Days Gone director pitched open-world Resistance
Syphon Filter reboot also discussed.
Days Gone staff discussed a potential open-world Resistance game and a Syphon Filter reboot with higher-ups at PlayStation.
Jeff Ross, the director of Days Gone who left Sony in late 2020, discussed some of these pitch ideas last night via video chat with former Twisted Metal developer David Jaffe. During the call, he went into further detail on how his hopes for a Days Gone sequel were squashed.
"I think it was dead on arrival," Ross said of his Days Gone sequel pitch. "It did get reviewed from a level right above the studio, but I don't think it went any further than that.
"I just think the reviews [of the pitch] were from the lens of 'the first one was a trainwreck in so many ways and didn't sell awesome, so yeah let's keep these guys busy'. They asked us, hey what about a Syphon Filter reboot..."
The appearance on Jaffe's YouTube channel follows a high-profile tweet by Ross which contrasted Days Gone's 8m sales with an impression from "local studio management" that the game had been a "big disappointment".
"It was very obvious we shouldn't be talking about Days Gone, even while we were working on the [sequel] pitch and generating it," Ross said last night. "So it was clear it was a non-starter. And there was nothing in the pitch which made local management or his boss feel really good about it."
So what about Syphon Filter? Ross had previously worked on the third-person shooter series while at Sony Bend, though admitted he was not sure how it could be brought back.
"It was just an ask - 'are there any other IPs that we have that we can use?' And the only one we had was Syphon Filter. But honestly I had zero ideas on how to reboot Syphon Filter, I was not interested in that at all.
"The pitch I was making was: 'open-world Resistance would be fucking rad'. [We had] all these open world loops that we figured out. It almost wrote itself with Resistance, there's so many aspects of that property that lends itself to open-world gameplay. But they weren't interested in that either, and I don't know how well it sold. They were interested in almost anything except for a Days Gone 2."
Earlier this week, Ross wrote on Twitter that he had been "planning on building on top of the original for a kick-ass sequel".
"Even the first Killzone got a 70 on metacritic, but the sequel roared back with a 91. You gotta crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.
"Development was a long slog, but we were a small team learning how to make our first open world game. All things considered, it's amazing we finished at all."
Eurogamer has contacted Sony for comment.
Sony Bend is now assisting development on Naughty Dog's upcoming multiplayer game - believed to be an expanded version of the long-awaited multiplayer experience that was initially planned as part of The Last of Us 2.