Bend Studios could be pivoting away from single-player
Days Gone was a single-player sort-of-RPG action adventure in a big map, starring a former MC outlaw called, against all probability, Deacon St. John. I was very disappointed it’s not prounced Sinjun, but you can’t have everything in life. As Deacon you roared about on your cool motorbike and did missions, while searching for your missing-presumed-dead wife. You know these games, you’ve played these games. The pivot to live service would be a pretty big change for the studio, therefore (though they did do an Uncharted card game for the Vita that had asynchronous multiplayer).
It looks Bend are switching workflow styles as well, since the job listing emphasises, a lot, that the applicant should be experienced in agile workflows, and switching from waterfall to agile. Waterfall, from my hasty Googling, is the kind of development approach where you work in sequential order, and each stage more or less relies on the previous stage being done, while agile is a flexible approach with less planning where you test and iterate over a lot of short stretches. Personally I think agile soundsfucking diabolicalto do, but I’m not in the business of making AAA live service games. Whatever the case, big changes could be afoot at Bend, which will no doubt be conducive to a trouble-free development cycle.
It’s sort of a shame, I think, that in response to everyone gettinga bit tiredoflive service games, big publishers keep going “but if we makethe bestlive service game, then we’ll make all the money!”. Maybe development on this potential live service game from Bend started back when we all still liked them, or maybe Bendjuststarted and by the time it’s out the public opinion worm will have turned again. It’s possible to make live service games people love, either way. Just look atHelldivers 2! Edders wrote about how it’sbroken from the live service mould.
Maybe this job will be filled by one of the900 people Sony layed offin February.
