Days Gone is a AAA open-world post-apocalyptic game from Sony’s Bend Studio. It feels like is a blend of The Last of Us (i.e., character movement, melee, shooting, crafting), Red Dead Redemption 2 (open world, bike management instead of a horse, long travel time between missions, and storytelling during these sections), and Far Cry (i.e., outposts, random animal encounters, enemy scouting/marking).

You play as Deacon St. John, a drifter trying to survive the harsh post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest by managing tasks for various camps, all while searching for information about his missing wife, Sarah. The world is full of humans and wildlife, both of which can be encountered as infected. The most common enemies are “Freakers,” the Days Gone version of zombies.

This post is more subjective than many of my posts and I’ll begin by pointing out the things I liked most about the game, followed by things that I felt could have been better.

TL;DR version down below “Final Thoughts!”

Main positives

• Riding the bike is satisfying and gets even better over time with upgrades as you can feel the evolution in its performance. Similar to Spider-Man, the moment-to-moment traversal was so good that I rarely fast traveled, unless it was a very long distance, then it was a nice option to have. After I finished the story and was trophy-hunting, exploring the world on the upgraded bike made seeking collectibles much more tolerable.
• Visceral, weighty melee combat with a variety of weapons. There is a satisfying “thunk” when Deacon lands a blow into a human enemy’s neck or when chopping off Freaker limbs. A great usability addition is the ability to press [R2] at any point to take out a melee weapon. It allows the player to quickly swap between shooting and melee when Freakers close in rapidly in large numbers.
• Horde encounters. The varying locations and sizes of these encounters keep them feeling fresh. There are a variety of ways incorporated into the level design that give the player numerous environmental options, in addition to shooting and crafting, to deal with them. However, the tuning of these encounters can impair the feeling of intensity and despair. If the player lures the horde away too far from its origin point, only a subset of the horde will continue to chase the player, whereas the rest will slowly stumble back. This results in the player being able to fairly easily deal with the subset of Freakers, pick off stragglers as they stumble back, as well as regroup, craft, and devise a new strategy to deal with the rest. Overall, this made defeating hordes much more manageable but often made it feel like there were many mini-horde encounters rather than one large one. However, I’m curious if the newly-released Survival Mode difficulty might change this. Altogether, as a fan of zombie media and games, these large-scale encounters were something that I was craving from the genre.
• Emergent gameplay. Although these were not as prevalent as I had hoped, the situations where a horde or wildlife came crashing down as I was attempting to take out an enemy camp, similar to Far Cry games, were exciting and added an element of unpredictability to encounters that became a bit repetitive due to poor human AI.

STORY SPOILERS ABOUND!

Main negatives

Trivial missions inhibit story pacing

It begins with Deacon and his friend, Boozer, getting into some trouble with some local Freaker worshipers called Rippers. Boozer gets critically injured, which results in Deacon searching for ways to help him recover. These events, along with getting acquainted with some camps, are the focus of the first third of the story. Overall, this first section of the story has slow pacing and feels like it takes a while before Deacon is doing anything meaningful; there are a lot of fetch quests that do not drive the plot forward. A lot of the pre-release coverage (e.g., Rager bear, harsh world, hordes) is not relevant until you progress the plot far enough to unlock the southern portion of the map, which is in second third. To have certain expectations set via marketing made me question if the game was as advertised. Ultimately, it was, and I’m glad I played long enough to see it grow into that.

The last third of the story has the player return to the northern portion of the map where they were at the start. The main reason for Deacon to return to this region is to warn a fellow camp about the militia camp he joined down south, which is holding Sarah hostage, and that they plan to attack the (Lost Lake) camp. There is a sense of urgency when returning up north, which comes to a screeching halt when the player is tasked with more “kill X enemies” objectives. The player needs to do a bunch of outpost-clearing missions before the main plot continues. These kill the tension that the militia is going to attack and that Deacon needs to return South to save Sarah as soon as possible. While not an issue that is unique to Days Gone, as it is a part of many open world games, I still found it to be irritating, nonetheless.

Overall, some of the content crammed between these story beats made it feel artificially inflated rather than continuously driving the story forward, even if at a slow pace. There were multiple instances where I thought, “okay, this has to be near the end, right?”

Secondary characters lack meaningful development

While the overall story is not necessarily unique, considering the genre, great character development can go a long way when it comes to carrying an average story. However, in Days Gone, the lack of character development drags its already mediocre story down.

