
The game also offers no glimpses of anyone other than Deacon and Sarah before the outbreak, despite some characters noting that they knew Deacon from before - the players are given no context to their past relationship, which seems like a missed opportunity. Your best buddy Boozer also turns out to be a hindrance rather than a strong character, as it feels like you spend so much of the story babysitting him. Eventually, Deacon finds himself embroiled in larger scale human conflicts it's all very cliché. The hope and drama of finding out what happened to Sarah cannot be sustained over 30+ hours of doing busywork in the open world. Players will come across some touching as well as harrowing situations, but these moments are scattered within hours of mundane dialog and repetitive objectives. The characters and stories aren’t poor, but they are not exactly memorable. Most revolve around the survivor camps and their inhabitants, and they follow fairly typical post-apocalyptic genre clichés. While the hope of finding Deacon's wife alive is the driving factor for most of the narrative, there are multiple other story arcs throughout the adventure. He also suddenly runs into NERO, the corporation that was in charge of trying to contain the outbreak, and who he left Sarah with.

However, after an encounter with the hostile humans called Rippers, Boozer is injured and unable to ride for a while, so Deacon finds himself staying in the region and starting to run jobs again. With the country at large having collapsed and the zombie-like Freakers roaming the land, the pair of drifters find themselves ready to move on from their current region and head north. Both of them were members of a biker gang, and following the dramatic events they become drifters, sort of mercs for hire who travel the land and work for various human settlements. Deacon manages to survive and escape the city with his good friend William "Boozer" Gray. John, who is separated from his wife, Sarah, during the initial panic and societal collapse.

Days Gone takes place in the Pacific Northwest, just over 2 years since a mysterious viral outbreak turned most of the populace into fearsome creatures known as Freakers.
