As is the trend with many open-world titles recently, Days Gone will have no load times, keeping its experience seamless.

It is not just the open world that will remain a smooth experience, but many of the interiors in Days Gone will also be fully explorable, allowing players to walk into buildings without a loading screen breaking up the action and hurting the immersion. This is particularly good news for this title, where players will often be seeking refuge from the dangerous world outside, whether it be to take a breather after an encounter with aggressive survivors or to hide from the zombie-like Freakers that populate game.

Loading screens are not entirely absent, of course. Booting up the game or loading back into it after a death will surely make players wait a moment while the game resets. Since Days Gone is designed to be challenging - lacking difficulty settings or even an easy mode - players should expect to meet their untimely ends more than a few times. Hopefully developer SIE Bend kept this in mind, and attempted to keep those loading times as short as possible.

The developers could take some notes from another recent PlayStation exclusive, God of War, which made headlines when it claimed to have no loading screens. The title made clever use of cutscenes and other devices to load in parts of the game in the background. Even using portals to quickly jump to different areas of the map would forgo a loading screen, instead taking players to a waiting room, where dialogue would often trigger to entertain them while the game loads their desired destination. It made for a very immersive experience, and one that other developers are eager to emulate.

Originally scheduled for a late 2018 release date, Days Gone has been moved to an early 2019 release instead. There was no word on the reasons for this decision, but it is likely that the game simply needed more time to add some final layers of polish.

Days Gone will be released on February 22, 2019 exclusively for PS4.