I do believe this lack of character development is related to my previous issue with the poor pacing of the story due to filler content. If this filler content were slightly more meaningful in the sense that it strengthened the relationships with the people for whom you were doing the tasks rather than bounty hunting random post-apocalyptic ass holes, it would have made a big difference. Most missions are “go and find this person who is being a dick out in the “shit,” which does not further Deacon’s relationship with that specific camp or character (e.g., Rikki). There are hints at a past that are often described briefly or in passing but felt like a weak attempt at making the player care about the specific character.

Another example is that it is unclear why Deacon cares so much for a random girl, Lisa, he is tasked to save by one of the camps early on in the story. You have to go digging in the subtext of the storyline menu to see that “she resembles Sarah’s sister” which, from a storytelling standpoint, is not mentioned until the very end of the storyline when she returns to one of the camps. Throughout the entire storyline, I was left wondering, “why am I doing what I’m doing?” and “why do I care about this random girl?” The player is never even introduced to Sarah’s sister via flashbacks or in conversation with Sarah herself to build any context about how Lisa resembles her. Ultimately, this gives the player very little reason to care about Lisa. Additionally, the fact that Lisa is an otherwise underwhelming character who makes boneheaded decisions makes this even more difficult.

Furthermore, underdeveloped characters and relationships with other secondary characters result in important scenes lacking emotional impact. There were several big scenes (i.e., the reunion with Sarah, Iron Mike’s death, the rally to hit the militia to avenge Iron Mike, and “Boozer’s death”) that simply did not land for me due to storytelling structure (e.g., flashbacks to establish Deacon’s relationship with Sarah), lack of significant time spent with the character (e.g., Iron Mike) or predictability (e.g., Boozer’s “death”).

Game flow issues

• Frequent black screens between gameplay and cutscenes. There are a lot of loading screens, as well as many of them being quite long even when running on PS4 Pro. There are also countless instances where black loading screens appear between cutscenes and gameplay or cutscenes and other cutscenes. The latter often seem like they could have just been one lengthier cutscene. These are often serious pace killers, especially when they appear between a cutscene that is supposed to provide an emotional impact and the resolution to that scene.
• Blue “search” circles will appear randomly on the mini-map but ultimately lead to nothing. These blue circles are search zones that indicate that there is something for which the player can search. However, you can find the first clue to initiate the search, but this often results in some tracks to follow that would end abruptly with nothing to see. There was one instance that I was captured and caged by marauders when doing this, which was cool and added to the feeling of unpredictability and “harsh” world. However, that lone instance was not enough to make up for the multiple other times I investigated these zones with nothing to show for it. It was unclear if this was a bug or if some of these encounters are indeed intended to result in nothing, which would be a surprising design decision.
• Hordes teased early, relevant later, then too many required in succession without warning. The player is introduced to hordes (one of the largest in the game) early on via a side character in a cutscene. However, there are no horde-clearing story missions until the player enters the southern region of the map, which is a decent amount into the story. Then, multiple story missions in a row that require the player to clear hordes, often without warning until the player reaches the desired location. This lack of notification beforehand was frustrating because hordes need the player to have a pretty stocked inventory, which takes quite a bit of scavenging and crafting prep work. Not only does this negatively affect the player’s ability to continue the story at their own pace, but it also feels like forcing the player into exploring the world rather than encouraging it to happen organically.
• Inconsistent respawn locations. One anarchist camp mission has you take out twelve anarchists in a mine to free a hostage. Once the hostage runs to safety, a horde spawns in the back of the mine that engulfs the player almost immediately. There is no warning whatsoever. Then, upon death, the player spawns outside the mine and has to do the entire encounter over again.
• Intrusive “mission complete” prompts when fighting infestation zones and hordes. These often appear before the player finishes killing every enemy, which was often disorienting as I was in the middle of combat.

Mediocre human AI and some repetitive mission structure

The entire spectrum of human enemies the player encounters, from Rippers to marauders, to anarchists, has weak AI. Some exhibited behaviors include running out of cover, running straight at the player, and not noticing the player when within sight or reacting when right next to them. There were multiple instances when clearing camps that the last couple remaining enemies continued patrolling while I was engaged in a fire fight with their comrades as if they were utterly oblivious to what was happening around them.

