Let’s be clear here: Days Gone is not a perfect game. My playthrough was peppered with technical issues, as well as the signs of a tumultuous development with its early goings not flowing all that well together at all. However, long before the credits rolled, I was totally won over by Deacon (including his silly name and hat), the dozens of hours of horde slaying and ear-trading I waded through improving significantly as the hours went by.
One of the reasons for this uptick in opinion? Days Gone’s weather system, which, while strikingly random at times, should do enough to dissuade those who think it’s nothing more than just another zombie game with no new ideas of its own.
The weather is as much a character in Day’s Gone initial chapters as Deacon himself, its gloomy nature perfectly reflecting where our gruff protagonist is at mentally as the sunlight struggles to break through the trees near the game’s first HQ.
You don’t forget your first downpour in Days Gone in a hurry, especially if you’re lucky enough to have a 4K TV and a Pro. While I would still really struggle to call a Pro a necessity this late in the generation, it’s a luxury that can seriously enrich one of Days Gone’s best features.
Days Gone’s weather has an impact on the Freakers themselves, rain even being your ally during the early goings where you feel about as well-equipped as Varys at Littlefinger’s brothel. Though not fundamentally game-changing, the patter of rain can mask your movement to allow you to go for stealthier kills, or to just “nope” out of there altogether.
Rainfall can also muddy tracks and make driving more hazardous, which I discovered early on as I desperately tried to rev away from an oncoming pack of Freakers but just found myself spinning out in a panic instead. The detail on the mud splashes as you race through waterlogged roads is crazy, and yet another sign that a tonne of love has gone into Days Gone, something that the post-launch issues might have made its harshest critics miss.
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As you might expect, when sunshine does break through in Days Gone, it’s pretty damn gorgeous, especially when you’re out on the open road or near Iron Mike’s lake and you can almost think, even if just for a second, that you’re simply on a nice vacation and that a very mad bear isn’t going to ruin your day out of nowhere.
However, the weather that Days Gone nails above all else? Snow. While the latter section of the game deals pretty heavily in the white stuff, the first seemingly random bit of snowfall was something that simply made me stop for few minutes and watch as it piled up all around me.
After a confrontation between some bandits and Freakers in an abandoned town, I finished off the survivors as snow began to fall. I don’t know if the game’s weather system is scripted or just happens as and when it fancies, but it was poignant as anything here, the snow almost burying the dead as it became torrential.
There was one aspect of this snowfall in particular that I believe was the start of me reconsidering Days Gone as a whole, that there was definitely a diamond in the rough worth chipping away at the game’s worst habits to unearth.
The above screenshot (which doesn’t even really do it justice as it’s quite compressed) depicts two corpses on the ground, which seems like nothing special to begin with. However, if you check out the Freaker to the left (and also the steps), you will notice a light powdering of snow based on the length of time the snow has been falling as well as how exposed the corpse was to the elements. A canopy had shielded its right side, which was also why the human in the right of the screenshot was completely “clean”.
Looking back on this now really makes me wish I had thought to put together some kind of timelapse for the scene, but it’s just one of the many good memories I have of playing Days Gone instead. Though Days Gone may have been absolutely mauled by some at launch, its weather system and plenty of other unique mechanics ideas mean that it’s absolutely snow joke.
Sorry.
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