It’s three years later and Days Gone is still being talked about to this day – more like people trying to defend its failures that is. Since the game was released back in 2019, the Days Gone director John Garvin has continually commented about the game, trying to defend everything about it. It was only last week that the former director claimed the game’s middling reviews were because of “woke reviewers” and people who “couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game.” As you can expect, this went down like lead balloon.
These comments were made by Garvin on Twitter, and his account has since been locked and his tweets protected. Not only that, but Garvin also blamed the game’s failures on things like bugs, inconsistent frame rates, and poor streaming, basically throwing the game’s programmers under the bus in the process. These claims were rebuffed by Bend Studio, who has said that they don’t share the same controversial thoughts of the former creative director. Bend Studio is also being backed up by Jeff Ross, another former Days Gone director who wants to have his say on the tetchy subject.
Ross took to Twitter with a series of tweets that showed support for the developing team. Ross said that Bend Studio “has a small but incredibly talented engineering team who punched way above their weight class to finish Days Gone.” Ross added that “One engineer single-handedly coded all sound, music, weapon, melee combat, and localisation systems,” while also claiming that “another engineer was SINGULARLY responsible for all the animation systems, physics, the motorcycle, AND the horde – which is just insane.” For individual people to take on so much responsibility is crazy and mightily impressive regardless of what the outcome was.
It’s nice to see Ross sticking up for this former team of developers, and there seems to be some bad blood between them and Garvin, why else would he very publicly attack them? You could say that Garvin is bitter about certain things, unhappy with some ideas maybe, but whatever the case, it does seem that Ross has now distanced himself from his former colleague and his strange comments.
Both men have now moved on from Bend Studio and Days Gone, with one of the reasons being down to the fact that Sony didn’t want to do a sequel. Ross has since moved on to Crystal Dynamics, while Garvin is working on some kind of NFT game called Ashfall. If Garvin has anything to do with it, this won’t be the last time we hear about this story.