritty, self-serious, open world zombie survival game.
Normally I'd be inclined to at least finish games like this, because I enjoy trophy hunting on PlayStation and am willing to endure bland open worlds and middling mechanics while listening to Well There's Your Problem, or Lions Led by Donkeys, or [INSERT PODCAST]. This should be the perfect game for me to engage with.
Instead I played it for most of an afternoon and uninstalled it. The problem, despite John Garvin's insistence, wasn't wokism or bugs, but fundamental design hiccups that impede upon the game's core experience, creating a clunky, frustrating open world hybrid stealth game instead of a focused experience.
To Garvin's point, I suppose, I did not play the entire game. However, four hours of Days Gone will see you well through the first half dozen or so missions, and if that's not enough to hook me when there's no one saying "ah but it gets good later" then I'd suggest some facet of its design has failed. And that's just if it didn't grab me. Days Gone's suspect motorcycle mechanics, overzealous resource restriction, and generally rote encounter design were also there pushing me away.
What got me however, was a classic: poor autosaves. I like to roam around big games, so I'm a perfect canary in a coal mine for bad autosaves as design that doesn't account for the freedom of the player or is inconsistent will invariably always see me lose a lot of progress. Days Gone was, in my experience, one of these games. This combined with a bug to punish me to the tune of about half an hour of exploration, hence the uninstall.
There's a somewhat random mechanic involving a snare that starts a mission. I can't tell if it's a recurring open world mission, or simply a one off that can start in multiple places, however instead of the snare functioning as intended (Deacon passes out and is transported to a small stealth encounter) nearby enemies killed me as I was yanked up into a tree as I ran away by a trap only denoted by a pile of leaves on the ground in a forest full of ground cover vegetation.
I suspect you're not supposed to be able to die there, but I found a way and respawned halfway across the map and a couple encounters from where I ended up, sighed as I exited to my PlayStation's system menu, and uninstalled the game without even bothering to close it first.
I stopped playing Days Gone because the save mechanism broke, managing resources was too cumbersome, it's kinda clunky, and it's willing to betray my trust that the game's mechanics are fair or consistent - which isn't necessarily impossible to pull off, but wasn't what I wanted out of a game only half intended to focus on.
I never even saw Deacon look at a butt, to my memory, and wouldn't have cared much if I had because it's fundamentally unoffensive. I'm absolutely baffled that a grown ass man thinks a carbon copy of a joke that has existed in every semi-premium network TV drama for the last 20 years is what sank his decade late to the party gritty, self-serious, open world zombie survival game.