The test
Bend Studio has come a long way! Before being acquired by Sony in 2000, this company was best known for being the origin of Bubsy 3D, one of the worst games of the first PlayStation. This is a stain on a CV and does not help to have good press with players and professional critics. However, the release of Days Gone on PS4 in April 2019 came to reshuffle the cards. This open world was not lacking in qualities and has attracted the favor of a large audience. Today it is the turn of PC players to be able to enjoy this adventure which, as it should, takes on its finery for the occasion.
With his rocker heart and his biker motorcycle, Deacon St John travels through post-zombification Oregon in search of his wife. Harvesting the resources necessary for survival, armed clashes with enemy gangs, and mass-chain slaughter of infected form his daily life, and therefore that of the player. For more details on everything related to the background of the adventure, do not hesitate to go (re) read our test of the PS4 version, written by the verbose Maximilien. Two years later, his prose remains perfectly valid because the PC version that interests us today is almost identical to its big sister in terms of content. For those who are more resistant to reading, let us just point out that Days Gone is a very classic AAA open world, which borrows a lot from references of the genre. Its main originality comes from the presence of hordes of zombies, which represent a very real danger. Indeed, these groups bring together several hundred individuals, who are also perfectly capable of running, contrary to the tradition of the genre. Using the environment, traps and advanced weapons is then necessary to hope to overcome these herds of hell!
At the time of its release on PlayStation, some players and journalists had hardly appreciated the game, which was effectively handicapped by significant drops in framerate on classic PS4, and a good number of more or less annoying bugs on both. console versions. Ring oboe, ring musettes, all these problems belong to the past. The PC version no longer presents shameful bugs, the framerate is no longer blocked and can therefore go as high as your machine will allow it (bye bye the 30 frames per second), and the same goes for the resolution. The 4K / 60 FPS combo is therefore perfectly possible on recent configurations. Small downside, however: the game was obviously not developed in partnership with Nvidia, and it therefore ignores raytracing and DLSS.
A PC VERSION THAT DOESN’T DEACON
These trifles aside, we are entitled to a real PC version, which does not use its console origins to clumsily justify any laziness. The game supports 21: 9 screens, for example, which suits it quite well. Whether it’s to magnify its stunning panoramas even more or simultaneously display all the zombies in a horde, the ultra-wide format is relatively relevant here. On the controls side, all joysticks are supported, as well as the keyboard / mouse pair. Flexible and responsive, Days Gone automatically adapts the icons displayed on the screen when switching from one device to another. Remember that some purely PC games still ignore this kind of detail … The graphics options are numerous enough to best refine the image according to your machine. Foliage rendering distance, quality of shadows, geometry, lighting, clouds or even textures answer the call. By putting everything thoroughly, we obviously get a much richer and more precise result than what the PS4 version displayed.
Foliage rendering distance, quality of shadows, geometry, lighting, clouds or even textures answer the call. By putting everything thoroughly, we obviously get a much richer and more precise result than what the PS4 version displayed.
The 2019 photo mode has also been improved for the occasion. It harnesses the power of our machines by offering us a resolution multiplier, capable of calculating the final capture in a resolution up to eight times greater than that of the game. We tested this option while the game was running at 2560×1440 pixels and got a 17049×9590 pixels snapshot on our hard drive! The x8 is not quite there, but the result is still very impressive, and high enough for just about any conceivable use. Finally, beyond technical considerations, note that this PC version of Days Gone immediately includes free downloadable content that had appeared over time on PS4. Thus, survival mode, challenge mode and the new game plus are immediately available.