This poor AI led resulted in some lack of challenge and feelings of repetition during some missions, but the Nero storyline missions all follow the same structure, whereas camp-clearing missions at least threw different layouts and amounts of enemies at the player. For Nero missions, the player needs to avoid detection from a few guards and remain within the distance of a researcher to hear what they are saying, which typically included new updates about the infected and the virus. Not only do all of these missions follow the same structure, but the stealth required is also quite rudimentary; the player can roll around closely to guards without detection and is completely undetectable when crouched in the grass.

Minor usability issues

• Grapple prompts are small, hard to see, and difficult to time, primarily the mash prompts and critical attack triangle indicator. The latter are also difficult to time as the player has to get the quickly-spinning indicator into a small triangle and the sizes of these triangles vary by enemy type. I don’t think I successfully timed one throughout my entire experience with the game, which did not improve my feeling of competence.
• Survival wheel can require a lot of precision to navigate. The player needs to hold [L1] to bring up the crafting wheel, which is similar to many games. However, there are so many categories and subcategories available for crafting that navigating between all of these can require a lot of precision when using [RS]. These multiple levels of menus can make this experience frustrating when trying to craft on the fly (e.g., being chased by a horde) and I often found myself accidentally equipping an unintended item.
• Object geometry getting in the way of shots. There were numerous instances when using sniper rifles that my clearly-lined up shots did not register properly, presumably because the geometry from objects in the world was getting in the way.

Final thoughts

Overall, the story felt artificially bloated with filler content that often killed the pacing and did not add anything meaningful to Deacon’s relationship with secondary characters. I liked the approach taken with the story, having multiple storylines, many of which converge near the end but I expected stronger cohesion and character development, especially considering how long the game is. There were also some flow, usability, and technical issues (e.g., framerate drops, repeating survival hints and audio/VO bugs, being thrown across the map by a bear) that moderately hindered my experience.

Although this post has been largely critical, I really enjoyed Days Gone from a gameplay standpoint and, the more I played it, the more I liked it (so much so that I Platinum’d it). Deacon’s arc reminded me somewhat of Arthur’s in Red Dead Redemption 2; they both start as notably unremarkable men that grow to realize things about themselves and the people around them. Deacon became a leader of sorts and developed trust with a camp, which he was typically against because of his drifter lifestyle. Over time, I became quite fond of Deacon, having gone through so much with him, but I don’t think the story and writing brought this to as satisfying of a conclusion as Arthur’s arc in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Days Gone was a great effort from a Bend Studio team that had not developed a non-portable console game since Siphon Filter in the mid-2000s. I think it is a better game than the critical consensus, which may be partially due to “zombie fatigue” or simply not sticking with it long enough. There is a solid foundation that, with better writing and characters, would be a world I would enjoy returning to, especially with the ending that seems to prime it for an interesting sequel.

This post will look at some issues with inventory management in Horizon Zero Dawn. It is not a comprehensive review of the UI or the game overall, rather a focused analysis of the “Inventory” tab and some pain points encountered during my playthrough.

General navigation and usability of “Inventory” and “Resources” tabs cumbersome

Horizon Zero Dawn allows players to pursue a few different paths when it comes to assigning skill points on the skill tree. Being a player who prefers not running out of necessary items for crafting, I initially invested in perks that allowed me to gather more resources from loot drops. Although I was constantly using many of the items, I quickly filled my inventory (resources are capped at 100) and was routinely looking to remove/drop things when finding newly-dropped items. Anyone who has ever played a RPG knows the feeling of a full inventory, but Horizon Zero Dawn makes dealing with this a chore.

Upon first opening the “Inventory” tab, the player is presented with a grid-style layout. While all sections of the inventory have this layout, the burden of manageability is especially apparent in the “Resources” tab due to the high capacity. Visually, the iconography does not do a great job of differentiating the many items on screen. Although there is color added to some of the icons on other tabs, the resources tab only has rarity-based coloring, which does not help the player to quickly identify items at a glance.

Another reason the “Resources” tab can become overbearing when the player has many items is because items cap at arbitrary numbers. For example, the first seven items seen in the screenshot below (Sparker) are all the same, but once the player collects 100 of that item, a new inventory spot must be used. Also, there is no consistency in this numbering system, as players can obtain 100 Sparker before needing to use another inventory spot, whereas meat can cap at 25 before needing another spot.

Furthermore, when dropping items (holding triangle), there is no option to drop a partial amount of these arbitrary numbers. If the player wants to open an inventory spot by dropping (or selling) one of the seven spots occupied by Sparker, all 100 would need to be dropped. Allowing players to drop a specific amount would have allowed for more precise and customized inventory management.

