(bright tones) - [Falcon] On December 7th,
"The Day Before" released on Steam to overwhelmingly
negative reviews. Players complained about
server issues, subpar gameplay, and poor performance. On December 11th, the game was dead. Fantastic released a short,
terse message on Twitter. You can call it X if you want. I'm not. That the studio was closing
due to a lack of funding. The fix was in, and anyone
who actually bought the game was left holding the proverbial bag. And what a roller coaster
ride this game has been, from that first massively hyped trailer to everything that followed, this game was, at very least,
a constant source of amusement for people watching from the sidelines. For the players who actually
looked forward to this thing, oof, what a disappointment. The game was originally promised as an open world MMO
zombie survival experience, but was released as a
half-baked extraction shooter. And I want to stress,
that's not an exaggeration. The store page still
describes the game as an MMO, but in its current state, it is a half-baked extraction shooter, a shooter that extracts
and was baked halfway. I wanna stress all of those
words contain no exaggeration, and may even be a little generous. With that in mind, hi, folks, it's Falcon, and today on Gameranx, we're talking about how "The Day Before" lied to us. So sure, there was a possibility
that things could improve. That's probably why Fantastic
slapped the early access tag on at the last minute,
but it doesn't matter now. With the closure of the studio,
the game's effectively dead. Whatever future the game
had left, it's gone. And it's not uncommon to hear
people talk about a rug pull, where a Kickstarter game
or an early access game just disappears into the night, but the devs running away
with the money that was meant to fund development. It's something that a lot of people joked about "The Day Before" but I didn't think it would play out exactly like this. And I don't know if it's a
scam or pure incompetence, but either way, it just
really sucks for everybody who is actually interested in this thing. Looking back, the first
announcement trailer was absolutely chock full of red flags, but we're so used to trailers exaggerating or embellishing what's
actually in the game. A lot of folks ignored it and accepted what they were seeing. It was very ambitious and
seemed to come out of nowhere. And I'd say in hindsight,
we should have known better, and a lot of us did, a lot of us did. Through the years, you've heard me express plenty of skepticism about this game, but also, I've always
tried to be optimistic. I never want to just take
a big, old, steaming dump on some developer that's
punching above their weight. Honestly, I like it
when developers do that. It's oftentimes kind of a wild haymaker and when it connects, it's crazy. But, you know, Hail Mary plays
aren't typically referred to as such because they have more
than a prayer going for them, but these guys were promising
nothing less than the fidelity of "The Last of Us," the world
in danger of "The Division," and a massive, player-driven
world at the same time. It sounds too good to be true, because it was too good to be true. Still, people got hyped,
and for good reason. It's an impressive trailer. It went for the "Red
Dead Redemption"-like, Rockstar-style guided tour, which gives the players the impression that it will be an open world game. This is, of course, arguable. One of the narrators first
lies is that "The Day Before" takes place in a huge
post-apocalyptic world, which is not the small chunk of city and countryside that's in the game. The stilted dialogue from the players didn't fool anyone, even back then. But a lot of games try to do this sort of enhanced
gameplay stuff with trailers, where it's all scripted and
it's meant to give viewers the impression of what
the final game's gonna be. It's obviously staged, the
players are never convincing, but it's not abnormal. It's unfortunately a
common industry practice. In the trailer, the
players get a radio message that's from the Woodbury community, which implies a lot of things, like this is a place you
can actually drive to, a survival colony among
many in the open world. It's not in the final game at all. Like, Woodbury is a place you wake up at the start of the game,
it's more of a central hub and not part of the map. It's the only survival colony in the game, so everything about this
message is either misleading or just isn't in the game. There's plenty more in that first trailer that's clearly not in the finished game. The animation where the
guy hits the soda machine and gets something out of
it, that's not in the game. The shootout in the
store has objects flying all over the place and
environmental damage, it's not in the game. The elevator shown in
the announcement trailer, that doesn't work. Crafting doesn't work,
at least not like that. Nor is there a stealth
element to the game, as implied at the end. Zombies all just attack you.
