Days Gone developer pitched Resistance reboot, but Sony didn’t bite

No matter Sony Interactive Leisure desires out of its Bend, Oregon studio, it isn’t one other Days Gone. Neither is it a reboot of Resistance: Fall of Man.

Jeff Ross, the previous SIE Bend Studio director on 2019’s Days Gone, took to David Jaffe’s livestream once more on Thursday, a day after tweeting some sales figures for Days Gone that later got here into query. Whatever the numbers, Ross intimated that Days Gone was toast as a result of it had already been judged not a success, by SIE greenlight-givers fixated on video games with hit cachet.

“It was clear that [a Days Gone] sequel was a non-starter, and there was nothing within the pitch that made the native supervisor and his boss be ok with it,” Ross instructed Jaffe.

This comment adopted the tweet during which Ross urged that Days Gone’s gross sales, after a yr, mirrored Ghost of Tsushima’s after the identical span, with the latter praised as a success and the previous scorned.

After different video games press picked up on that declare — builders and publishers discussing laborious gross sales figures is as uncommon as a panther sighting — Ross instructed Jaffe that it got here from a now-defunct web site known as Gamestat, which tracked PlayStation Trophy information. Although Ross nonetheless says Bend’s inside telemetry and the Gamestat information had been considerably the identical, it’s attainable that used copies, gamers who received the sport free on PlayStation Plus, and different distributions are factored in.

At any price, Ross felt that Days Gone’s unappealing Metacritic scores meant no gross sales quantity would get SIE’s approval for a sequel. “It was very apparent that we shouldn’t be speaking about Days Gone once we had been engaged on the pitch” for his or her subsequent venture, Ross stated.

In June, the chief of PlayStation Studios stated SIE Bend is at work on a brand new IP, though nobody is saying what precisely. Ross instructed Jaffe that at one level he pitched an open-world reboot of Insomniac Video games’ Resistance, the alternate-past sci-fi shooter collection which final revealed in 2011.

“There have been all of those open-world loops that we found out,” Ross instructed Jaffe. “There have been so many elements of that property that lent itself to open-world gameplay.”

Sony purchased Insomniac in 2019 and theoretically may ship any of its IPs to some other SIE studio, however this by no means made it previous the blue-sky, convention desk stage. It’s attention-grabbing to notice that, in November, console-exclusive sci-fi shooter Halo went open-world with Halo Infinite, to a positive essential reception.

Ross left Bend at the end of 2020. Earlier than leaving, he stated phrase got here down that possibly he and his studio ought to take into account rebooting Syphon Filter, the stealth shooter whose final look on consoles got here in 2007. Ross stated he felt that the studio’s senior management was simply tossing this out to get their minds off doing Days Gone 2.

“It was nearly like a keep-them-busy-type of query: ‘Hey guys, why don’t you provide you with one thing for Syphon Filter whereas we work out what we’re assured in pitching.’ So, I don’t assume it was ever real,” Ross stated.