I liked Days Gone, at least when I played through it again recently on PC. Did it have some issues? Oh, absolutely. The pacing was rather terrible throughout, but was especially poor in the opening few hours. The melee combat was also lacking. There were some other nitpicks here and there, but I generally had a good time with it. The acting was stellar in spite of some poor writing (which often pushed in the "very poor" territory at times). In fact, I reviewed the PC version of Days Gone back when it first came out and gave it a rather high score of 4 out of 5 stars.
Naturally, this PC release came out quite a while after the initial release on PlayStation 4 in 2019. This means that Days Gone on PC had the benefit of incorporating several major patches that developer Bend Studio had to release to fix the very buggy and somewhat janky PlayStation 4 release. The PC release also included several quality of life improvements and bits of additional content that were also added to the PlayStation 4 version after launch.
The fact of the matter is, the PlayStation 4 release was merely "ok" by most standards, held back from greatness due to bugs, pacing, several instances of poor writing, and various gameplay flaws. It didn't review particularly well, but it also didn't review terribly. MetaCritic has that PlayStation 4 release at a still respectable 71, while the PC release there has a 76 average score.
On December 6, the director and writer of Days Gone, John Garvin, took to Twitter to share the reasons he thought the game didn't review particularly well in its initial PlayStation 4 release. He says there are three reasons for the lack of praise.
Three reasons:
1. it had tech issues like bugs, streaming and frame rate;
2. it had reviewers who couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game(...)
1. it had tech issues like bugs, streaming and frame rate;
2. it had reviewers who couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game(...)
Where Garvin really jumps the shark here is when we get to his third point about why he believes the game reviewed poorly.
3. And three, it had woke reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass
Garvin decided to double down on his take when several responses called him out for being a clown. One response read, "C'mon John: 'woke'? You're better than that." Garvin replied with:
"Nope, I’m really not… if a reviewer objects to a character because of identity politics, I call that woke … how am I wrong?"
There's also Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, a game where you are literally playing as a "gruff white biker" scoring a 90 average. There's also most every entry in the Metal Gear Solid franchise. The franchise that feature a "gruff white guy" and plenty of sexualization (MGS5's Quiet, MGS4's Beauty and the Beast Unit, MGS3's Eva, MGS2's Easter egg posters, MGS's CODEC flirting and Meryl working out Easter egg and Snake literally staring at her ass as she ran away). Those have never reviewed well, right?
Thankfully for Bend Studio, Sony, and the gaming industry at large, John Garvin is no longer working at Bend Studio. Garvin left Bend Studio at some point in 2019. These days, when he isn't on social media blaming those damned "woke" people in the media for his own shortcomings, he's busy working on Ashfall. Ashall is described as "the first true Web 3.0 AAA title for PC, console, and the Hedera network." Hedera being a platform that uses "a native, energy-efficient cryptocurrency."
Yeah. Good luck with that, Garvin.
He is, what's that also overly used phrase they like to throw around? Ah right. He's such a snowflake.