I got Days Gone on a Steam sale, played through the main story, did most of the hordes and nests, including all of the largest hordes. I think I uninstalled with a few smaller scattered hordes left. My character was fully maxxed out in the three skill 'trees' from mission and random experience gains. I used a mod to prevent melee weapons breaking, because crafting the same good axe 100 times was annoying as hell. I can shoot 100,000 rounds through this LMG, and never even let it cool off or change the barrel, yet my solid metal weapon breaks after like 8 swings? Ridiculous busy work. Should have been a toggle built into the game, have no melee weapon degradation. I never found a real suppressor either, just crafted oil can suppressors, which is ridiculous for modern day America. Suppressors are all over the place in civilian and military usage, and they last a long fucking time. Crafting those is just busy work.
It's an okay game. The story and character writing goes from atrocious to acceptable and back, throughout the game. The ending especially was extremely aggravating to me in how ridiculously bad the writing was. The choice of outlaw bikers was pretty weird to me as well, at least for modern day America where those guys are literally organized crime and/or racist traitors to the United States in the present day. Ignoring that, weapon balance was a bit weak, only some guns were actually useful vs the numbers of enemies you will face. Also they could have used a more 'realistic' ammo system. 9mm is the same across two different pistols, Days Gone. I can take out those bullets from this dead enemy's weapon and use them in my other firearm, okay? It was really annoying with the rifles... kill some guys with 5.56 weapons, whoops, can't use their ammo for some reason in my weapon which is also a 5.56 caliber weapon. A lot of open world busy work for not much benefit. I crafted everything possible, used basically... health potions? Noise makers and other crap were rarely worthwhile, easier to just run infected into a bottleneck and use the Growler firebomb on them then LMG. If there was a flamethrower in the game I never found it, but I kept expecting to see one, considering how many times firebombs, molotovs, etc. came up in the storyline.
Logic wise, the story failed repeatedly, but this is not exactly uncommon in games these days. By the time my motorcycle was fully upgraded it felt almost like a real motorcycle in terms of speed, but that was near the end of the game.
I felt like there could have been a real awesome opportunity for better design for the traps and crossbow, but there are literally too many human and infected enemies to make those worthwhile after the very early game. Some of the sniper rifles were pretty amazing as well, but you hamstring yourself if you take one instead of an LMG. Should have been more weapon slots, or a few weapon slots on the motorcycle to carry special use weapons.
Based on my playthrough, the game probably sold better and had better reviews than it realistically deserved, this guy should be happy with the success he received.