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The Day Before - update (02/01): "Inside The Day Before" - investigative documentary from two German gaming sites (with English subtitles)


best3444

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INSIDER-GAMING.COM

On Monday it was announced that developer Fntastic was closing its doors, but it may have simply just changed its name to Eight Points.

GIF by hero0fwar

 

Edit: Seems to be bogus

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WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

UPDATE 5pm UK: Hype Train Digital has confirmed to Eurogamer why it changed the developer on Steam for The Wild Eight f…

 

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2 hours ago, Dre801 said:

The whole saga needs an official documentary.

Seems exactly the type of thing that would be featured on What Happened. He does quite a bit of research and sometimes even gets first hand interviews with people involved with projects. So maybe, if anyone will be willing to talk about it or if there’s enough to dig up. 

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IGN put their review up after the game was pulled from sale. Good times

 

 

WWW.IGN.COM

Easily one of the worst games of 2023.

 

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What shocked me most about The Day Before was the notable absence of almost any UI. Sure, there’s a touchscreen display for your quests – which you can only track one of at a time – as well as a makeshift map, which is clunky to use because (after the long animation to set it up) you have to navigate it exclusively with your WASD keys, leaving your character a sitting duck while you do. The inventory screen is also barebones, and even if you manage to find yourself in the same squad with other players, it’s almost impossible to figure out where they are or even if they’re still on your team.

 

Not only is there no multiplayer menu – there’s no voice chat either, so if you really want to you’ll have to friend up and use Steam’s chat or Discord. At least you can communicate with your party in a rudimentary in-game chat window, but even getting that to work properly is an exercise in patience. I’d have had a more enjoyable time actually hiding under a dumpster surrounded by zombies than waiting for The Day Before’s multiplayer to work right.

 

 

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Verdict

 

The Day Before is easily one of the worst games I’ve ever played, to the point where I’m afraid to continue running it on my PC. Sure, you could say there are the bones of something coherent here, but even those bones feel splintered and brittle. Its map is lifeless, its enemies are idiotic, its PvP is an exploitable mess, its story is pointless, and its progression is downright infuriating. While the now-defunct developer FNTASTIC said it wasn’t done, certain baseline standards have been established in the years since Early Access became a thing, and this game met none of them. The many mysterious questions around The Day Before’s development will likely go unanswered now that the curtain has fallen a mere four days after its release, leaving the playerbase to fend for itself until the servers are inevitably shut down for good. Steam is already diligently refunding anyone who made the mistake of buying it – and if you didn’t manage to try it, you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones.

 

 

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WWW.ROCKPAPERSHOTGUN.COM

Advertised as an ambitious open world survival MMO, The Day Before ended up barely scraping by as an extraction shooter…

 

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Now, days after releasing into early access, developers Fntastic have shut down and you can't purchase the game anymore. Does it come as a surprise? Not really, considering the final product wasn't what they promised - not even close. Instead of an MMO, it was barely an extraction shooter. Consider my words below a record of a rancid time had across its short-lived early access release, then. A time when I would've rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk.

 

Booting up The Day Before on release, it felt heavy - the sort of leaden feeling where your tabs weren't clickable for a while as it clunked to life (and that's putting it generously). Often it opened at a lower resolution than my monitor's default, appearing as a bloated black screen with a pixelated bar running across its top. Once you got in, there was a character creator with some basic bits: hair, eyes, voices that didn't really change. Then the game asked you to select a server from a list. Most MMOs like World Of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV will order its lists by popularity, with clearly posted numbers or at least a colour-coded phrase outlining whether you're going to join a busy or quiet server. The Day Before just listed a bunch of states like Danworth, Smokeshill, and Woodtown all marked by a "High" population, because every server had players practically spilling out of their sides apparently.