Lastly, there are no filtering options to expedite the process. Players need to manually cycle through all 100 items (if full) to find an item they deem expendable. Being able to sort and filter by different categories of items, rarities, etc. would have been very useful. Alternatively, having the “Resources” tab broken into more specific categories rather than just lumping everything under one tab have made navigation and management more fluid.

Lack of further information about resources

Upon further exploration of the items in the inventory, information about the use of each item is presented on the right side of the screen under “Used For.” The issue here is that this information offers very little help to players, primarily because many items in the game have multiple uses listed and there is no way to find more relevant information from here. Therefore, the player might be on the fence about selling an item that is listed as “Selling for Metal Shards” because it also has a listed use for “Crafting Items.” This lack of information severely limits important decision making for players. Also, this can cause a snowball effect, which starts with a fear of parting with any items because they might be needed later in the game to craft or trade with a merchant to get something specific. There is nothing like hoarding items in RPGs, parting with some at some later point, then ultimately realizing it’s needed for something else you want.

For example, in the screenshot below, ‘Bony Meat’ has multiple uses in the game (i.e., crafting items, trading with merchants, selling for metal shards). Important information to include here (or ways to navigate to) to inform decision making would be:

• What item(s) can be crafted with bony meat?
• What can bony meat be traded with merchants for?
• How many metal shards can be obtained by selling bony meat?

“Create job” does not perform as expected

Horizon Zero Dawn has a mechanic that allows the player to create a job to find crafting items or items they might need to complete trades with merchants. While this is a great addition to help players track items, it does not perform as expected. As seen the in screenshot below, players can press square on an item to “Create job” and actively track the missing required items, which is a “Lancehorn Heart” in this instance.

Once a job is created by the player, he/she is given the option to make it their active quest. Everything about this “New Errand” behaves like a quest, minus one major component – the determining of the location of the tracked items. The “Create job” mechanic basically gives players an on-screen checklist for items they need to find and nothing more.  Without any additional information here, such as a waypoint set to a general area of the map, players can spend a lot of time roaming around for animal parts, for example, which are not indicated on areas of the map like robots, and are needed to craft many different items. If this omission is by design, perhaps to encourage random exploration, and the intent is to be a glorified checklist, great. If not, this seems like a missed opportunity for a potentially super-useful mechanic.

Additionally, there are some issues present when trying to conduct business with Merchants:

Lack of clarity when an item cannot be sold

Below is a screenshot of the main UI when selling items to merchants. The “Resources” tab is similar to that discussed earlier in the “Inventory” tab. The item selected in the screen below, Ridge-wood, is a very common item in Horizon Zero Dawn used to craft arrows. It appears, just like every other item in Aloy’s inventory, when navigating the “Sell” tab. However, it cannot be sold to merchants and the only information conveying this is in the bottom-right corner, where “Sell multiple” and “Sell” are dimmed/grayed out. If the player attempts to sell it by holding X, the “Can’t sell” prompt seen in the bottom right appears. Neither of these are very clear; the dimming of the text is too subtle to be recognized and, along with the “Can’t sell” prompt when it appears, is on the opposite side of the screen away from the player’s main gaze. This important information can be easily missed. A better way to convey the “Can’t sell” information would have been directly on the items themselves, where the player is directing their attention.

Lack of clarity when an item cannot be bought due to full inventory

Similar to the previous issue, when navigating the “Buy” tab and attempting to buy an item when having a full inventory, the “Item doesn’t fit” prompt appears on the opposite side of the screen from the player’s main gaze. Additionally, this prompt overlaps some of the item art, which can make it harder to read.

Inconsistency with sorting options

When navigating the “Buy” tab, there is the option to sort by ascending/descending item value. However, this option is not included under the “Sell” tab, adding to the list of inconsistencies within the inventory management system.

Important player-facing information cut off

Although minor, one thing that is consistent across both “Buy” and “Sell” tabs (and the inventory in general) is that the bottom-most visible row is cut off, often omitting important information and requiring the player to scroll. For example, in the screenshot below, the value of the modification is cut off.

Buying back items is unclear

Players have the option to buy back items that have been sold to merchants. Although this sounds straight forward (i.e., player sells, can buy item back), it is not. Merchants only keep the ten most-recently sold items in their inventory at any one time. Additionally, players cannot buy back any items of common rarity, only green (uncommon), blue (rare), and purple (very rare). If a player goes on a selling spree not realizing this, the player will not have the option to alleviate any potential feelings of seller’s remorse.

