The Day Before He Debuted in a Big Way
A big part of The Day Before’s rise to becoming Steam’s most beloved game was the way it was announced to the world. One day it didn’t appear on YouTube with a press release like most games do.
The first trailer for The Day Before appeared on IGN’s official YouTube channel. Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent to its existence, IGN remains one of the biggest names in video game coverage, and with that comes a level of trust and prestige.
Showing your first trailer on IGN is special, making people instantly feel like the day before must be something worth paying attention to.
Look, they did it: the announcement trailer received 2.5 million views on IGN.
The trailer certainly did its job in making “The Day Before” look like the next big thing. It showed off an impressive open-world MMO where zombies and other players roamed a ruined city.
The Christmas theme meant that wet streets were lit with decorative lights, snow was falling gently from the sky, and everything the trailer showed was rich in detail.
From the start, it seemed very similar to Ubisoft’s The Division, a comparison that was immediately made in the comments.
To be fair, you could say it looks like it took a lot of inspiration from Ubisoft’s shooter-looter, and it’s a bit off-putting to call it a blatant rip-off with a few zombies thrown in for good measure.
Regardless, The Day Before instantly gained a lot of attention among people who were excited at the prospect of an open-world MMO survival game.
Although the comments were full of people exclaiming that it couldn’t look that good and would be downgraded at launch, that didn’t stop the game from rushing onto Steam’s list of most desired games like a rocket tied to another rocket.
He, in turn, was tied to Wile E. Coyote’s back.
Fntastic followed shortly after by releasing a trailer for the game, which was again shown by IGN and thus immediately gave it an audience.
This new trailer was even more impressive than the first, and this time it took the action out of the city and into the countryside.
Again, it looked amazing, but new features were also introduced, such as drivable vehicles, vehicle repair, and weapon customization.
It wasn’t finished either, because shortly after, a trailer was released with the release date, this time showing things like the construction of bases and community centers.
If all of this is true, it looks like Fntastic is promising the biggest, most feature-packed survival MMO of all time, and based on its trailer, it was scheduled for release in June 2022.
However, red flags were already spreading like a jungle. It came out of nowhere the other day to be shown on IGN, it looked great and seemed to have a lot of promise.
The only reasonable answer is that it must be from an elite team of experienced developers backed by a large sum of money because the first trailer showed a game that rivals a Triple-A production in quality and scope.
It slows down the day before and then it gets late.
At this point, things are looking good for developer Fntastic and publisher Mytona, who were presumably very happy with Propnight and willing to give Fntastic a bigger budget for the work back in the day.
The first trailers for The Day Before managed to attract a lot of attention, and no one was paying much attention to the small group of detractors who already had doubts that The Day Before was too good to be true.
However, this is where things start to go off the rails. Fntastic is silent after showing the release date: no new trailers, no betas, no demos, nothing. nothing.
Then, just a month before release, Fntastic appears to announce that The Day Before will be postponed until March 2023.
According to Fntastic, this delay was due to porting the entire game to Unreal Engine 5, something Unreal Engine maker Epic does not recommend doing while your project is in production.
Although Fntastic wasn’t moving from a completely different engine like Unity, it was still a baffling decision when the game was about to launch.
What’s even crazier is that they were aiming to complete the transformation in about 10 months so that the day before could make it to the new release window.
What the Hell is a Continent?
good. Now we make a small detour towards the continent. What is this, you ask? Well, that’s the brief period in early 2023 when Fntastic declared “War on Desktops!” “The fight for freedom has begun.”
Confused? Should be. You see, Fntastic was primarily a remote work studio, and it turns out that while they were making The Day Before they were also working on something they called Continent, an app similar to Microsoft Teams.
Fntastic originally appears to have had the idea for Continent back in 2018, when they created a very basic website for Continent.
They didn’t do anything with the site until January 2023, and suddenly they put a pretty face on it while declaring war on desktops. It’s a little dramatic for a remote work app, but oh well.
Shortly after that, Fntastic started introducing people to what they were marketing as a sort of look at how The Day Before was created that would also include proper gameplay.
But it turns out that the entire trailer was actually an advertisement for the mainland and occasionally appeared the day before.
