I've been playing this for a few weeks now, and it's been alternately a surprising and frustrating experience.
First off, I don't have a lot of gaming time, so when I say "a few weeks" I probably mean about 15 hours' worth of actual game time. I've just rescued
someone and brought them to Tucker's camp, and I've cleared one horde (in a train car) that I stumbled on accidentally. That was a fun, desperate fight.
I'm generally pretty conflicted on the game, though, so I felt like setting down my thoughts:
- Visually, there's almost nothing else like Days Gone. I didn't like Red Dead Redemption 2 as a game, but it's the only other touchstone I have for an experience where so much attention has been lavished on textures and incidental details. Yes, a lot of the secondary character models look like they came from a completely different games, but when it's Deacon, out in the wilds on his bike, and the rain starts falling through the floodlights of a Nero checkpoint, this game looks phenomenal.
- That level of detail also extends to the worldbuilding and immersion. Everywhere feels dirty and lived-in, and there's mess everywhere - but without it being overdone. Stalking around Marion Forks felt like exploring a genuine post-apocalyptic town, rather than a game-y contrivance of one.
- I think the shooting, stabbing, running, and trapping all plays and controls well. I mean, MGS5 this isn't, but firing guns feels reliably punchy, and you're given a lot of options for tackling different scenarios. Obviously the hordes are the highlight, where all these mechanics come together, but I also enjoy fighting bandits, rippers, etc. At no point did I feel as though I was playing a B-tier title, gameplay-wise, and toying with the AI by relocating, places traps etc. is always entertaining.
- In a similar fashion, I think the story and characters were unfairly maligned. The plot is a very slow, naturalistic sort of affair, and everyone's very brusque. I guess that doesn't translate well for an audience that wants cliffhangers and constant suspense, but I liked the slice-of-life thing they have going so far.
- Where I definitely feel like I'm playing a B-tier title, though, is the bugs. For the first 10 or so hours I figured I'd been smart, coming to the game a few months late, after a load of patches. The open world exploration was flawless, and nothing seemed glitchy or unreliable except the obvious weirdness of the cutscenes that were clearly meant to transition straight to gameplay but then didn't. But the last few hours of play have been really messy. In my most recent missions I've had invisible helicopters, T-pose NPCs, crows stuck in the side of buildings, missing geometry, characters stuck in walls, segments where Deacon's clipping box got turned off somehow, audio cut-outs, disappearing guns, every car on the map being replaced by a blurry box, and two different crashes to the PS4 frontend. It feels like I've hit some kind of save file issue where things just keep getting more and more fucked up, and resetting the console and reverting to a cloud autosave hasn't helped. So far these issues are only happening in story missions, when the game force-changes the time of day, but they're now happening EVERY story mission.
I'm actually really disappointed that this has happened, because up until recently I was ready to align myself with the crowd that calls Days Gone an overlooked / unduly criticised gem. It looks great, it plays well, and I like the way it's structured, but good lord did it need more time in the oven from a QA perspective.
EDIT: One odd thing I forgot to add: dying. I'm playing on hard and I was really enjoying the tension of creeping around, clearing nests etc., until I died. I figured I'd get sent back to a quicksave point, or a safe house, but instead I just got placed back in the same area of the map, with full health and stamina, and lost no progress. Unless I'm missing something (like an XP penalty) then it seems like dying might actually be preferable to healing during open world activities!