This is a fine system; I’m not advocating for players to have the option, at the end of the game, to buy back the very first option he/she sold. However, there is critical information here that needs to be conveyed, perhaps upon the player’s first visit to a merchant via a small tutorial or prompt.

Conclusion

Horizon Zero Dawn is a good game that does many things well, such as numerous open-world tropes, combat, and telling an entertaining story; however, inventory management is not of of those things. Although I likely spent as much time fumbling through the inventory as I did combating robots, Horizon Zero Dawn is worth checking out if you’re a fan of action RPGs.

Even the simplest games require attention, focus, and cognitive effort, which leaves users with fewer resources for regulating in-game decisions. Affordances, or things that help users do something, can be implemented to reduce cognitive load and effort. Since playing games requires learning, an intuitive design and inclusion of affordances can help reduce cognitive resources allocated to figuring out how a game works and increase allocation to where these resources are designed to be spent. There are four main affordances in UX design:

Physical

A physical affordance is a feature that helps users accomplish physical actions with the interface. An example might be the distance of a button on the interface of a mobile game from the user’s thumb while the phone is in a portrait or landscape position. While some games allow the user to play in either of these positions, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival is only playable in landscape. See below for a screenshot of the main town hub, which is one of the main interfaces of the game and where the player spends a bulk of his/her time when building the community and collecting resources.

Although it is a busy interface, the main interactive icons populate the perimeter of the landscape-positioned interface. The type of device the player is using (i.e., phone or tablet) will determine the difficulty of reaching these icons with his/her thumbs but, from my experience, it is never an uncomfortable reach, even to access the top icons, when playing on a phone. Again, this will differ according to the size of the device and the size of the player’s hands.

Additionally, when a building, post, farm, etc. in the community is selected, the menu interface is retracted and replaced with a building-specific interface. Although the icons in this interface are similar in style to the menu ones, they are distinct by having different symbols that are also larger in size. Not only are these buttons easier to press, but this physical affordance, along with retracting the menu interface to avoid an overly-busy screen, results in the building-specific interface not becoming easily confused with/as the menu interface. These two interfaces can be seen at the bottom of the GIF below.

Cognitive

A cognitive affordance is a useful feature in design that allows the user to think, learn, understand, and know about something in an intuitive manner. For example, in the screenshot below, there are symbols that represent specific in-game resources that can be accumulated by the player. These symbols help the player understand the different types of materials at a glance and precisely how many of each he/she has at the moment.

Also, if the player is ever unsure of the current state of his/her resources, he/she can tap the symbol, which brings up an overlay with more information about the respective resource. See the GIF below for the overlays for each of these resources.

Sensory

A sensory affordance is a feature that helps users sense (i.e., see, hear, feel) something intuitively, which enhances perceptibility and (hopefully) information processing. At its core, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival is an RPG about community building and character development. This development is attained by fighting walkers and humans through single-player story missions, scavenging missions, and asynchronous PVP ‘Raids’. It is up to the player to build successful, synergistic teams and below is the screen that displays the player’s roster of characters. Since players can have multiple teams, IUGO incorporated useful signifiers that allow the player to see the most important information about each character right from this screen, such as player persona, trait, stats, and level, which are all indicated by symbols and numbers. Importantly, at the top of each character, it displays what team(s) that specific character is currently on. If a character is not currently on a team, it will be blank. This is a useful feature to help the player notice and quickly track what characters are on what team without having to proceed to ‘View Teams’.

Additionally, the roster of characters can be sorted by rarity, type, cost, etc. by tapping the down arrow in the top-left corner, which leads us to the final type of affordance.

Functional

A functional affordance is something that simply adds functionality, such as sorting or filtering items in an inventory. Similar to the sorting feature for the character roster, the inventory interface in The Walking Dead: Road to Survival clearly breaks down items into specific categories along the top of the interface and allows the player to sort through the inventory, which can be activated by tapping ‘Sort’ in the top-left corner. After sorting, the player simply has to swipe left/right to see the items. This added functionality enables the player to more easily find a specific item in a game that has many, many different types of weapons and items.

Final thoughts

There are four main affordances that are useful in UX design for games: physical, cognitive, sensory, and functional. Only some examples were discussed in this post and, while which affordances to incorporate into a specific game’s design depends on the design intent, many games will have instances of all four to some extent.

I hope this post has been informational. If not, well, as with many Walking Dead games, you’ll have a difficult decision to make:

(Bill will remember that)