Let’s go back to the day before the release of The Day Before. After being the most wish-listed game on Steam, it is finally going to launch, and people are going to get to experience the “Open-world survival MMO” they are waiting for.
Except they won’t, because only four days later the studio that developed the game – Fntastic – would shut down entirely due to the game’s poor reception.
The Day Before was called out to be a scam by many, way before its early access release. It looked too ambitious and too good to be true, which made people highly skeptical. The marketing was also weird, and they kept calling it an MMO that is set in an open world, but the game turned out to be an extraction shooter (or an attempt at it).
In short, most of the gameplay shown in the trailers that started the hype is entirely missing from the game. It launched as a mess, completely riddled with bugs, crashes, performance issues, server problems, and the list goes on. These will never be fixed despite the servers being up because any further patches to the game were stopped only four days later when the studio shut down.
Here is my story of survival through these four days of The Day Before.
Day One: The Servers Are Full
It’s the launch day. I start the game and after the title screen, I am presented with character customization. Naturally I ignore that and immediately go into settings.
Basic settings are missing, such as the option to set the frame rate. Trying to change the resolution is a nightmare as it keeps switching between wrong ratios for no reason. I try my best to set whatever I can and proceed to create my character.
The game has three classes, but they don’t seem like they are distinctly different from each other. The character customization is basic at best but okay enough to create a somewhat unique model. So far so good, but this is only the beginning. Now comes the hard part – actually getting into the game.
Every server in every region is apparently full. The discussions are up on this being truly full or purposely inflated so that people can’t get into the game before their 2-hour refund time on Steam runs out. I tirelessly spam the random servers on each of the region lists, hoping to get into any server possible at this point.
After what seems like the longest 45 minutes of my gaming life, I am in.
My character wakes up in a hospital bed inside Woodberry Survivor Colony, a safe settlement in New Fortune City which acts as the main hub of the game. As the cutscene ends and my character sits up and gets off the bed… it immediately falls through the floor and endlessly falls through a void of nothing below the map.
Guess I’m going straight to hell with this one.
Day Two: The Story is Empty
After multiple crashes and constant server-spamming, I am now actually in and playing the game after multiple hours of its launch. The doctor who fixed me up tells me that after my car crashed nearby when I was running away from the zombies, a Woodberry resident saved me and brought me here… and that’s about it.
How did the zombie apocalypse take place? Who was my character before all this? We will never know.
I get my first objective – Talk to Chris. It’s the guy who saved me. He explains how Woodberry is a safe settlement made out of a middle school building, and that I can do jobs around here to earn some money. He also offers a piece of open plot where I can settle.
This open plot is just a small area I can fast travel to and looks exactly the same for everyone. I can place down tents and furniture here but it’s pointless. Chris also gives some history on Woodberry and other things that are way too uninteresting to even pay attention to.
Chris now asks me to go meet with everyone important at Woodberry, all of whom have generic appearances, subpar voice acting, and boring dialogue options. These are various NPCs like the weapons vendor, the doctor, the bartender, etc.
After meeting all of them, I am finally given the Journal, a touchscreen PDA that also works as a map. I can use this Journal to initiate “Tasks” which are quests I can do out in New Fortune City.
After the game sets me up with some basic gear and guns for my first run, I am ready to head out and do the most generic quest one can have in a zombie game – bring back 3 walkie-talkies from a random place. Because walkie-talkies are generally useful in the post-apocalypse. Nice.
Day Three: The Gameplay is Bad
As soon as I get into the actual “open-world” map, Chris immediately tells me on the radio that my objective is to loot as much as possible and head to an “extraction”.
This is not an MMO at all! It’s the gameplay loop of an extraction shooter. But before I can experience any of this extraction shooter game that I am now suddenly playing, it crashes.
I now get back to spamming the servers for a long while to get another chance at… whatever this is. I do all that and then walk for about 10 mins through the barren city towards the quest area. There is no zombie in sight, no players either, despite being apparently “full”. Just an empty, generic-looking city with the same five cars and trucks scattered across the roads.
And the game crashes yet again.
I am finally able to get it to work, AGAIN. I spend another 10 minutes getting to my quest marker before getting killed by another player in an extremely unfair gunfight with delayed damage and clunky movement.
I have lost all the starter items given to me, and I am back in Woodberry. I am generously given 500 Woodcoins to get back on my feet, which is merely enough to buy a low-tier pistol and a few bullets. I realize – if I run out of bullets, I am as good as dead because no one in the world of The Day Before can use their fists or any melee weapons. It just doesn’t exist.
