The Reasons I’m Skeptical About The Day Before

,,The Day Before is an open-world MMO survival set in a deadly, post-pandemic America overrun by flesh-hungry infected and survivors killing each other for food, weapons, and cars” – sounds amazing. On the market, there is always a desire for a dystopian zombie game. Numerous IPs have succeeded in this setting, and adding the social aspects of an MMO to it appears to be quite promising. So why are people worried?

The game is expected to be released on March 1st of this year. It’s been developed in Unreal Engine for four years and was meant to be launched on June 21, 2022, but the development team, Fntastic, opted to shift it to Unreal Engine 5, therefore it had to be delayed. The first odd thing to me is that the game will be out in about 6 weeks, yet we have only seen about 5 minutes of gameplay in various promotional trailers over the last year or so. There was no beta testing, pre-release builds, or anything else. Furthermore, these brief gameplay clips appear to be incredibly staged, smooth, and scripted. Moreover, several comments and YouTube videos pointed out that the UI designs and gameplay mechanics are quite identical to other games of this genre, such as Tom Clancy’s The Division, and The Last of Us. Another warning indicator is that their past games were never successful. Prop Night, a survial multiplayer game of theirs, has mixed reviews on Steam, with the majority of the negative comments focusing on cheaters in the game, broken gameplay, and a lack of originality in the content.

Many things regarding Fntastic Games appear questionable. The Day Before is the second most wish listed game on Steam, and it’s being promoted by Nvidia, but the studio was still looking for “volunteers” from the community to help finish the game for free. The studio’s communication is also poor; they made a “behind the scenes” vlog, but it turned out to be a promotional film for their remote job management software. Things just do not stack up. How can a small and unknown studio, with a history of abandoned and broken titles, create one of the most anticipated games in recent years out of nowhere?

Only time will tell. The truth will be revealed on March 1st. Everyone wants a game like this, and everyone wants it to be genuine, decent, and successful.