Days Gone – An interview with David Lee from Days Gone developer, Bend Studio

Days Gone is a much-anticipated action horror game set in a post-apocalyptic open world. The game is coming exclusively for PS4 this April and ahead of its official release, we got a chance to have an interview with the Community Manager of Bend Studio (the developer for Days Gone), David Lee. Read on below for the new details he told us!

The game was first announced during E3 2016, which is about 3 years ago. Comparing then and now, David tells us that the game has improved dramatically and visually especially on the UI. PlayStation has provided a sufficient amount of time and budget for the studio to create the game, and David hopes that everyone will be able to love and enjoy the final product.

Freakers don’t really have consciousness, they are violent and ruthless, the only thing in their mind is “food”. You will be the biggest thing they want to eat, so make sure you take them out whenever you meet them. Also, they are more aggressive and violent at night time (especially during the snow), but this doesn’t mean that they are weak to high-temperature conditions.

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The Hordes (a group of Freakers) usually migrate together from place to place. You should always aware of their locations because it will be really difficult to escape if you bump into them. However, if you manage to survive through the Horde, you can earn a lot of Freakers’ ears and trade them for currencies to upgrade your camps. You can only collect them one by one though.

There are plenty of ways you can clear a Freaker nest, but the easiest and most effective way would be using Molotov (or anything with fire). When asked about the possibility for enemies like Rippers to move into the cleared Freaker nest (instead of allies), David tells us that Rippers have their own activity area so we don’t have to worry about that. There will be several locations to where the Rippers are, and you will know it once you are aware of that.

We all know that Deacon will lose his favourite bike at the beginning of the game. We wonder will we be able to retrieve it back, David responses us by saying that “play the story and you will know it!”. Also, the game doesn’t require you to make serious decisions, but you can choose to help out other survivors or leave them alone while you are travelling in the open-world. These choices you make will not affect the main storyline.

As the game has a day/night cycle, the resources you can grab in the game will respawn again when a day passes. Some of the rare resources might take a few more days to respawn. For now, the difficulty modes only affect the amount of damage you deal and the amount of damage you take.

There are 3 different skill trees for Days Gone – the Melee, Ranged Combat and Survival. For those who want to scavenge more supplies or make resources collecting easier, you can level up the Survival skill first. While Ranged Combat skills allow you to perform better in ranged combat, for example, you can bring more ammo or have the focus mode. For Melee, you can increase the damage of your melee weapons or repair them so that you can consistently keep it yours. It is up to you to balance the skills and find a perfect space between them.

Using bikes to ride over animals or Freakers will be one of the best things you can do in Days Gone because it is basically a one-shot kill. The bike receives damage, there is no skill to reduce it but you can add more durability of your bike by upgrading its parts. Under the Survival skill tree, there will be a useful “Survival Sense” allowing you to outline enemies from a distance. You can try to lure them over using rocks or other items.

On future plans, we are curious about DLCs that might explain more on the main casts’ back story. According to David, they do have DLCs but he can’t tell us anything yet. However, he ensures that the main story will be informative enough to tell you everything important about the characters. The team will also consider adding multiplayer features if there is a lot of requests from the players.

Depends on how you play, you will get a unique experience in Days Gone. It is a game that you will enjoy replaying. The game is launching on April 26 for PlayStation 4, don’t miss out if you are interested!