0
0
It is nearing a year since I last asked the question, “What is going on with The Day Before” and one would imagine that after more than 10 months and what was supposed to be the impending release, that we would have a substantial amount of information about this ‘upcoming’ survival MMO. We now know that The Day Before has been delayed yet once again. This is actually no big surprise to any of us that have followed the game, and there have been obvious signs that Fntastic has mismanaged a game that was once the most wishlisted game on Steam. It’s time to switch on the WTF machine, and get into how The Day Before completely eradicated their fanbase.
Developer Fntastic is not necessarily new to releasing games with several titles dating back to 2018 under their belt. Whether you look back on their self-published title Radiant One or you take note of their latest game Propnight which has been limping along on Steam with mixed reviews and an average of around a thousand players a day, any way you look at it, Fntastic has been successful at releasing games in the past. What makes The Day Before so different? Here’s a quick trip down memory lane.
Initially The Day Before was slated for a June 2022 release date. Leading up to their release, Fntastic spend the entirety of their promotional effort on releasing a trailer directly to IGN in early 2021, and teasing RTX performance. These would normally be good signs, and at the time, it was enough of a good sign to warrant a flood of interested gamers to The Day Before’s Steam page, which resulted in a rise to the top of the most wishlisted games list. However, even at this early stage, there was a lot missing from the game’s development, and the red flags began piling up. You see, The Day Before was an MMO, but not only was everything we’ve seen up to that point a professionally curated presentation, but there were no actual signs that the team was even interested in letting players get their hands on the game before launch.
The Day Before is going #RTXOn with Ray Tracing and NVIDIA DLSS!See an exclusive first look: pic.twitter.com/xoKH7zBwzH
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) January 4, 2022
I detailed my quest to get information about the game back in April of 2022, which was just a few months before their initial planned release date of June 21st, 2022. In hindsight, the entirety of what’s been happening over the past few days shows more than mismanagement, but a clear intent to deceive players and misrepresent what the team has been doing all along. For starters, if the game was supposed to be released back in June of 2022, why is it that we’re just now hearing of a trademark dispute in January of 2023? It was obviously a lie, that they’ve admitted to, the trademark had nothing to do with the delay, but even worse than that, they already had a missed launch schedule to hammer out these details well in advance, and now, where does that leave The Day Before? If we’re honest, it’s been in the same place it always has been, Fantasy Land.
A 2022 Release Was Never in the Cards
There was no intention to release the game in June of 2022. It’s clear now. What’s really disturbing is that the team decided that the way to move forward was from community help, as they attempted to onboard volunteers. The volunteers included the mod of their official Discord, Wholf, who has spent a lot of his time ensuring visitors that the game was still in progress, that the Discord is indeed real, and that the team is hard at work behind the scenes. Unfortunately, it came to light that he too, recently questioned whether the game is real. That’s not a good look Fntastic. I did reach out to Wholf for more information, but have yet to hear back from him. It’s hard when your own volunteer is struggling to determine what state the game is in.
On top of that, testing for The Day Before was initially slated for a pre-launch beta back in June of 2022. Fntastic at the time also stated that they weren’t in a rush to test because MYTONA, their publisher, has so many employees, as that was their reasoning why they didn’t require testing. Yet, the team still attempted to bring on volunteers, and the volunteers they had were not directly involved in testing the game? Nothing about this situation adds up. We’re looking at:
- A failure to release pre-launch testing prior to June of 2022
- A failure to meet their launch date in June of 2022
- An attempt to receive free labor utilizing volunteers to complete development
- Severe lack of communication for months on the part of Fntastic related to The Day Before
- Only prerecorded videos provided and interviews given to limited outlets
- The official Fntastic Website being offline for weeks due to the team allowing the account to expire
- Bringing up a trademark dispute 2 months prior to their second attempted release date, and now requiring the game handle the dispute legally or rebrand the game.
- Lying about the trademark dispute as the reason for the delay.
- Getting delisted from Steam due to a dispute that should have been resolved over a year ago
We’ve seen more communication and better management from Kickstarted MMOs than we have from Fntastic and MYTONA when it comes to The Day Before. Yet here we are at a point where Fntastic co-founder Aisen Gotovtsev stated that the team hasn’t asked for anything from anyone, and that the accusations that the game isn’t real is “unpleasant to hear”.
“We didn’t take a penny from people: no crowdfunding, no pre-orders, no donations.” – Aisen Gotovtsev, Fntastic co-founder, IGN Interview
Fntastic may not have asked for money, but they sure asked for volunteers to use their time and expertise, while not paying them for their work. On top of that, I personally couldn’t care one iota about how “unpleasant” it is to hear that people are questioning whether the game is real or not. This literally lies at the hands of Fntastic, and nobody else. They could have posted dev blogs, animation clips, hell even at this point concept art would have been a welcome reminder that the developers care about keeping their fans invested.
None of that was done, so now, Fntastic is trying to rally the troops for their “third time’s the charm” launch date on November 10th, 2023. For the sake of the fans, I hope Fntastic can get it right this time, but that doesn’t even delve into the actual quality of the game itself. If the team can’t even handle public testing, trademarking their name, or paying all the people that work for them, what hope do we have that they are able to put together a compelling, enjoyable game? Their long list of issues has proved more than a year ago that The Day Before would never deliver on their development schedule and it’s far less likely they’ll deliver a solid survival MMO either. To say that I have zero confidence is an understatement.
