The Day Before was one of the most hyped-up multiplayer games of the year. Unfortunately for the devs, the immediate consensus was that the game turned out to be an utterly disappointing mess, and now everyone’s slamming it to pieces.
The Day Before is a post-apocalyptic survival horror MMORPG that takes place in the United States. If you’re familiar with games like The Division 2 and DayZ, you already know the entire premise. It’s a zombie game that you can play with other people and scavenge and shoot your way to glory.
It was released on December 7, 2023, and was immediately flooded with negative reviews by a lot of angry gamers. Its current steam score is sitting at “Overwhelmingly Negative” with over 22,000 reviews. Even worse, the game is riddled with really scummy game design.
As Twitter user and game developer Monad points out, the game is basically a bad loot extraction sim that is overloaded with fluff. There’s actually so much intro fluff that by the time you get to the actual game, your two-hour Steam refund window will have expired.
If that wasn’t enough, this game might have forced the company to close down. As reported by Eurogamer, Fntastic, the developer behind the game, closed its doors on launch day. One former dev of the studio has come forward saying that the game wasn’t actually supposed to be an MMO either, but something of a mixture between DayZ and Rust. Eurogamer writes:
“No one from our team knows why they called it an MMO. It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics. Not one RPG mechanic was implemented – skills were an idea, and they were in the prototype stage, but nothing more.”
The dev also said that the game being a huge financial bomb was the main reason for closing the studio. Apparently, the company work atmosphere was plenty toxic too, as a lot of employees stayed silent on executive decisions out of fear of losing their jobs. The same source all of this information comes from also verified that pretty much half of the 200,000 copies sold have already been refunded.
The same studio has had a rocky financial past. According to Yahoo Gaming SEA, the studio execs received lavish paychecks of $200,000 last year while seemingly not paying any staff at all in Singapore, despite being headquartered there. (Fntastic’s employees appear to still be based in Russia, where the company was created, making this an even more complex mess.) As we’ve talked about before, unfair working conditions in the industry are unfortunately quite common.
It’s almost always sad when a gaming studio closes, but doubly so when the employees are screwed over hard. We can hate the games being produced and still want better for those who worked on them. Here’s hoping the developers find better jobs as soon as possible.
(featured image: Mytona)