What was offered was a rather poor version of Microsoft Teams, a cheap imitation that you might expect to see in a convenience store somewhere that also sells “The Re-Avengers” featuring classic heroes like Pikachu and a vaguely generic plastic block. with human form.
Play! And Plagiarism!
Under intense fire from even the most ardent defenders of The Day Before, the dubious duo behind Fntastic finally delivered the game’s promised trailer for February 2023, giving us a 10-minute look at the game in action.
Finally, a chance to see what it would be like to have a keyboard and mouse and play ‘The Day Before’.
God, it was boring. The trailer showed many large, empty spaces with almost no zombies and minimal PvP action.
Most of the time was spent holding down the F key to loot things very slowly.
It was like someone forgot to include zombies in the game, and then five minutes into the game trailer they remembered that there were supposed to be undead in it and managed to ram maybe a dozen zombies.
It was a far cry from the initial trailers they showed us.
The visual decrease was also quite significant. While it certainly didn’t look bad, it was a big step back from what was shown in the early trailers.
The moody Christmas vibe of the first trailer disappeared, taking with it all the cold light reflections in the beautiful puddles and snow. What was left seemed flatter and less visually exciting.
The reaction was not good, to put it lightly. The trailer received many upvotes, while Discord and Reddit threads appeared full of people who were unhappy with the lackluster gameplay and the huge step backward taken by the previous day’s graphics.
Many people have begun to speculate that the first trailer and subsequent gameplay were not taken from the game at all and were created as densely written fragments of gameplay designed solely to attract attention.
It’s not unusual for a company to take a vertical slice of its game and showcase it, but in the case of “The Day Before” people suspected there wasn’t a bigger game at the time to take a slice of.
Things got worse for Fntastic when people started noticing that the gameplay video contained a lot of footage that not only looked inspired by Call of Duty but looked like it was lifted directly from it.
Another shot showed one of the players driving a Lamborghini quickly through the streets while a herd of deer ran in front of him,
A scene very similar to what happened in the Will Smith movie “I Am Legend.”
This wouldn’t be the only time Fntastic has been accused of plagiarism either, as some of its later videos have included voiceovers that sound like they were copied from other games like Red Dead Redemptio 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
A video that shows how Similar the Fntastic The work is for those of bigger and much better games.
The Launch Was a Month Away and He Was Still Missing The Day Before.
As October 2024 approached, the first day was a month away and I still hadn’t returned to Steam.
But that didn’t stop Fntastic from announcing some new things, as this time it said that players will be able to get jobs in the game’s safe spaces, becoming manual workers or even musicians.
The idea, according to Fntastic, is that these features make The Day Before more immersive. Well then.
It wasn’t until a few weeks before the planned release that The Day Before reappeared on Steam and Fntastic managed to win its court case.
It seemed like people would finally be able to play The Day Before… and then Fntastic postponed it again.
The new delay was changed to the day before December 7, which will become its actual release date.
But with the delay came another piece of news: The Day Before will now be released as an early-access game, something Fntastic has never hinted at before.
Everything they said indicated that the day before would be a record-breaking release, especially since they stood firm in their claim that the game had already been in development for five years.
That was another red flag to add to Fntastic’s growing garden of damn things.
By putting the game into early access, Fntastic could be charging people for a basic or barely working project, and one could argue that all the promised features will come later.
This all sucked on previous Fntastic games that were abandoned in early access and never finished or came close to fulfilling what was promised.
People were worried. However, there is still a hardcore group that defends Fntastic and The Day Before at all times.
Oh look, IGN reviewed it
I wanted to close out this lengthy read with a bit of a laugh because we need it.
You might recall that IGN has played a part in The Day Before’s rise to popularity, inexplicably featuring it multiple times throughout the years.
I don’t hold it against them though, since Fntastic did a pretty good job of fooling a lot of people, including even Nvidia at one point.
One Final Shot From Fntastic
On December 11th, the day that Fntastic announced its closure, X user Kypershot Tweeted Fntastic and said:
“Unbelievable that you guys hyped this game up so much and this is the result. You guys are an absolute disgrace to the Video Game industry.”
Fntastic replied: “This was our first big experience. Shit happens.”
“Shit happens.”
Shit. Happens.
SHIT. HAPPENS.
The Day Before Shit Happens.
