In Days Gone, unless you deviate a lot, it takes about 40 hours to reach the credit titles – by motorcycle. Given its open-world nature, it is quite likely that that same number will end up shooting you. With how good your scenarios look on PC, even more so. Two years after its release on PS4, Bend Studio’s game finds a well-deserved second chance to shine on desktop systems.
Which does not mean that in just 40 minutes you have already got a pretty clear idea of the game as a whole. That you go from accommodating yourself to the controls to immersing yourself fully in the bulk of its experience in automatic mode , and -to a certain point- you hardly get any surprises with everything that Days Gone ends up offering you. Factors that, in their own way, did not play in their favor on PS4, and are manifested again in their adaptation without FPS blocking for Steam and the Epic Game Store.
Because Deacon St. John , the central character in Days Gone , is the kind of protagonist that you instantly have a hit on. After a minute and a half of being able to rotate the game’s camera, you know that he will be following the pattern of the intrepid biker and reckless survivor of a zombie pandemic. The hero by force with his own code of honor. Said wrong and soon, a manual Daryl Dixon , tailor-made for the PlayStation brand.
Through Deacon and his different motivations a hostile, but rich and generous open world opens up to us. What’s more, touring it on a motorcycle while we adapt to the best and worst of the climate and topography of the Pacific Northwest is one of Days Gone’s biggest claims. That said, the more we immerse ourselves in the most ambitious game Bend Studio ever made, the more its greatest weakness becomes apparent and palpable: a constant sense of déjà vu .
Of course, the arrival on PC has not done Deacon bad at all: Days Gone no longer has to be measured head-on -or indirectly- with the best-sellers starring Kratos, Aloy, Ellie or a Sam Bridges that, by the way, he shares face with Daryl from The Walking Dead . And that, in many respects, ends up playing in favor of the Bend Studio game and its way of claiming its proposal for action and survival in vast natural environments.
And yet, the great paradox of Days Gone is still present: despite being a good game, it takes horrors for it to click with the player himself. In wrapping the inevitable routine of its infiltration, survival and exploration missions with a story capable of leaving something like an imprint of its own. And that, taking into account that it is not exactly a minor production, makes it pale compared to other alternatives.
In this regard, it could be said that among the titles signed by PlayStation Studios, it is no longer enough to be a very good game and be well assembled: to be up to the mark you have to be truly exceptional . In other words: Days Gone has everything well tied and in place as a video game, but its great sin is it lacks that extra that distinguishes between the best games and those that end up being positioned among your favorite games. And that, as we will see, there are reasons to dedicate more hours than necessary.
Welcome to what remains of Oregon: if you want to live, don’t get too far from the motorcycle
The world is falling apart and Deacon St. John , a war veteran, is forced to make a decision that he knows he will regret for the rest of his life: find an escape route with the love of his life or prevent May your best friend be left to his own devices.
In the not too distant future , a pandemic has been unleashed on a global scale. Chaos and violence have taken over the streets of every city and civilization as we know it is collapsing. The origin of everything: a strange mutation has begun to spread without measure among the population, turning them into mindless beings and brutally hungry for human flesh.
Desperately escaping in the middle of that hecatomb, Deacon runs into a dilemma: in the last escape helicopter there is only room for two more crew members. On the one hand, his wife Sarah is seriously injured and if she does not take the flight she will not survive. On the other hand, leaving his best friend Boozer to his own devices is condemning him to die.
In a moment of clarity, our protagonist takes a step back and lets his beloved go to stay with Boozer. Deacon’s original intention was to meet his wife again once the danger had passed. The reality is that two years have passed since he saw Sarah leave in the helicopter and the world is an even worse place.
As far as playable, Days Gone is a true melting pot of influences that range from State of Decay to The Last of Us in the field of video games, very palpable elements of the comics and The Walking Dead series and even the occasional brushstroke of Sons Of Anarchy . All assembled in an open world in which the action eats up a lot of ground for exploration, and both leave just and necessary space for the plot.
Taking the role of a much more seasoned Deacon St. John in this post-apocalyptic nightmare and converted into a bounty hunter, our main purpose will be to travel on a motorcycle the huge map that Bend Studio has arranged to meet the needs of survivor communities, accept commissions and, to the extent possible, wipe out all limbs intact in the face of the dangers of this time of chaos.
In this sense, the classic third-person action of Days Gone knows how to give space and prominence to infiltration. Not only to be able to go unnoticed before the hordes and creatures that come our way, but also when it comes to facing the most dangerous enemies: the most hostile survivors. Which, all said, completes the amount of clichés around the zombie genre of the game itself.
Control in hand, Days Gone does not innovate or need it. We can manage our inventory comfortably with radial menus, create medicines or weapons on the fly and employ stealth tactics and small strategies that will make our raids more efficient and, with enough skill, the errands that we will have to do less painful. And of those there is a lot.
