Screen Rant got to spend some time playing a portion of Days Gone, and spoke to Sony Bend Studio director Chris Reese about the inspiration for the game, and how its open world works. The results sound pretty intimidating and terrifying.

"Inspiration comes from a lot of different sort of media: games, movies we'll all interested in, or books or TV shows and all that sort of stuff,” said Reese. “So, it's a culmination of, what are our general interests? What do you we want to do? What's cool and fun for us? That's sort of where the idea originated from, and then it was just diving down: Okay, what's going to make this unique? Why would we want to play this game? If we want to play in an open world, then what about this open world is going to interest us? So, our unique take... we just have this sort of unrelenting world that just keeps coming at you. And the player has to try and figure out how to survive."

Days Gone seems to borrow heavily from other video games and movies that highlighted the zombie/horror genre, possibly from 28 Days Later to the obvious comparison, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us. However, Bend Studio aims to make it something unique in the process, and judging by the ‘unrelenting’ world that constantly comes at the player, it leaves very little room to breathe.

"One of the pillars that, when we set out on this project, was to, you know, from an open world standpoint, what can we do? What can that experience be the player engages in and feels - and it's like, we wanted to make this tough, gritty world that's just always coming after the player,” Reese continues to explain. “It's built that way on purpose. So, we want the player to feel what Deacon is going through. He's one of the few people in this world that can actually survive out in this world. So, in the demo that you saw today, you start out in an encampment. That's where the many populations in the world go to sort of these encampments; it's 'cause they can't survive on their own in the world 'cause there's so much coming at them."

By the sounds of it, Days Gone isn’t going to be a walk in the park. The open world is designed specifically to apply pressure on the player, thus creating an immersive and very believable post-apocalyptic world. The only question is, how will Days Gone actually play in the final product?