A peek inside Bend Studio, the developers behind Days Gone

Scaling from a team of 50 to 130 to deliver an open world game

Bend Studio, the developers behind Syphon Filter, have mostly been known in recent years for taking others’ creations and running with them like Resistance: Retribution for PSP and Uncharted: Golden Abyss for PS Vita. With Days Gone, the studio returned to its roots of creating original content from scratch and with it came growing pains.

Game director, Jeff Ross:

We’re still a relatively small developer, and I think that we realized somewhere, to compete in this generation of games, you need to set a high mark and you gotta go for it. We’re just crazy enough to bite that off and try to chew it.

As Jeff goes on to note, things have dramatically shifted in this generation and we only need to look at titles like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and Spider-Man to see the bar set for massive, open world games that deliver on the emotional level as well as technical/visual. To achieve that, the studio needed to scale up.

I think it would take a Bend Studio to make a game like Days Gone, because we were crazy. We were crazy when we started building this game to think that 50 people could make a game this expansive. And we just went for it anyway. My first notes on the game are from 2013, and at the time it probably was crazy, but here we are, six years later, and this thing’s about to hit the streets.

But even reaching a peak of 130 is still a relatively small team when compared to other big first party studios at Sony like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studios. Here’s a brief look at everything it took to bring a game like Days Gone to life.

Days Gone will arrive on PS4 on April 26 with full 4K support for those with a PS4 Pro.

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