When Sony Interactive Entertainment revealed Days Gone back at E3 2016, it wasn’t initially greeted with as much hype as many other first-party exclusives. Why? Well, because the game looked a bit rough and generic. But perhaps what stuck out the most — other than that it was yet another dark, brutal zombie game from Sony — is that its protagonist, Deacon St. John, seemed generic, and frankly, a bit uninspired. That said, you wouldn’t know any of this by looking at the game now. It looks as good as it sounds on paper, and Deacon seems like much more of a likable protagonist. And according to Sony Bend, this isn’t by chance.
Speaking to Polygon, director on the project Jeff Ross revealed that a lot of feedback-driven changes were made to Deacon over the course of development to soften him and make him more relatable.
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“We got it from everyone,” said Ross replied, talking about criticism of the character. “Just the way some of the lines were read or the way they were written. We’ve refined some of the rougher edges, where he may not have come off as the most relatable character.”
“We worked really hard on making Deacon’s character realistic,” added writer on the game John Garvin. “It wasn’t about trying to make him likable. We wanted him to grow over the course of the story, and you have to start him someplace, so he can end up someplace else.
“In the early development of Days Gone, we didn’t realize how long the player would spend with this character before he starts regaining his humanity. Nobody is willing to spend eight hours with somebody they don’t like. This was just part of us learning and growing as developers of an open world.”
According to Garvin, Sony Bend is grateful for all the feedback it got, and for the heads of Sony allowing it to take the proper time with the game in order to fix things and get stuff right.
“There were a lot of moments that were too on the nose,” said the writer. “We edited a lot of that out so we could allow the player to fill in their expectations of how the character behaves and reacts, and not just spell it all out for them.”
Days Gone is in development for PS4, and is scheduled to release next month on April 26. For more coverage on the highly-anticipated open-world action-adventure game, click here. And as always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think or hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_ and let me know there. What do think of Deacon?
Thanks, ThePlayStationBrahs.
