Days Gone, the next title from Bend Studios, has evolved a lot in a year, we sum up the game as it has changed in these last two E3 event.
Days Gone was first announced back at last years’s E3, a sombre trailer painted the story of Deacon St John a wanderer travelling the broken remains of North America. Shortly afterwards a longer, ten minute, gameplay segment was shown off, painting a vastly different game; Deacon remained, solemn and stoic, but the gameplay revealed an open-world game driven by large set-pieces.
As Deacon closed in on his target, exploring and scavenging an abandoned lumberyard, it became increasingly obviously Bounty Hunter work that he’d mentioned in the first trailer was an ends to a means, because the world was overrun by the remains of humanity, freakers -Bend Studios’ ‘not zombies’. The situation at the yard escalated, resulting in what developers described this year as over a thousand of the freakers bearing down the protagonist who deployed traps and interacted with environmental elements to try and shake off the horde.
It was strange, to say the least, a one-man-army crap shoot, giving up any lead he had on escaping the enemies by turning around to shoot a couple of them. There were some impressive elements on show, mind, quick takedowns, environmental hazards, and a quick, realtime crafting system. However, what was on show delivered a completely different message than the trailer released shortly before.
E3 2017
Fast-forward a year and the 2017 stage demo shows a different game again. This game looks just as high quality on the visuals as the previous efforts, however the change of both pace and nature are immediately noticeable.
The new demo starts with exposition, the main character heading out to rescue a mechanic who has been kidnapped by bandits; motoring away down dark, dusty roads, their motorbike’s headlights barely lighting up the road ahead. Each bump sends the vehicle jarring, and the lights wobbling.
After a short time they come across some freaked wolves, feasting on a fallen, former rider. As Deacon continues past the wolves one gives chase, however a quick shot stops the beast from interfering. Distracted, Deacon then slams into the floor, toppled by a lashed up rope; a trap laid by two raiders. The demo, which you can see below, then continues on for a further 10 minutes, we see environmental take downs, a stealth approach to drawing attention to a bandit group by moving their bear-traps, and even a swarm of freakers being set upon a small camp of bandits following the main character removing a literal wall from between them.
Indeed, the new trailer confidently shows a game much more confident in its pace, with the entire demo -bar the moment with pursuing wolves- as passable without killing an enemy.
It’s not just the stealth, or trap-redeployment, that’s interesting however; the situation where the freaker is chained to the tree, where the player breaks the chains that bind it and it subsequently removes a much more dangerous foe, that’s great emergent gameplay, and hopefully the game will be filled with situations where you can topple logs onto your enemies, or shoot /deploy various objects to distract enemies.
Most interesting, is the fact that -as shown in a background video during an interview with developers– weather, day/night cycle, and other environmental effects can alter the behaviour, density, and line of sight, of the enemies.
Days Gone is still relatively early in development, I imagine we’ll be seeing it at next year’s E3 as well, and even then it might not have a release date; but, when it does release it will do so exclusively on PS4.
