From there, pretty much everything started to go wrong. In May 2022, Fntastic announced that The Day Before would need to be delayed so that the team could port the game over to Unreal Engine 5. While not a big deal on its own, that delay preceded a series of revelations that would change the narrative about the entire project. Not only was it revealed that Fntastic relied heavily on unpaid labor, but they were soon accused of “asset flipping” and even copying parts of larger games’ trailers to promote their project. These accusations were accompanied by numerous delays and a bizarre apparent “trademark dispute” that resulted in the temporary removal of the game’s Steam page. The red flags were quickly piling up.
Soon, many discussions about The Day Before devolved into a debate over whether or not this game was a straight-up scam, a case of a developer being overly ambitious, or if this project was indeed still shaping up to be all the things it could be. Fntastic even weighed in on that debate by publishing a suspicious number of statements that reiterated The Day Before was not a scam and that they were not scammers. Those statements continued up until the game’s Steam Early Access debut on December 7, which, again, developer Fntastic seemed to be oddly defensive about.
If you want a more complete breakdown of the game’s rocky road to release, I highly recommend this IGN article on the subject which covers all of the…highlights of that process. However, it does feel necessary to skip to The Day Before‘s actual release given how it relates to the most recent and significant events of this story.
To call The Day Before‘s launch “troubled” would be a gross understatement. Its Early Access debut was like a Hall of Fame collection of everything that could go wrong with a modern game’s launch. Suspiciously full servers, countless bugs, a treasure trove of flipped assets, and potentially AI-generated voiceovers all shot to the top of an ever-growing list of player complaints that soon became larger than the game’s hilariously barren world. In fact, the core The Day Before gameplay experience wasn’t even what fans were promised it would be. Rather than delivering a zombie survival MMO, The Day Before’s gameplay was closer to a modern “extraction shooter,” and it wasn’t a particularly good one at that.
Through it all, though, gamers continued to argue over what had happened up until that point and what will (and should) happen next. Despite The Day Before‘s stunning number of issues, some continued to argue that developer Fntastic clearly bit off more than they could chew but that they shouldn’t be accused of scamming players so early into the game’s lifecycle. Indeed, Fntastic released several statements after the game’s launch which reiterated their intent and desire to continue improving the game. Granted, they also went out of their way to clarify that they hadn’t taken fans’ money leading up to the game’s Early Access debut (even as they shut down their Discord server due to overwhelmingly negative feedback), but they continued to insist that more substantial updates were on the way.
Of course, everyone now knows what many already suspected: those updates are never coming. The hotfixes The Day Before received in the hours and days following its release will seemingly be the last improvements the game ever enjoys. We are seemingly forever left with what The Day Before is, and the game we are left with features all the personality, soul, and ambition of AI-generated art without any of the mechanical efficiency that AI-generated art is otherwise known for.