The audio design is some of the worst I have seen —constant sounds of car alarms blasting in my ears even when I am two blocks away from it, fake gunshots to emulate the existence of real players when they are never actually there, same background ambient noises playing in a loop. The list is endless.
The zombies have bad AI and can simply be countered by getting on a slightly higher elevation level than them. They say you should always hit zombies in the head, but the gunshots are so slow and delayed that I miss more shots than I hit.
I barely even see zombies in the city, which makes me wonder why this place is described as “dangerous” and why no one is around here despite being safe most of the time due to the severe lack of zombies.
Fighting PvP against a real player just comes down to who saw the other one first and who has the better gear. I somehow manage to kill a player despite the laggy and clunky gameplay, but I sustain injuries like bleeding which cause me to die anyway in just about 30 seconds after winning the gunfight.
So now, my only real option is to avoid ANY dangerous encounter until I have powerful items. This could take days if not months of grinding the same generic tasks over and over again.
The inventory management is okay but mostly annoying. I am tired of having to always go back to my storage box to get money and other stuff. I can buy attachments for guns, but most of them don’t really explain what they do or which gun they are even for.
So far, from my countless times just looting and searching containers like cars, postboxes, bags, etc., I haven’t found a single valuable item. The looting is never satisfying no matter where I go.
Inside the quest area, where I am supposed to find the special quest items, there are players camping since it is one of only three locations for starting quest options. All of these three starter quests ask me to go to a specific area where I know players are camping in wait.
Day Four: The Experience is Worse
After many, many hours of crashes and deaths, I am finally able to find the three walkie-talkies without getting killed by anyone. I am also able to extract. But now what?
I head over to the NPC who assigned me this task and hand over the walkie-talkies. In return, all I receive is just 1,000 Woodcoins, barely enough to buy anything worthwhile. The mission slot in my journal has been replaced with yet another generic task, and that’s about it.
The game seems to be about just doing these generic quests and working my way up to buying better gear so that I can camp at extractions and stomp on people with weaker gear.
It has now been multiple days after the release of The Day Before. Despite trying every day, I have barely made any progress due to the frequent crashes and server issues. Even if I manage to do a few quests and earn some Woodcoins, I will end up losing it all when I died on a run. This would put me back to square one.
I can get more money faster in The Day Before by purposely dying and getting the pity 500 Woodcoins, depositing it in storage, and repeating it. I can’t make that much by actually doing the tasks. There’s also an infinite money glitch that some players discovered. I avoid using exploits, but for The Day Before, this has to be done as a desperate move. I want to actually progress and find out what I can do with a lot of money.
After attempting the glitch, I have found out that I can do nothing. All I can do with that money is buy the best gear possible to do the same boring quests. Only this time I am not as scared to get into PvP or PvE fights. But now every other player has the best possible gear in the game because everyone is using this infinite money glitch. The camping and toxicity has only increased, and the game has become even more unplayable. Now that’s something I thought wasn’t possible.
Not long after, I experience the final nail in the coffin — a game-breaking bug that has caused my character to keep falling through the map forever after a random crash.
I have tried restarting the game. My character just loads into a void of nothing and keeps falling perpetually, ending my journey in this game exactly how it started. I thought of deleting my character to start again, but the buggy game won’t let me delete it.
My character is still out there somewhere falling through the void of The Day Before, and it will be there for days after until the servers shut down for eternity.
Verdict
The Day Before is a broken mess of a game. It was falsely advertised as an Open World MMO but turned out to be an extremely bad extraction shooter even by early access standards. It shows no potential to be something better in the future and is created on top of a baseless and generic concept of a zombie apocalypse. There’s nothing unique about it, and even the generic stuff doesn’t function.
With clunky & laggy gameplay, forgettable characters, a boring world & narrative, this game has been pushed into its grave – and deservedly so – now that the studio that made it has shut down. The game has been pulled from Steam, but the scars will remain.
The Good
- Few good immersion elements like minimal UI and other things (I’m trying really hard here).
The Bad
- Clunky and slow gameplay.
- Bad server performance, possibly inflated.
- Frequent crashes and laggy performance overall.
- Lacks any real story or narrative around the world and its characters as well as for the player.
- No real progression.
- Small and repetitive world environment, bad traversal.
