E3 2016

Days Gone is an open world zombie apocalypse that gets everything right

There are several moments in Days Gone's post apocalypse where a flood of zombies poor through a doorway. It’s a like a liquid tumble of bodies that’s almost impossible to process. First time I saw it I knew I’d just be dead if it was real. No fight. Just frozen to the spot in a ‘well, shit’ moment of reflection before death by a thousand teeth.

Decon, the game’s biker hero, isn’t me though. He fights, spraying bullets into the crowd so that the bodies slow the horde, while leaving obstructions in his wake as he runs - collapsing piled up wood in the lumber yard location, dropping doors or throwing petrol bombs to create fire barriers. While the zombie apocalypse might feel like familiar idea, here it’s never been this fast or reactionary in a game before.

You’re not just blasting creatures and running. The gameplay is as much about reading the routes and spotting opportunities in a dynamic ongoing chase. In my demo developer Sony Bend took a different route to what was shown in the Sony demo, running though piles of lumber and ending up in a small building. Here the game showed off a different pace with one-on-one encounters with the few Freakers, to give them their proper name, that got inside.

These smaller clashes are brutal, with Decon using his knife to stab eyes, an axe to cleave heads off at the jaw, while using environmental kills like slamming a face into waiting circular saw. The visual gloss, post apocalyptic world and smoothly scripted animations that seamlessly blend the combat really made me think of The Last of Us, with things like crafting, and the survivalist atmosphere also contributing to that.

However, senior artist Brain Pape is quick to dispel that comparison. “I think this is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s more over the top, its more extreme,” he explains. “The sheer number [of enemies] we have shows that. In The Last of Us you’d come across one or two at a time and make your way between them. This is more of a run and gun style, over the top extreme action”.

Another differentiation is that this is a completely open world. While the mission Bend has revealed might look like a beautifully scripted action set piece, it’s actually just a mission in a world that you can approach however you want. Stealth is an option for example, using melee weapons or silencers to dispatch enemies without calling in the horde.

Great Leader Sprucenuce wrote:Was miles better imo.

I'm personally not interested in Shenmue and Final Fantasy anyway but for starters they showed pretty much no gameplay of either.

God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Detroit, Resident Evil 7, Days Gone and so on all showed significant gameplay to suggest they are not that far away.

I never did get the hype around last year really, all they really did is show two games which you won't see for like another 3-4 years anyway lol. Even Spiderman showed more than they did lol.