Recently, Days Gone director Jeff Ross made headlines after his viral tweet about how Sony Bend’s open-world game had sold more than Ghost of Tsushima yet the local studio management made the team feel like a disappointment. Ross yesterday appeared on original God of War creator David Jaffe’s livestream, and revealed a few new interesting details about what happened after the rejection of the Days Gone sequel.
Ross talked that the team was made clear that they shouldn’t be talking about Days Gone in their pitches, and Sony management wanted the team to pursue a reboot of Sony Bend’s Syphon Filter (though Ross doesn’t seem interested at that prospect).
“It was very obvious that we shouldn’t be talking about Days Gone when we were working on the pitch [for our next game]. It was clear that it was a non-starter and there was nothing in the [Days Gone 2] pitch that made the local manager and his boss feel good about it. That’s probably a failure of the creative group… it was just an uphill battle.”
“It was just an ask: ‘are there any other IPs that we have that we can use?’ and the only other IP was Syphon Filter,” he explained “But honestly, I have zero ideas on how to reboot Syphon Filter. I was not interested in that at all,” Ross said (as transcribed by VGC).
He further talked about how he also made a pitch about an open-world Resistance game, which also failed to get traction with Sony execs. Ross said that the formula would work really well with the open-world loops Days Gone used – ultimately making the game “pretty rad.”
“The pitch I was making was, open-world Resistance would be rad,” he said. “There were all of these open-world loops that we figured out… it almost wrote itself with Resistance: there were so many aspects of that property that lent itself to open-world gameplay. But they weren’t interested in that either. I don’t know how well it sold. They were interested in almost anything other than Days Gone 2.”
During the livestream, Ross also revealed how he got the sales numbers for Days Gone when Sony didn’t make them public. He sourced it from trophies site Gamestat, which more or less guarantees that there are fewer copies than he mentioned – read more on that through here.