 

If you managed to get into a server on the first try, you'd have borne witness to a miracle. It never happened for me, instead giving me error code after error code. I like imagine this was because the server infrastructure was wired to a potato in someone's drawer and as it sprouted, the two clips latched to the skin got shunted out of the way. To get in, you could spend a few minutes just clicking on servers and hoping you didn't get served another dreaded error.

Once you did, finally, make it through the barrage of errors, you awoke on a doctor's table in some resistance camp. Then after a swift introduction, you were encouraged to speak to everyone one after the other. The ammo person. The barman. The lady who looked after your stash. On and on and on it went. Speak to this person, that person. All of the inane chats eating into, at the time, your 30-minute refund window. Eventually you're forced to visit your "land plot", a separate instance away from the city and the camp that you could upgrade with furniture. The idea being that you'd come back here after your excursions, then spend money to make your house pretty and... not much else.

 

 

 

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

The open world survival game is no longer available for sale, but its servers are still up. So how bad is it?

 

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The Day Before was one of the most-wishlisted games on Steam before it came out in early access last week. Players flooded into the servers—over 38,000 were playing concurrently at its peak—but very quickly began flowing out, either because they were unable to connect to the servers, which featured no login queues, struggled with crashes and bugs, or just weren't having fun in the open-world survival game. Just four days and many refunds later, developer Fntastic announced that it was closing, and The Day Before joined the ranks of legendary videogame flops.

 

But is The Day Before really that bad? We've played it and, yeah, it's pretty bad—not shockingly so, but certainly not a game to stake a company on.

 

How expectations for The Day Before got so high in the first place is a bit of a sociological mystery. Taken at face value and with the understanding that they're clearly choreographed, the 2021 announcement and gameplay trailers that earned The Day Before so much hype look fairly similar to the game that released. They include features absent in the early access release, such as vaulting, but basically show what you get: abandoned stores to loot, awkward third-person shooting, and zombies that run directly at you. 

 

 

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WWW.POLYGON.COM

The zombie survival game is one of gaming’s biggest flameouts ever

 

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The Day Before went from one of the most anticipated games on Steam to an unqualified disaster. After spending months at the top of the platform’s most wishlisted list, the game’s release on Dec. 7 quickly led to a wave of immense blowback, tens of thousands of players seeking refunds, and the closure of the studio behind it.

 

Just four days after launching on Steam, The Day Before developer Fntastic announced that its game was a “failure financially” and that no more updates would be released for the early access title. Fntastic, saying it lacked the funds to continue, was closing. The studio then wiped its YouTube channel, deleting all official uploads of The Day Before gameplay trailers; its CEO has disappeared from social media; and the game itself has been pulled from sale on Steam. The game’s publisher, Mytona, said on social media that it’s working with Valve to provide refunds.

 

The sequence of events, and Fntastic’s promises about what The Day Before would be, have led many players and purchasers of the game to call it a “scam.” Polygon has reached out to Fntastic, its CEO, and publisher Mytona, as well as Valve, for comment on The Day Before’s launch and removal from Steam, but all parties have refused to respond so far.

 

To recap the events leading up to The Day Before’s disastrous launch, we have to go back much further.

 

 

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19 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

I meant the PS4 and Xbone versions mostly. But yea, Cyberpunk did a complete 180 and is a fantastic game now. Phantom Liberty was the cherry on top. 

I'll be honest I still haven't played it. Im waiting like a starving skeleton for it to be on game pass or a PSN freebie

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  • 1 month later...
  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to The Day Before (open-world survival MMO set in zombified post-pandemic 'Murica) - update (01/24): Fntastic lets it rip against the "bloggers"
  • 2 weeks later...
4 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:
WWW.IGN.COM

The information surrounding developer Fntastic’s December game release, The Day Before, just got a lot worse, according to reports from German game outlets GameStar and Game Two.

 

 

This is the documentary referenced in the article - it's in German, but there are English subtitles.

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to The Day Before - update (02/01): "Inside The Day Before" - investigative documentary from two German gaming sites (with English subtitles)

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