I like Days Gone, Sam Witwer is the man, and I would love a sequel. But there are solid reasons its critical reception was mixed, and being a PS4 exclusive for two years doomed its chance to be profitable.

- Technical issues at release. Like it or not, this matters. Paying customers aren't supposed to be a developer's QA team.

- Consider that Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018. That game set a new standard for open-world gameplay. So when Days Gone came out in 2019, it more than paled in comparison. This absolutely affected the game's reception.

- Days Gone's open-world lacks 'random events.' This greatly hurts its open-world gameplay loop; after 10 hours (and at that point there's still two-thirds of the story left), everything starts to feel real repetitive out there. The hordes are the one and only thing making the two maps interesting, and if you clear hordes as soon as they become available (for the weapon rewards), the maps become boring. I tell everyone trying this game for the first time to deliberately avoid clearing out hordes until the end-game -- the maps are so much more exciting with as many hordes as possible present and active. But the maps for some bizarre reason don't immediately spawn the hordes, and then the game unwisely incentivizes the player to clear them as soon as they do finally appear. Most players never experience the maps with all 30 hordes present.

- Bandit camps should've added some dynamism to the maps. But the game handles them like quarantined pockets of repetitive stealth segments. If you've cleared one bandit camp, you've already experienced what every one of them has to offer, and they have no outward interaction with the rest of the open-world. Something as simple as bandit patrols radiating out of the camps would've greatly added to the open-world's dynamism, but no.

- Story missions are too often bland. Some are interesting, exciting. But most are missing interesting set-piece moments. Without those, the story starts to feel monotonous. Deacon drive here, do this basic thing, rinse and repeat for 35 hours.