So The Day Before had some new Gameplay

So glad I woke up for that...

If you are FNTASTIC in the modern age, it's pretty clear that your marketing team has let the side down a bit. For no other reason than the fact that no body appears to be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to assume your game is even real. Even after FNTASTIC came together to prove that they are a studio capable of actually making and bringing out games, albeit those of a much more constrained nature than the proposed zombie survival visual spectacle that The Day Before pitched itself as, everybody has reached a point of disillusionment with the coverage of the game that they're calling the project a asset flip! (Very bold claims that really demand a source if there's any fire to that smoke.) What the company really needed was a hail mary that would turn everyone's head, prove the game was real and was shaping up to truly be everything that the fans were promised all those years in the past.

But then, even if the game is real the incompetence of the company seems to border on malicious with the way they've covered The Day Before up until now. I mean, this most recent heavy delay which shoved the game far out of release-date reach was apparently due to a trademark troll who stole their name a couple a years ago because the company were too dumb to file for their own project's name when they announced it. Oh wait, actually it's been alleged that excuse was a lie (shocker) and The Day Before had actually been planning this delay before the Trademark issue; that was just the straw which pulled them off of Steam. Funny, those are some pretty important wires to get crossed from a public marketing standpoint. On one hand you'll come across looking like an idiot, sure, but on the otherhand you'll come across looking increadibly moronic- between boiling water and an open flame I know where I'd rather jump. 

Still, the project has been juggling around this promised gameplay reveal for a long while now: a proposed raw look at the gameplay features of The Day Before which would finally dispel the long held rumours that every bit of footage was heavily scripted engine walkthroughs that absolutely would never run on an MMO server. 'No' they insisted 'We absolutely can pull of a high-fidelity open world with ray tracing in puddles and metallic surfaces, heavily cluttered ground surfaces and dozens of players operating without substantive drop-offs in performance. Obviously!' This was also going to be the footage that resolved world hunger, gave the boot to cancer, and paused all conflicts around the globe with it's shining brilliance. Or at least that was all the hope that we had. The Day Before really didn't have a lot of wiggle room, they had to get this gameplay out and it had to be just perfect.

Which is why a few public eye brows got themselves raised in the immediate lead-up to this footage being dropped, what when the tag 'raw' dropped itself from the upcoming footage. Worrying, given that the lack of genuine in-game footage is what first tipped people off that this game might not be everything the developers said it was. It is particularly gruelling, afterall, to be led on the promise of how revolutionary an survival game will be when you've never seen the real thing in action, but rather just progressively frustrating glimpses of how pretty the engine supposedly running the thing could be. Let me be clear, I absolutely don't believe that FNTASTIC are inventing the existence of this project; I've just always maintained the game has been more uglier and rough than the team have been fabricating and their unwillingness to be open about the real struggles of actual game design paints them with the same sort of brush that pure con-artists usually dominate.

With the new gameplay the general take away has been: Wow, that was intensely boring. Which in a way kind of makes sense, with the team's confessed inspirations being titles like Escape from Tarkov and Day Z, it's true that a lot of those games do feature extended periods of milling about lazy countryside in uneventful silence before any of the action kicks in. Although I seriously do question the wisdom of capturing that still before the storm and highlighting it in a marketing video as a distillation of the 'raw' essence of your game. Perhaps the audience would have better preferred being actually thrilled by something happening? Instead of a slight jog through the Cotswolds followed by a tour across the least populated zombie infested city known to man. I think we saw a total of 11 or 12 zombies in the entire video, and none of them got close enough to even make out their character models.

Then there's the visual quality, which many seem to think has taken a serious downgrade from visual trailers. I don't really have an eye for the nuance of a high resolution 3d model compared to any other, but I did notice a distinct lack of real-time reflection technology which was lauded in the first year trailers, as well as a considerably cleaner sweep of streets which were before littered in clutter and other general junk which helped make the world appear 'lived in'. Whether that counts as a significant downgrade worthy of splitting hairs really comes down to your personal preference, I just figured it was the sensible cut-backs that a team would have to make considering this title was supposed to be an actually competitive shooter that takes cues from Tarkov. It's actually insane that they thought they could pull off high-end ray tracing in an MMO game without owning God's own servers to run it. I will say, however, that for some reason I did confuse the footage with GTA VI and I can't quite understand why... I think it's to do with the character models themselves, but the issue seems to have slipped behind me. I just can't get to the bottom of it. I'd hazard a guess, but I would just end up making an ass of me. Butt.

Aside from the visuals, there were a lot of really nagging design choices that rubbed me the wrong way. The extensive weapon crafting scene featured a really unhelpful UI interface that refused to convey important information such as how much was being crafted at any one time and how much of that item you have on your person. The alarm system which the player defuses seemed to have absolutely no purpose. It wasn't drawing any attention, it started without the player setting it off and the player left the second after they defused it without taking advantage of anything. I don't know why it was even there. Actually interacting with the alarm was itself an unholy mix of conflicting systems. It required a hold down prompt for several seconds in order to activate, but that activation just brought up a further interaction window. Hold down prompts with several second delays are designed to simulate the process of performing a task, if you have another means of conveying that task (such as an actual interactive keypad) there's literally no reason not to have that interaction be instant. It's actually annoying not to have it be instant, if it's something you're going to be interacting with frequently. And that isn't even a higher game design concept I'm playing with, it's general QOL stuff which would have been picked up if this game went through any testing.

All that said, I think this footage is the closest I've ever come to believing that The Day Before is a real game, but I'm no closer to thinking it's anything like the game that FNTASTIC desperately want it to be. Visual woes and design faux pas' aside, I just don't think that The Day Before has the talent on hand to create a fulfilling zombie survival experience with solid player versus player shooting across a massive open world. Tarkov developers were already veterans of their craft before they did what they did, Day Z had years of work to get where it is; FNTASTIC have a few games under their belt, but nothing that seems to play into the skillset that this project seems to demand of them. Again, I don't think this is the scam of 2023; but I think it is a coming disaster of a project that is going to fall apart in the hands of the consumer as they scramble to fit together a game that simply works, let alone one that has all the bells and whistles that sold the world in the first place.