When survival shooter The Day Before made its scheduled but disastrous early access launch, multiple players pointed out a wealth of issues with the title, but one of the more telling is that the game is a smaller scale extraction shooter instead of the larger-sized survival MMO that it was originally billed to be. Now it looks as if developer Fntastic is trying to move the goalposts as it quietly changed its Steam tags and removed trailers calling it an MMO.
This past Friday saw Fntastic attempt to remove both the “massively multiplayer” and the “open-world survival craft” genre tags on its Steam page, but as of this writing the “massively multiplayer” tag appears to be back and the game still classes itself as an MMO as evidenced in the image embedded to the right.
In addition, journalist Nick Calandra highlighted how the number of videos on the game’s YouTube page have been significantly reduced, especially the trailers that reference the game as an MMO or ones that showcase features that are not in the released early access product; indeed, if you go back to our own original announcement story, you’ll see that the embed has now been broken as a result of the associated video being removed from the channel.
In spite of this attempted cleaning of the record, we want to point out Fntastic’s own PR copy that was first put to print when it was announced in January 2021:
“Welcome to The Day Before, an open-world MMO survival set in a deadly, post-pandemic America overrun by flesh-hungry infected and survivors killing each other for food, weapons, and cars. You wake up alone in a world you no longer remember, setting out to find answers and the resources to survive.”
Meanwhile, a solo developer named Crimson is already working on a “parody” video called The Day After that takes assets from the game and adds in missing features and animations to put into the trailer. His most recent work has included melee attacks that aren’t in the game itself, while other additions made to the game for the video include looting, crafting, a functional UI, and enemies that take different amounts of damage depending on where they are hit.
This remastering won’t become a game release for obvious reasons, but it has apparently made Crimson – a game dev who has released titles like the shooter Suit for Hire and is currently working on the roguelite Ronin 2072– intrigued by the idea of making a zombie survival game himself.
As for the extraction shooter’s current fortunes, it still sits at an “Overwhelmingly Negative” user review score thanks to over 18K negative player remarks and its player numbers have subsequently taken a dive off of a cliff.
Further reading on the whole saga:Making 'The Day Before' parody – Day 35/?:
– first iteration of melee combat hits, not 100% happy with it just yet but it's getting there- sort of works in multiplayer as well, just needs a bit more finetuning
– complementary bug at the endIt's not perfect but getting there! pic.twitter.com/7LRG7BsRDU
— Crimson (@thecrimsondev) December 11, 2023
