From the first, The Day Before always felt a bit like snake oil, and after its disastrous release and subsequent studio closure, Fntastic hasn't exactly been forthcoming about the debacle. A recent response to a clearly upset fan isn't helping things, either.
In case you've been living under a rock the last few days, The Day Before, after multiple delays, finally launched into Steam Early Access last Thursday. However, from the very start, it was clear this was not the game that was shown off in the glitzy trailers and marketing material produced by its development studio, Fntastic, even if those trailers bore striking similarities to other game trailers themselves. Just days before (get it?), Fntastic begged players to "not call them scammers" simply because they never took money from people during the development process.
Not exactly the most confidence-boosting statement if you were already shaky about how the MMO would turn out.
Our own Steven Weber tried to play The Day Before within minutes of launch and was met with massive bugs that halted progress before the first cutscene even stopped playing. Players were met with an empty world that, if Reddit investigators are to be believed (and it wouldn't be the first time they were right) was simply built using store-bought Unreal Engine assets.
The Day Before was billed as a post-apocalyptic zombie survival MMO but bore no resemblance to that moniker other than there were a few zombies, not even threatening ones by all accounts. It quickly became one of the worst-reviewed games in Steam history, with players filing for refunds thanks on Steam.
Fast forward to yesterday, developer Fntastic announced it was closing its studio thanks to the financial flop of The Day Before, and began to nuke its entire social presence. Its YouTube channel had ever video deleted, while the official Discord descended into chaos, only to find it too was basically wiped from existence by the end of the day.
This morning, though, The Day Before team at Fntastic was seen responding to tweets from spurned fans, pushing back against claims that it built their game with store-bought assets, as well as pushing back against the way the team hyped things up with trailers and more.
In response, Fntastic blamed their inexperience and said, "Shit happens."
Obviously that isn't exactly what we all want to hear from a studio that went so far as to put a billboard up in Times Square of its trailer to promote its game, only for the result to be an unmitigated disaster that might rival one of the worst launches of all time in the games industry. It might also be the extent to which the team is willing to admit fault in all of this. Fntastic isn't exactly forthcoming with the media (just look at how they thought of us with a Press Armor description, as reported by PCGamesN's Lauren Bergin)
We were planning on reviewing The Day Before however, we've opted to just leave it and not waste time in the world Fntastic created. However, if you are interested in reading one, sometimes MMORPG.com contributor Gabriel Moss has published his review over at IGN, and the score shouldn't surprise you.