There's no detection system. They're just like, "Ah, person!" Yeah, even the weird
"Walking Dead" crapola game that came out, where you
can use smoke for stealth, has stealth in it. This game doesn't. Okay? There's no smoke floating around the city that you can completely hide
yourself from zombies in. Nothing like that. I mean, there's a lot that's
not in the final game. What this trailer promised was an exciting multi-player experience that looks amazing and
is full of surprises. It's a game I'd love
to play, but I haven't. I have played "The Day
Before," but it's not that. And you'd think the first
trailer would be the worst for this sort of embellishment. It often is with games,
but the second trailer called the exclusive official
gameplay trailer is way worse. Before getting into this,
I wanna make it clear that the final game, I
mean, what it actually is, it's an extraction shooter where they randomly dump
you in a part of large map, you fight with other players for resources that you can take back to base, and you can either equip
it if it's a better gun or if it's not, you sell it for money, and the map is the size of
a large multiplayer map, like a "Warzone" map
or something like that, but not an open world map. Keep that in mind when
you see the gameplay they're showing here. Everything about the cars in
this trailer is absolute BS. I'm just gonna come out and say it, there's no way they were gonna make a MMO with a "Mudrunner"-style
simulation going on in the background. That's not possible, there's
a reason most interactions in MMOs are basic and timer based, because anything that
requires more precision is usually too much for the servers. I don't have time to get into
the technical aspects here and I'm not smart enough to
explain it properly anyways, but just keep in the back of your mind what's going on here
versus any random MMO. Like there's a reason
they don't play like this. None of the environments
shown in the trailer are in the final game. It all implies the place is so much bigger than it ended up being. The gas station is where the claims of stolen assets started. It looks remarkably
similar to the gas station in "Life is Strange 2." Yeah, this is where the first claims that the game was an asset flip started, but now that we have access
to the main game, eh, much more confirmation. I'm not gonna go through
everything people claim is either a store-bought asset or something they may have stolen, because if this Reddit
post by EpicStory1989 is to be believed, nearly
everything in the game is some kind of stock or purchase asset. Now the players can actually
compare the game files to asset store stuff. They can pretty definitively claim that a whole hell of a lot of stuff is either based off of or
literally just copy pasted assets that were purchased from a digital store. It's pretty damning, covers
everything in the game. It's from the UI to the quest
system, the dialogue system, the characters, almost
everything in the entire city. It all looks like it came from stuff devs just purchased and
slapped in the game. And I would like to very quickly point out that using store-bought
assets in a game that is good and took effort, either in
the writing or the mechanics or some element of the
game is really well done, and they used pre-made assets
either that they bought or I don't know, you get a lot
of those for free in Unreal. There's plenty of games
that make use of pre-made or store-bought assets to great effect, but "The Day Before" is not one of them. Going back to the trailer, the segment of the gas station hits us with another bold face lie. The guy in the video climbs
over the waist-high barrier, which is something you
can't do in the actual game. It makes no sense why it's there. It's not in the final product, but I can't really imagine that it would've been that
difficult to bring over, right? Like, it's not exactly
the most impressive thing we've ever seen, is it? No. The zombie density
is not right either. There are way more zombies
around in this trailer compared to the final game. When they go back to the car, there's this whole
complicated menu of options that seem to give you a huge
amount of granular control over how to upgrade or repair the vehicle. This should come as no
surprise at this point, but none of that is in the game. Not even in any form. There's nothing like that in the game. One thing I will give the trailer, this part with the alarm system, that house isn't in the game, but at least the whole turn off the alarm system mechanic is, and it's basically as represented here. Alarms don't draw the attention of zombies in the game though. They're just noisy and annoying. Oh yeah, you know that
intriguing bunker at the end of the trailer that seems to lead to something interesting and mysterious? Yeah, these are just
exfiltration points in the game. They automatically open and there's nothing
interesting about them. When you're done, you go there. The last of the old trailers was the official release date
trailer from back in 2021. Other than promising the
game would come out in 2022, which obviously didn't happen,
this one looks a lot closer to the actual game we got. So the parts where it's
blatantly misleading begin to stand out even
more, like the opening where it shows us
endless, expansive trees, which imply the world is, again, big rather than the small-ish map that we got. Another bit in the trailer
