Days Gone dev on zombie saturation: It’s like saying ‘superheroes are played out’

The creators of Days Gone have heard the criticism that there are too many zombie games out there, including some from Sony’s Naughty Dog studio that are among the finest games with the walking dead ever made. Nobody wants to create just one more zombie apocalypse game, even if it features a different setting from the usual urban rubble.

I played the latest build of Days Gone, making my way through a level about an hour into the game. After starting with a narrative experience, Days Gone shifts into a kind of open world in the Oregon woods, where you can choose a variety of missions aimed at improving your chances of survival despite scarce resources. Then I sat down with John Garvin, the creative director at Sony Interactive Entertainment Bend Studio, for an interview. Sony will likely show this part of the game at its booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in mid-June.

But even after this peek at a new level, you’ll still have to wait. Sony recently delayed the game until 2019 so that the Bend can make it better. (And it would make sense to stay out of the way of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 as well). That may also make sense if Sony is planning to launch The Last of Us Part II, another postapocalypse zombie game, sometime this year.

I talked to Garvin about the crowded market for zombie games and how his team at the Bend, Oregon, studio is trying to differentiate their game from the rest. Days Gone features some amazing technology in displaying hundreds of freakers running around at high speeds trying to chase the hero down. But it also features a unique narrative.

At the core of Days Gone is a challenging experience of driving a motorcycle through the trails and winding roads of the Oregon woods, and it has a dangerous world full of infected bears, wolves, and other animals. I like what I’ve seen so far, but Days Gone will have to deliver more than a zombie open world with a bounty hunter narrative to get fans excited.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: John Garvin is creative director at Sony Bend Studio for Days Gone.

GamesBeat: I liked the game ever since that first demo [at E3 in 2016]. It’s interesting to see your progress, as far as what you’re showing now. How do you look back on previous demos compared what you’ve decided to show here? I see a different side of the game, more of the open world.

John Garvin: When we debuted the game in 2016, we obviously started with the horde. We wanted to show one of the things that really makes the game unique. That accomplished that. And then last year we were trying to show the dynamic nature of the world and how you can complete missions and jobs in different ways. This year is the first time you get hands-on.

Personally, I think what I find most fun about the game—the bike handling is really good. The guys have spent so much time tuning the physics for the trails and the kinds of environments you ride through. If you spend much time just fooling around on the bike, there are a lot of mechanics for that. You have the drifting mechanics, where you press the circle button and do donuts and get around sharp corners really quickly. It’s the combination of all that — being able to ride the bike, the on-foot mechanics, the way the world is always active, always alive, always trying to kill you.

GamesBeat: You confront a lot of problems there. I saw the wolves going after another guy. And the—what do you call them again?

Garvin: The freakers.

GamesBeat: They came after me. In the open world, it seems like a space full of animals, people, and zombies. A lot of danger.

Garvin: That’s something we’re still tuning. I feel like as soon as we get that 100 percent dialed in—we don’t want it to be so overwhelming that you’re constantly being killed or being attacked or running out of gas or getting sniped by ambushers or whatever. We also want there to be this sense that danger is always around the corner. I think we’re close to that now.

I’ve been watching a lot of people play today. Like you said, there’s a good spread of the kinds of things that can happen. Wolf attacks aren’t as common as you might think, but when they happen, they’re memorable. I saw this guy get attacked by one wolf, so he starts running. He stops, turns around, aims his gun, and he gets blindsided by another part of the pack that came around to one side. We want them to feel like—even if you were to get killed by something like that, it would be memorable. “Oh, yeah, I ran into a bear, and it killed me, but it was an awesome moment.”

Above: Deacon flees a horde of infected, zombie-like “freakers” in Days Gone.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: The horde, then, how common might that be? The encounter you had in the first demo, is that a relatively rare event, where you have hundreds of them after you?

Garvin: No, the horde encounters are going to be pretty common. They’re a part of the story. In the first hour of gameplay you run into them a couple of times, although you don’t interact with them. And then, as you’re playing through the Cascade wilderness, the first part of the game we dump you into—if you go through the world and start exploring, you’ll run into these horde infestation zones. You’ll see that come up on the screen.

If you look around, you’ll find the cave or the mine or whatever it is they’re hibernating in. You’ll be able to see where they feed, because there are mass graves in the world. They feed on these huge piles of corpses. You can also find where they go to water. Part of the life cycle of the world is seeing how the horde is going to move. Depending on where you go and what you do, you can run into them.

Early on in the game, you can try to take them on. Hordes come in all sizes. There are hordes that are 30, 40, 50, more like a swarm, up to the size of the horde you saw in the 2016 demo, which was 500 I think. You run into them throughout the game.

GamesBeat: I heard a couple of different things from people’s reactions. Some of them liked it, liked the things that make it unique, but I’ve heard other people complain that the zombie genre has worn them out. Do you feel some of that? Would you have any response to that, or some awareness of how to deal with that reaction?

Garvin: That’s come up a lot. I have mixed feelings. To be honest, I don’t understand the comment, people saying, “Oh, zombies are played out.” Really? Walking Dead is still the highest-rated program on TV. I’m looking forward to the World War Z sequel. I read the book. I Am Legend was pretty awesome. I just don’t get it. To me it’s like saying, “Well, superheroes are played out.” There’s a lot of superhero content out there, but–

GamesBeat: You hear some of the same people saying that The Last of Us was just another zombie game, which I’d say is pretty far from the truth.

Garvin: The Last of Us is a really good example of why I think the basic comment is so wrong. If you have a compelling experience—The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time, by the way. The story was amazing. The experience that they created was amazing. No matter what your background is, whether it’s aliens or zombies or superheroes or a Western, if you tell a good story and you create a compelling experience, players are going to like it.

But yeah, we got hit with that from the very beginning. “Zombies are played out. I’m so tired of zombies.” I think what they mean by that is, “Slow-moving shambling creatures with no backstory and no thought put into it.” I do remember playing a few of those five or six years ago. I don’t remember a ton of games like that recently. I don’t understand the visceral reaction that some players have to zombies. To me, I’ll play any game if it’s fun, if it’s compelling, if they’ve done a good job.