Director Jeff Ross has his tongue out. Despite the millions of copies of Day Gone, the Ex-Bend Studio is not bad and once again laments Sony’s decisions.
Since Bloomberg’s revelations about refusing to start at Days Gone, have we heard this much from Jeff Ross? Despite critical success and over eight million copies sold worldwide, the director continues to express a certain tiredness and desperation about the decisions made by his former publisher.
Days blown by the wind
Now if we know the Bend Studio teams at work on a brand new license, we know that Sony was once offered a sequel to the adventures of Deacon St. John, who more or less politely declined the proposal. Last asked on the youtube channel From another director, David Jaffe, Jeff Ross talks about the options he would then have tried to come up with:
When we started working on the pitch for our next game it was clear we shouldn’t be talking about Days Gone, I was asked if there wasn’t another license we could take and the only other license we could had was siphon filter. I didn’t care at all. It was like trying to keep ourselves busy while we waited for something else.
Prove that you exist
The TPS series, which emerged when Bend Studios was still called Eldetic, was no longer open to Ross and his teams. On the other hand, a series that Insomniac Games abandoned in the early 2010s might have done the trick well:
I set up a new open world resistance that would have been fatal. We had ideas for open world gameplay loops … the ideas just came naturally. There were so many aspects of Resistance that could be open world gameplay, but Sony didn’t care either.
The story between Bend Studio and Resistance is therefore summarized in the Retributrion episode published on PSP in 2009 …
