It may not have always been this way, but open-world games come attached with the expectation that there will or should be hundreds of hours tacked onto them. Dying Light 2: Stay Human wore its 500-hour completion expectancy like a badge of honor, for example, and meanwhile there are many players who find that grossly discouraging. Rather, fans may all agree that when mechanics are appropriately integrated into an open-world game’s atmosphere, it creates a fantastic experience. Days Gone and Mad Max are both good examples of this when it comes to vehicle management.
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Vehicle Management in Days Gone and Mad Max is Highly Satisfying
In any open-world game where players have an overwhelming map to navigate, how traversal is designed should always be paramount. Of course, not every game can feature Marvel’s Spider-Man’s masterful web-swinging, but there should be purposeful entertainment in whatever resources or boundaries a game’s world adheres to.
In the case of Bend’s Days Gone and Avalanche’s Mad Max, there are many similarities they share that demonstrate a great consideration in how players will make their way through these individually dystopian landscapes. Days Gone’s Deacon St. John rides a motorcycle and Mad Max’s titular protagonist drives the Magnum Opus and other miscellaneous cars, but the premise beneath their maintenance and management is the same. Both games have a fuel gauge that informs players of how much longer they can drive their vehicle until it exhausts completely, at which point it will halt and be immovable. In order to prevent this from happening, players need to locate fuel sources and manually refuel their vehicle.
Mad Max features fuel cans in almost any camp or point of interest, largely due to the fact that there are infinite fuel can respawn points in some locations where an explosion is needed to get past a locked door. Players can also store an extra fuel can in the back of the Magnum Opus, as well as reduce the amount of fuel depletion they receive through Griffa token upgrades, making fuel management in Mad Max an afterthought if players want it to be.
Mad Max is also more forgiving than Days Gone with regard to vehicle repairs. For example, Mad Max’s Chumbucket autonomously repairs the Magnum Opus while it is stationary, regardless of whether the player is in it or not and also free of charge. Meanwhile, Days Gone’s Deacon needs to repair the bike himself with scraps or turn it into a mechanic at an encampment.
Days Gone makes refueling and repairing a costly affair, especially if players enter into many roadside encounters. It is in these moments of stressed panic where players are out of fuel that Days Gone’s Freakers and other infected blights become truly frightening, since players no longer have a reliable escape route. Mad Max’s convoys are less anxiety-inducing, as they seem to mostly stick to their predetermined sand-swept paths, but there are other ways that the game can make these moments immersive, considering the landscape players are in.
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Days Gone and Mad Max Thoughtfully Integrate Open-World Mechanics
Days Gone and Mad Max’s mechanics are designed to logistically make sense within their worlds. In Days Gone, players will often pass through a gas station, where they know there might be a likely chance to find a fuel canister. NERO Checkpoints are always an excellent source of fuel with canisters reliably lying about, and fast-travel between these points is then advised. Moreover, fast-travel is not as simple as in Mad Max, which allows players to travel freely and effortlessly to certain points of interest once they are unlocked, as do many other open-world games.
Instead, Days Gone satisfyingly designs its fast-travel to cost fuel from Deacon’s bike. This way, players can only fast-travel as far as they would naturally be able to ride before their gas runs out. Once NERO Checkpoints are cleared and unlocked this becomes a more trivial matter, since players could fast-travel to a NERO Checkpoint, refuel, then fast-travel closer to their destination.
This makes Days Gone’s traversal unique because its vehicle management is an essential part of its open-world atmosphere. Mad Max’s immersive vehicle management mechanics bleed out into other mechanics such as needing to replenish a canteen with water to heal, or eating intermittently discovered maggots and dog food.
Instead of having Assassin’s Creed-esque sync points litter the map with points of interest, Mad Max players must ascend in a hot air balloon that they sometimes have to refuel or activate themselves, and scan the environment with binoculars to then mark where locations or structures are on the map. As mentioned before, these may be parts of an open-world game that players wish to avoid entirely.
Some players may reasonably find it bothersome to have to infrequently pause what they were doing to find somewhere to refuel. However, it could be argued that this breaks up any monotony in Days Gone’s open world, where otherwise they would be able to avoid roadside or dune-side dangers freely.
Many open-world games already give players no excuse to travel the way that they are meant to, and rather let them fast-travel with no reason to explore their maps’ enormities. Both Days Gone and Mad Max certainly have their high and low points, as does any game, but where they truly excel is in designing satisfying open-world traversal with vehicle management that is engaging and immersive.
Days Gone is available now for PC and PS4.
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