Very soon, Sony is finally going to unveil the PlayStation 5 to the world and offer a proper first look at new games that are coming to the next-generation console. While the company is yet to make any official announcement regarding what may be shown, it's safe to say players will be given at least a glimpse at the future of first-party with potential appearances from God of War 2, Horizon Zero Dawn 2, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and Days Gone 2 (not all of them obviously, but even one or two of these would be big for the PS5).
Days Gone released in April 2019 to less than stellar reviews, failing to meet the same critical success seen with so many of Sony's first-party PlayStation 4 catalog. However, Days Gone managed to create a strong following with fans and outsold God of War, The Last Guardian, and Detroit: Become Human in its first month, enough to greenlight a sequel to Bend Studio's open-world zombie adventure. If Bend Studio decided to go ahead with Days Gone 2 on PS5, it's going to need to address some of the first games major issues and hopefully become the next Uncharted 2 or Assassin's Creed 2.
Deacon St. John & the Supporting Cast
One of the biggest issues with Days Gone unfortunately came down the game's main characters and its supporting cast. The story follows outlaw-turned-drifter Deacon St. John, excellently portrayed by Star Wars: The Force Unleashed actor Sam Witwer, as he attempts to uncover the truth about what happened to his wife Sarah after the outbreak. While Sam Witwer's performance is truly a highlight, Deacon himself is incredibly uneven and his lust for murder and revenge often becomes too much.
As for the supporting cast, no other character is fleshed out beyond their basic role in advancing the narrative besides Sarah. For example, marketed as Sons of Anarchy meets The Walking Dead, players are immediately introduced to Deacon's best friend and fellow drifter Boozer, and almost immediately, Boozer is injured and spends the first 5-10 hours of the game only playing a minor role over the radio. There's simply too many side-characters, catalyst characters, and camp leaders that could've been used to flesh out the core cast of characters, including its villains.
Nero and the Evolution of the Virus
Warning: MAJOR STORY SPOILERS ahead for the ending of Days Gone (skip to the next point to avoid). Days Gone features multiple storylines that run concurrently throughout the game and one of the most important ones follows a government agency called Nero that a seemingly still alive and well, and studying the Freakers while leaving humanity for dead. In theory, Nero helps usher in a fascinating government conspiracy that works best when its a mystery, but in practice, Nero never really went anywhere and ended up as more of a gameplay excuse to upgrade Deacon's health and stamina.
The end result of the Nero storyline comes to full fruition in a secret ending when players visit the graveyard after the credits and learn that Nero has been experimenting on humans, creating super-soldiers who are coming for the rest of humanity. Days Gone 2 needs to decide whether it wants to be an intimate story about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world or the war of factions against the government and its supersoldiers.
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Bend Studio went all out with the creation of Days Gone, creating an expansive and gorgeous open-world with a cinematic story, light RPG mechanics, multiple hub-worlds, vehicle gameplay and combat, hundred of collectibles, challenge modes, and endgame content in the form of the games biggest hook, Freaker Hordes. Days Gone is a 'Jack of all Trades' that manages to do everything reasonably well but never great. Days Gone 2 could greatly benefit from tightening the experience, focusing on everything it does really well such as the vehicle gameplay, and then expanding on that. Great games don't try to do everything; they do select things really, really well.
Performance Issues & Bugs on PS4
Despite any of the major issues mentioned thus far, Days Gone is a well-made game and a lot of fun to play. Where things really start to fall apart and a major contributing factor to its negative critical response comes down to how Days Gone performs on PS4. Even after a years worth of updates, Days Gone doesn't perform very on a base PS4, suffering from major issues with frame rate, screen tearing, textures popping in and out, environments not loading, and enough glitches and bugs for a highlight real.
In the mission What it Takes to Survive, players to this day are still experiencing an issue where the environment doesn't l0ad properly before the player enters a cave at the beginning of the mission. If the entrance doesn't load in properly, a story mission horde can't enter the cave and therefore players are unable to defeat the horde and finish the mission. There's currently no known fix outside of restarting the game and hoping for the best.
Before the release of Days Gone, Sony Bend Studio was best known as the developer of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, a PS Vita spin-off that released in 2011, and the Syphon Filter series on the original PlayStation. The studio hadn't previously worked on the PS4 or the open-world genre, making Days Gone an incredibly ambitious title for the studio that seemed to pay off. When it came to the game's critical response, the negative reviews for Days Gone came down to a lack of polish on the final product: uneven frame rates, texture pop-ins, a lack of cohesion between missions and side content, and far too much bloat where God of War and Marvel's Spider-Man proved that more isn't always better.
Taking everything it learned from the development of Days Gone, there's a lot of potential for an inevitable sequel to course correct and create a thriving franchise that PlayStation fans adore. Using the groundwork as the first game and addressing the issues mentioned here, Days Gone 2 could be a much tighter, focused, and polished sequel that doubles down on the game's story and zombie horde hook, separating it from being just another post-apocalyptic game. Hopefully, Sony will have a few surprises in store at the PS5 reveal event.
Days Gone is available now, exclusively for PlayStation 4.