Days Gone Will Have A Dynamic and Living Open World, Say Developers

I know a lot of people are wary on Sony Bend’s upcoming open world zombie survival game, Days Gone, but I am very interested in it. The title looks like it will be a blend of the kind of systemic emergent gameplay that Breath of the Wild delivered last year, with the kind of storytelling you can typically expect from a Sony game.

Speaking more about that systemic gameplay, Bend Studio’s Eric Jensen told GameReactor how the world in the game will be living, dynamic, and react to the game’s protagonist. “[The freakers are] part of the ecosystem, just like everything else,” he said. “And so you can be just driving around and stumble upon them and if you’re not quite ready for it, your options are to try to take it on and risk losing, or you can just take off and come back later when you have more supplies and you’ve upgraded some of your weapons.”

But it won’t just be the freakers- human NPCs around the world too could, for example, aid or hinder Deacon. “There’s different camp leaders that have different motivations, and there’s different jobs and job types that you can get from camps. That’s some of the more […] static stuff,” Jensen explained. “The rest of the world is dynamic and living and reacts to Deacon, so as you take out what we call ‘infestations’ – these are kind of hotspots of the freakers where they can nest – you’ll see the environment and an area start to change and adapt. So where previously where it was infested with freakers, you might start to see humans showing up.”

So far, it sounds like it will be a game that tries to actually “simulate” a zombie apocalypse, so to speak- in that it is a game that is trying to really put you in a post apocalypse where your very survival is a game mechanic. I like that- and I love the potential to get a zombie apocalypse game that isn’t scripted for once. I just hope Sony Bend will be able to deliver a final product that can live up to its vision, when it launches on PS4 next February.