Two years after its exclusive release on PlayStation 4, the open-world action game Days Gone is out on PC. Recently, Sony has been increasingly indulging this platform with games that were originally PS exclusives, but the ports are not always of the proper quality. We tested the PC version of Days Gone and found out that things turned out differently this time.
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Zombies are back in fashion
The plot of Days Gone is based on a typical zombie apocalypse. Humanity has become a victim of a virus that has infected billions of the world’s inhabitants. People began to turn into phreakers – zombie-like creatures, only a few with different habits. During the day they prefer to hide in shelters, called nests, therefore they are not particularly active, and at night they go out into the street, and then you can meet them literally at every step. Sometimes they gather in hordes – an attack on such a group of hundreds or two of phreakers requires the preparation and conduct of a real special operation.
However, the virus did not affect everyone. What happens in other parts of the world – history is silent, but at least in a small area of Oregon there are still living people. Some of them form camps that live according to their own laws and orders. The territory outside of them is called “Adische” – in addition to phreakers, there are animals, including infected ones, as well as groups of marauders and sectarians.
The main character, a biker named Deacon St. John, together with his friend named Bukhar, carries out various assignments of local camps in the “Adische”, and also extracts resources for himself. Throughout the game, we are tied to our bike – even during foot operations, we will be no more than 100-200 meters away from it.
This is what the horde looks like in Days Gone from the side
At the very beginning of the pandemic, Deacon put his wounded wife Sarah in a NERO helicopter – this is a government organization that represents the Ministry of Emergencies at maximum speed. It was she who was involved in measures to contain the spread of the epidemic, and then began researching the virus, including on live freakers living in Oregon’s Adische. The main plot is devoted precisely to the Deacon’s attempts to find Sarah, but in parallel with this, the main character will have a lot of other work. For completing tasks, he receives credits that can be spent in camps to upgrade a bike, buy weapons or ammunition. At the same time, each camp has its own currency.
It takes about 30-40 hours to complete the whole game. More detailed reviews have been online since the release on PlayStation 4. We will focus on the technical aspects of the port on the PC and tell you how successful it turned out to be.
The port turned out to be better than the original for PS4 at launch
In technical terms, the PlayStation 4 version left much to be desired at the start: there were problems with frame rates, bugs and slow texture loading. Only a few patches later, the game was brought into a state more or less corresponding to a Sony exclusive.
As for the PC port, even the pre-release version already worked fine. The developers removed the frame rate limitation, and a computer with an Intel Core i-7 9700K processor, 32 GB of RAM and a GeForce 2080 Ti video card at maximum graphics settings produced a stable 100 FPS at 1080p resolution. Days Gone was also tested on a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 5 3550H processor, 16GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 560X graphics card with minimal graphics settings – and even there the FPS was around 50-60. However, the game looks really bad this way, and many details of the world like grass and ground textures are loaded to the end only at a distance of 4-5 meters during fast movement on the bike. You can eliminate this effect by increasing the quality of the graphics, but to achieve a decent picture on such a laptop, you will have to sacrifice FPS and play at about 30 frames per second.
Minimum graphics settings in Days Gone on PC
Visually, Days Gone on PC is not much different from the console version. The drawing distance has slightly increased, which in this case gives almost no benefit. The world of Days Gone is a mountainous landscape, and therefore only on rare plans does this advantage really give a practical result. Otherwise, the picture resembles the one that was available on the PlayStation 4. However, Bend Studio tried very hard to get the best result on the resources that the console provided, therefore, without numerous additional upgrades that could be implemented on a PC, the graphics are quite consistent with the time … The textures have also become a little more detailed, but in the dynamics of the gameplay, you can hardly notice the difference.
The lighting in the tunnel shows that some objects do not cast shadows.
However, there are plenty of useful bonuses on the PC. For example, it is possible to expand the field of view, that is, to move the camera away from the main character. There is also support for resolutions for monitors 21: 9. Previous ports of Sony’s PC games – Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn – came out with DLSS. For some reason, Days Gone does not have this technology.
The game has not forgotten the “roots”
In some moments, it is very strongly felt that the game was originally developed for console control from a gamepad. For example, there is sticking to the enemy in hand-to-hand combat – you don’t need to direct the hero to continue the series of attacks. Any opponent can simply be called by removing your hands from the keyboard, regardless of how he moves. There is also no need to turn around if the enemy crept up from behind: the hero himself will take out a melee weapon and turn around at the first attack, and further in the program – again a simple call.
One-on-one hand-to-hand combat is a simple call. Attacks from multiple enemies or mini-bosses can be dodged with rolls like in Dark Souls
As for shooting, even when playing with a mouse and keyboard, it is possible to use the auto-aim function. On a bike, it always works, regardless of the type of controllers and settings. At the same time, the firing system from automatic weapons sometimes raises questions: even if the target completely hits the crosshairs, when firing in long bursts, bullets can sometimes fly by. In the mouse settings, there is a basic set of functions: you can turn off acceleration, as well as select a separate sensitivity for turning the camera and sight.
The developers have tuned the motorcycle control system very well. Even when playing on the keyboard, a pleasant physical model is felt, as well as the nuances of the surface – for example, on soft ground or in the snow, the bike must be “caught”. The developers have provided the ability to disable auto-centering of the camera while driving – this is a very useful feature when using the keyboard and mouse.
General impressions
Days Gone is a rather long narrative by modern standards with a huge number of plot twists. The post-apocalyptic open world is filled as much as possible in such a setting: in addition to missions, other activities are available to us, such as destroying phreaker nests, random events with ambushes and rescuing civilians, battles with infected bears and wolves, and battles with hordes.
Find out where the tank comes from?
In terms of gameplay, Days Gone will not offer you anything new – almost all of its game mechanics have been present in other AAA releases. Tasks also do not shine with originality (kill someone, find something or someone, catch up and shoot someone) and differ little from each other. In the end, it already seems that the gameplay is needed here as a filler between story clips. And the further events develop, the more you involuntarily begin to rush through boring missions as quickly as possible to find out what will happen next. The story itself is not devoid of plot holes, but it is precisely this that is the main factor in the involvement in the gameplay. During the passage, the player will receive the full range of emotions – from pain and disappointment to the most sincere joy.
At the same time, throughout the passage, individual elements of the game, made frankly carelessly, are striking. For example, a couple of missions in which Deacon needs to go through half a map to talk to a friend, ends with a dialogue of two or three dubious phrases. It seems that the developers decided to finish them later, but they either forgot or scored, rushing to release the game. The tasks that you go through with your partner often reveal AI problems: NPCs move unnaturally slowly towards the goal, and sometimes even start to stop after each step. And once I saw a motionless model of a living dog, which came straight from the corpse. There are a lot of similar small bugs and flaws in the game.
One of the many bugs in Days Gone
Days Gone is not the best, or even one of the best, open world adventure games. However, if you are a fan of the genre in general, then you definitely should not miss this release. Days Gone is an endangered type of game with more plot and storytelling than grind. There are no stores with imbe guns and pumping boosters in it, and all the key characters are unique personalities with their own characters. And while the franchise never gets the glory of GTA or RDR, it’s not for nothing that fans are already writing petitions to Sony asking for a sequel to Days Gone amid news of its cancellation. So there is no doubt that the game will also find its audience on the PC. And the first reaction of gamers and journalists is another confirmation of this.
