2019’s Days Gone is probably the black sheep of all the PS4 first-party exclusives. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t great either (check out our review here). At this point, we might never receive a proper sequel to the game, but Days Gone director Jeff Ross confirmed that they already had plans for what a Days Gone 2 would have turned out to be.

Speaking with For The Win USA Today, Ross said:

“Yeah, they’re (Deacon and Sarah) back together, but maybe they’re not happy. Well, what can we do with that? Okay, we were married before the apocalypse, but what about the future? We would have kept the heavy, strong narrative. We would have kept the bike, obviously. And I think we would have expanded the tone a little bit in a more technical direction, kind of like, ‘Alright, now we have all this NERO tech – what can we do with it?’

The tone would have expanded one ring outward towards some of the new reality. I think this would have been a little bit more – I don’t want to say Avengers, but something where the player had resources, he had some sort of the remnants of whatever the government had.”

Besides continuing the story of Deacon and Sarah, Ross said that they would also have improved the gameplay, as well as given Deacon the ability to swim. Imagine that, an open-world game protagonist with the inability to swim. According to Ross, this resulted in a whopping 75 percent of players dying by drowning.

Ross continued:

“The swimming thing in Days Gone, it’s the worst,” Ross explains. “(Writer and director) John Garvin acquiesced to a certain point and just brought it into the narrative. It gave him an opportunity to have character growth too. I think that’s why he really liked it. This character can swim but refuses to, and later makes the decision to do it.

There’s a screenwriting principle behind all that. But from a gameplay point of view, I hated it. I’m like, ‘Alright, we’ll figure this out later.’ By the time we circled back around we were probably in the final year when the user testing was coming back, and people were complaining about the water.”

Sony Bend is now working on a brand new IP, so it’s very unlikely that we’ll see a Days Gone sequel or spinoff in the near future. On the bright side, at least the game is now available for PC via Steam, and it’s arguably a better game on that platform to boot.