I am currently playing Days Gone, an open world post-apoc zombie survival game that is much more Far Cry and Tomb Raider than DayZ, and it is a game with some very good Harley-esque motorcycle riding and some perfectly okay map-clearing hijinks, but it also has some deeply hacky, hamhandeded narrative stuff that gets in its own way constantly.

Nobody, nobody needs a "The Last Of Us but shittier" game about an emotionally stunted maybe-widower. Why was this what they did. What was the point.

People have been talking about ludo-narrative dissonance for years and years and yet AAA game still keep hitting highwater marks on this. Some folks voice-acted the the shit out of Days Gone, and it's clear from some flashback scenes that they're capable of doing solid performances of charmingly written dialogue! And yet everything in the bulk of the game is hammy dialogue, directed awfully, in service of who know what fucking goal other than If We're Edgy It Will Be Cool.

It feels both quixotic and also in a cultural literacy sense utterly reasonable to call this stuff out as galling: if TV shows can be fairly criticized as being stupider than than need to be, so to big-budget video games with conceits of being cinematically compelling. It's harder in some ways to make a dynamic video game be narrative and characterologically coherent in the same way as a scripted, linear show; but you can still fuck it up real good, which e.g. Days Gone manages regularly.

It's one thing to imagine a narrative in which e.g. a likeable, in-love biker struggles with the terror and grief of losing his wife and his world in a zombie apocalypse and becomes a shattered husk of a person, getting on in a day-to-day, dog-eat-dog hard-scrabble existence. That's a story, sure! It's another thing to execute it well, and Days Gone fails to do so; the writing and voice acting/directing is a hacky mess, and the dynamic execution of story elements is just all over the place.

And I have to emphasize: this is a game that, all in all, I *like* playing: I wish it could somehow be thematically other than it is, more of a game about biking around scavenging quietly in the wilderness of a scattered post-apocalypse world instead of somehow constantly killing both zombies and Conclusively Bad People, but the gameplay, the stuff-you-do, is good! It's fine, it's a solid map-clearing open world game! The narrative being shit is an own-goal, not a necessary element.

What is an arguable deficit of many of the more truly free-form survive-o-craft games I've played -- your DayZs, your Seven Days To Die, games without the big showy narrative throughline -- is I think in practice a big upside for them. Because if you aren't trying to tell a big showy story, you don't risk doing such a hamhanded, dissonant job of it, and you can focus your dev and content efforts on the broader set of things-to-do instead. Days Gone has the same paucity as Assassin's Creed.