Days Gone represents a somewhat odd moment for the PlayStation brand, a game that most players seemed to like, it sold pretty well, and yet Sony did not approve developer Bend to make a sequel, and now they’re onto a new IP.

That has never sat quite right with the director of the game in particular, Jeff Ross. Recently, he made headlines when Ghost of Tsushima’s 8 million sales milestone was celebrated, and he said Days Gone hit that in a year and a half. Though later it was revealed he was citing data from a trophy-tracking site, and the true number was probably a few million lower.

Now, he’s talking to USA Today about Days Gone 2, the sequel that never was, and what a second game was going to focus on. He compares it to how other big games were able to flesh themselves out in follow-up sequels:

“We have to be able to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run,” Ross says. “I just see that as a trilogy. First games – Batman: Arkham, the first Uncharted – are basic. They are a platform to build on top of for subsequent titles. And if you look at a game like Uncharted, you could surface swim in the first game. In the second or third game, you could go underwater. Then in the fourth game, you’re scuba diving underwater. They didn’t start with scuba diving, they built towards it. That applies to every game. Horizon Forbidden West is going to have swimming underwater. It’s gonna have all the things that they probably wanted to do in the first game but just ran out of time. So you create the minimum viable entry and then hope you get to build the second one. Because you’re not arguing over the foundations, you’re arguing over the epic new ideas that you’re gonna be putting into it.”

Among the ideas that were going to be implemented in Days Gone 2:

• Exploring the relationship dynamics between Deacon and Sarah.
• An expansion of the NERO tech concept.
• Improving the core gameplay based on player data.
• Improving dynamic elements of the game with better enemy/ally AI.
• Roaming animals in the wild, bears going through trashcans, wolves hunting in packs.
• The ability to swim, overcoming Deacon’s lore-based fear of water (75% of player self-deaths were due to water).

Ross has consistently believed that fundamentally, it wasn’t sales, but the game’s Metacritic score that ultimately caused Sony to pass on Days Gone 2, given that at a 71, it was well below the usual 85+ scores of most big Sony exclusive hits. Ross thinks the score was probably docked 10 points overall because of the game’s tech problems:

“I really do feel that Days Gone should have been an 80,” Ross said. “79 to 82 was what I thought it would get on Metacritic. I think that the technical issues set us back 10 points.”

He says he argued with the studio director about this, saying that points are lost for all manner of things, but he maintains that while things like critics liking story and gameplay can be subjective, technical problems are not. “You should run at 30 frames per second.”

It’s a really fascinating interview, and I suggest you check out the whole thing here. I can see both sides of this, but even if Days Gone 2 never happens, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what Bend does next with the lessons they learned.

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