shows a player character picking up a phone off
a display in a store, which I don't care how much
you want to pick up a phone, you're not doing that. The gun customization
stuff shown in this trailer looks like it's outta "Metro Exodus." It's just a standard mod menu now, though. Even in the Nvidia trailer, which showed off the game's ray tracing, which I'm pretty sure isn't
in the final game at all, has gameplay stuff that
isn't in the final game. Like this shot that shows
five players teaming up, nah, limited to four, oops. All these early trailers
had people questioning whether all this was even possible, so Fantastic pivoted to
less ambitious trailers in the following years, stuff like this official
gameplay one from 10 months ago. It's boring, but it's mostly accurate to what's in the final game, more or less. The same can be said of the final trailer, which, for some bizarre reason, is more focused on sports cars. It looks more like a weird "Forza" trailer than a zombie survival game, which is, I don't know, it's really bizarre. At that point, the devs were
mostly just trying to coast on goodwill and expectations. They knew there was a
market for a game like this. It's something that a lot of
people clearly want in a game. There was some actual,
legitimate hype behind it, even if the game's claim to fame that it was the most
wishlisted game on Steam was quite probably accomplished via bots. We know they use bots to try
to inflate the user reviews, that big Reddit post has
receipts to prove it. So why wouldn't they
do that with wishlists? During all that hype, they
never put out pre-orders, tried to hock a Patreon or
do a Kickstarter campaign, which are commonly used resources for your standard bait and switch. So some people assume the
game was actually real. Lot of red flags, like the many delays, and that time the game
was pulled from Steam for copyright reasons only
to reappear less than a month before the game finally came
out, now as early access. Those are red flags, but they didn't do any of
the take the money and run ahead of release type stuff,
which I guess, good for them, but they never said a
word about early access 'til less than a month before release, which should have been
red flag number 1,000, but some people really just
wanted to believe, I think. Listen, I don't wanna kick
folks while they're down here. I'm out 40 bucks, same as you. I may joke about how
people should have known "Day Before" was a disaster,
but at the end of the day, it's not people's fault, right? It's Fantastic's fault, a company's fault. People just wanted to play a survival MMO. That's not bad. Fantastic lied. Again, I don't know if it was outta malice or they're just morons, but they did lie. And on December 7th, the game came out and it was revealed to
be an absolute disaster. The ninth-worst rated
game on Steam of all time. 50% of the player base
has refunded the game. Only five days after the game came out, Fantastic closes and all
their promises about the game and its future as an early access title that will get supported for years to come have gone up in smoke. Now, I can't 100% say that
everything Fantastic said and did was a lie or a scam or whatever, but even if they meant well at the start, the game kind of ended up being a scam. I told you I don't know
what the intent was, but I do know what happened. There have been plenty of games that launched in ridiculously bad states and eventually they get
better, turn themselves around, and take something that was
initially seen as a failure and make it into a success. And it's not just these
massive budget games like "Cyberpunk" or "Final
Fantasy XIV" that do it. Tons of smaller games and
indies have pulled it off. What is "No Man's Sky?" A lot of people bought that game, sunk a ton of money into it,
it was a big disappointment, and you know what, they took
that money and did with it? Made it into a damn good game. So seeing Fantastic pull
up stakes only five days after release of one
of the most hyped games of the year feels extremely scummy, no matter how sincere the
motives behind the decision were. Ultimately, the game they sold people on was not the game they made,
and while maybe, possibly, it could have gotten a fraction
closer to being the game that was promised years after
with additional development, it was never gonna be that game. Not from a studio like
Fantastic, particularly. Maybe they thought they could pull it off, but a lie is a lie, whether
they're lying to everybody else or they're lying to themselves. Frankly, does it matter?
I don't think it does. It's just as likely that they knew exactly what they were doing, as
they were delusional idiots, and either way, they charged people $40 for "The Day Before." I do feel like this story
is somehow not over yet, even with the closure of the studio. Like, someday we're gonna find out what was really going on at Fantastic, how much of a scam "The
Day Before" actually was. But until then, I think we're
gonna have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. The only thing we know for sure is that "The Day Before" sucks and it's never gonna get any better. And that's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you're not subscribed,
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right here on Gameranx.