So what exactly does Days Gone bring to survival and open world games? In a way, that’s the big question . Bend Studio is neither risky nor impressive, but it knows how to take ideas that work very well and bring them to your field. And in this respect, the experience in which the Oregon study has turned the most is on motorcycle rides.
- On the one hand, giving life and palpable presence to its open world through wide landscapes successfully subjected to all kinds of weather conditions . Inviting us to constantly lose ourselves or regularly tinker with the photo mode.
- But, also, making our motorcycles an essential part of the game . We will have to take care of them, fix them and improve them when he plays. Finding gas canisters in the early stages will be as important as having ammunition. In return, the two-wheel rides will become the real reason why we will return to our departure.
As we accept commissions or unravel the main story, Deacon will acquire improvements, learn to build new weapons or types of ammunition and acquire skills of survival, attack and stealth that will slightly increase his chances of living long enough to see a new dawn on the back of our motorcycle.
Days Gone for PC: same content, but without hardware limits
Days Gone came to PS4 in April 2019 with a rare number of patches and updates. Some of them were uploaded to PSN prior to the launch itself, while others dressed up the game with a view to what PS5 could offer. In this regard, the PC version is the definitive revision.
To start with, because meeting the requirements, the game looks at a more than fluid 60 FPS that feels great on our motorcycle trips, especially when it rains. And the best thing is that if our PC lends itself to it, the framerate will be unlocked.
For its part, in addition to being able to watch the game at 4K resolutions, the level of detail of the models or the drawing distance have also been accommodated to the possibilities that equipped and assembled PCs can offer to play. The landscapes and small details look better than ever and the views from the high places are on another level.
In this regard, we can even take advantage of the game’s photo mode -which is available from day one on the PC version- to further increase the resolution and get spectacular images.
And be careful, this is not the only extra that came post-launch on PlayStation and that will be present in our first games from PC: as soon as we start the game and when we start the game we will run into survival, challenge and New game + modes. Although, logically, the latter does not make much sense from the beginning, since – unfortunately – it is not possible to import our games from PlayStation.
We have talked about technical improvements and launch modes, but: what about the news? PlayStation Studios adds a couple of especially welcome surprises, such as support for mouse, keyboard and new types of controllers or the possibility of playing in ultra-panoramic. But we fear that in the PC editions of Days Gone there is no new content. And that has a direct consequence: starting it from scratch on PC costs double if you already played it on console or from PlayStation Now.
Not that the game needed an additional epilogue, far from it. And it is a pity that a ray tracing system has not been implemented with the spectacular effects that would have been achieved through the puddles. But embarking on Days Gone from PC and finding that the game map is once again a blank canvas is something that is very uphill.
That Days Gone failed to cause the same impact as Horizon Zero Dawn since its introduction or after its launch is due to many reasons. Perhaps the most important of these is the contrast between plunging into an open world adventure and science fiction with everything to discover and how difficult it is to capture attention through the umpteenth experience of zombies and survival.
That said, despite the differences and similarities between Aloy and Deacon’s games, the most essential thing stands out: the two are very well assembled titles that guarantee the player dozens of hours of entertainment and challenges. Single-player experiences that reveal the increasingly defined touch and style of a PlayStation Studios that, even when it fails to surprise, shows that it knows how to do things well. From the acting work, led by Sam Witwer to the always impeccable voice work of Claudio Serrano in the Spanish version.
In this sense, Days Gone is positioned as a title that easily meets what is expected of a blockbuster. Its environment is rich and it feels alive and its game proposal will have us giving motorcycle rides more than necessary. Sometimes, for completing that secondary mission that will guarantee us an improvement, others for the pleasure it gives to get lost in its surroundings.
The big problem with Days Gone is not that we are not facing a good action, survival and open world game, but that everything that it borrows as a video game ends up turning -in a way- against it. Which translates into the feeling that everything that appears during your games has already been seen and played elsewhere.
Of course, that makes it difficult, as we discussed at the beginning, that Days Gone ends up becoming your next favorite game. And, in the process, that once the story is finished, you subtract hours from GTA V, The Witcher 3 or any of the last three Assassin’s Creed in order to get all their collectibles.
However, and with all of the above ahead, Bend Studiono’s game needs to be neither special nor exceptional to comfortably fulfill what was promised and hinted at: Days Gone an open world in which adventure and action are guaranteed. That tests our ability to survive. A single-player of those that PlayStation Studios is so good at doing.
Days gone
| Platforms | PC (Steam and Epic Games Store). Also available on PS4 |
|---|---|
| Multiplayer | Not |
| Developer | Bend Studio |
| Company | PlayStation Studios |
| Launch | May 18, 2021 |
The best
- An open world full of dangers and possibilities that lends itself to being traveled on a motorcycle
- Technical improvements in the PC edition accentuate the game’s strengths
Worst
- Too many missions and plots that give the feeling of having played them elsewhere.
- New content is missing
