The Day Before isn't real

 Or is it?

Okay, this isn't like that blog I made about the actor who may or may not be a computer generation, this is a real situation that I don't feel like has been commonly adopted enough. Not that I'm walking back anything that I said in that previous blog, I hasten to add, just that this one is a lot more serious and important... to gaming. Which I guess when you really think about it, makes it not serious or important at all, but in fact a huge joke that nobody seems to be laughing at. What am I talking about? The Day Before. That impressive-looking open world Zombie MMO survival and crafting title that has been doing the rounds for a few years. I don't think it's real. In fact, I'm nigh on convinced that it isn't real. And the most recent shenanigans from the title is just like a jerrycan of nitrous chucked on that little campfire in my head because wow- you'd have to either be terminally incompetent or full of fluff to make a mistake like that.

Firstly, The Day Before wowed in 2021 with one of those highly orchestrated gameplay reveal trailers that showcased a player-populated post-apocalyptic world with the minute-to-minute PVP danger of DayZ, the tactical 3rd person peek and shoot robustness of The Division and a visual fidelity to rival a decent budget openworld title. Did I mention it's also an MMO? I feel that last point is important in highlighting why it is I instantly decided this was most likely an over-ambitious GoFundMe pump and run. Because here's the thing, Fntastic, the developers purported to be behind this, are best known for creating small scale co-op games like 'The Wild Eight' and party games like 'Propnight' which is just, I hardly feel it needs to be said out loud, just a nod to the popular Prophunt community game in the ancient Garry's Mod sandbox. Which is to say, they've never made an MMO before. And by all accounts they seem to be a small company. Do you see my initial problems here? 

Now to slip on that stiletto and play the Devil's Advocate, the game they propose is not to the scale and demand of a traditional MMO; it's more like a considerably more refined and pretty version of DayZ. But then, even DayZ was built off of another game to begin with and took several years to become it's own independent product with many pitfalls along the way. I'm not saying it's impossible for Fntastic to pull the game they say they can out of their pocket after three years of hard development, I just think it's supremely unlikely. However, to their credit I don't think this was ever a Kickstarter or GoFundMe title, which leans me closer to the train of thought that these are just some supremely overly ambitious developers slapped together a shiny proof-of-concept without expecting the attention they received. Maybe through that same lens we can forgive the later demonstrations of 'gameplay'. Maybe.

One of my big problems with the game is the fact that over several years and spanning across couple of extensive 'gameplay' trailers, we've yet to see an actual vertical slice out of the final product. I'd go so far as to say we've yet to see actual gameplay, but that would be talking out of my butt. Yet how can I still say that we've not seen the real product in play? Well the 'orchestrated' nature of those later gameplay looks isn't just in the way the characters interact, it's actually in the design of the world we see. Take a close look at any of the gameplay walkthroughs in these open world 'demonstrations' that exist and you'll notice something peculiar, the world is designed in a 'hallway' fashion around where the player goes. Take the demo in the woods. We see the player driving over dirt roads and across ruins until they hit a truck stop, and everywhere around the locations they travel through are barriers to free exploration. In an supposed open world title. Impassable lakes of water or dense clumps of trees- the sort of thing a world designer would throw up to hide an invisible wall. But this isn't the sort of game that would have invisible walls everywhere, now is it? It's an open world survival game where you struggle to survive however you can and, apparently, even go so far as to build your own bases! (Where am I supposed to build them then? In the middle of this narrow path road?) Which means that the most charitable interpretation we can make of these gameplay snippets is thus; these don't depict the world of the game, but are rather just demonstrations, or maybe even Test cells, of what the finalised world might look like. But I have to tell you, I'm making a lot of legwork to reach that compromise considering they declare nothing of the sort in their expanded description about the gameplay.

The reason the game found it's way into the news recently is for yet another eye-brow raiser that just has me and the other sceptics kissing our teeth and salivating at the mouth to utter the long delayed cry of "We told you so!" Because lo and behold, with a release date that was slated to this March following a delay out of 2022, The Day Before was suddenly ripped off the Steam store without any explanation. Those who had wishlisted the game were left utterly confused for a while until the developers hit up their Discord about a bit of an issue which as 'Affected many games before'. Fastforward some time later and we got a few more juicy details. Turns out the team never bothered to secure the trademark for 'The Day Before' and Steam just got the takedown request.

Yep, according to the team themselves not long after the game was announced someone who, to paint within the picture they've provided we'll call a 'Trademark Troll', went ahead and stole the name at the US Trademark office. Now considering the announcement happened all the way back in 2021, it's unclear whether or not this occurred at the time and the team have just sat on their hands hoping everything will work out until the day Steam got the call to can their page, or maybe this happened at some point after the 2021 announcement and the team just didn't notice because they never took the steps to secure the trademark themselves. Eitherway, this is a supremely embarrassing and amateurish circumstance and though I cannot personally attest if this is or not a 'common technical issue' like the team claim, I know that any other studio to which this has happened kept it very quiet for how much egg on their face they would receive otherwise. And also, this seems very convenient.

It's convenient because the team had, against all logic, a release month locked in without the legal right to sell their product secured, and it was in just over a month's time! But with this delay the team have pushed their release back about half a year, which seems like a lot of time just to get a paper work issue sorted out. Assuming, of course, that they even got it sorted out and haven't just picked a random date hoping things will be fine by then. Heck, that's almost enough time to scramble together a concerted few months of crunch development in a desperate bid to get whatever they've got cooking up in their offices up to some presentable state because right now it looks like burning trash. Now I can't provide any evidence to back up that assumption of mine, but the development team can't provide any evidence that the gameplay footage we've seen depicts any form of an in-development product, so I think we're at a bit of an impasse.

Now we play the waiting game. The most ludicrous fumble one can imagine has shifted the goalposts of this product considerably and now murmurs of illegitimacy have grown into audible grumbles. The team have grumbled their own response, upset that the game they've provided no evidence of existing is being called into question; and at this point if the team don't deliver some sort of undeniable gameplay walkthrough trailer to dispel this aura of doubt- the real publications are going to start picking on this 'developer who cried wolf'. It's not that I don't want a game like this to exist, I actually think it sounds pretty cool; but that's also because it's an exact copy of the same bloody 'dream survival game' pitch that we've seen kickstarter scammers and vapourware Early Access launches pitch for the past 10 years. If you don't expect suspicious eyes working within a framework like that, it's you being the unreasonable one!