Days Gone isn't getting a sequel. That's a sentence that has upset an innumerable amount of fans, both the stalwart survivors on the PlayStation and the Johnny-come-latelies on PC, thanks to Sony's ongoing initiative to bring its titles to other audiences. While these concepts will now and forever remain on the cutting room floor, an interview with director Jeff Ross has shone a little light on what Days Gone 2 might have looked like.
Speaking to USA Today's ForTheWin, Ross suggested that the Bend Studio team was aiming for an entire trilogy to follow Deacon St. John's story across apocalyptic North America. “We have to be able to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run,” explained the director. “You create the minimum viable entry and then hope you get to build the second one. Because you’re not arguing over the foundations, you’re arguing over the epic new ideas that you’re gonna be putting into it.”
Check out the gore and glory of Days Gone with exclusive features and optimisations for PC players in its trailer below!
It's common knowledge that the game met with a middling reception when it launched in 2019. This was brought up by former Bend Studio director and writer John Garvin as a factor for why the Days Gone 2 pitch was shot down by Sony. Ross has said that the sales for the game equalled Ghost of Tsushima yet higher-ups seemed to suggest that the game was a flop based on this metric. As a result, Bend Studio is now working on something completely different whereas Sucker Punch Productions is almost definitely developing the sequel to the stealthy samurai sim.
Well, we could go round and round in circles like a man on his motorcycle avoiding the lunging limbs of Freakers all day. If Days Gone 2 was a possibility, the director said that the relationship between Deacon and Sarah would have been a focal emotional point in the story. “Yeah, they’re back together, but maybe they’re not happy,” speculated Ross. “Well, what can we do with that? Okay, we were married before the apocalypse, but what about the future?"
A pertinent question, to be sure. “We would have kept the heavy, strong narrative," he elaborated. "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.”
If the player collected all of the IPCA tech left behind at NERO research sites, they then unlocked the Unknown NERO Weapon which stuns enemies and has a chance of igniting Freakers. As Deacon and Sarah's knowledge of this technology increases, we could have seen our hero wielding some seriously wild weapons to fight against the terrifying new variants of the infected. That's a cool concept, and there's nothing to say that this won't be drawn into Bend Studio's newest game, whatever it may be.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: PlayStation, Days Gone