First announced in 2021, The Day Before is an Open-World MMO zombie-survival game matching gameplay themes with games like Days Gone, State of Decay, The Division, and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Not much outside of a few clips of combat and vehicle use is shown to the public, so not much is known about the game and further details have been kept tight under the covers by FNTASTIC, it's developer.
This is where the issues with the game arise, however. Since none of the videos show natural gameplay of the game, and instead are curated clips, many across the internet doubt the game's authenticity. Faking game footage has been done before by fake studios looking to scam gamers who by into marketing and hype, but the question needs to be asked if FNTASTIC is doing something similar?
FNTASTIC is the studio behind the Prop Hunt, Dead by Daylight blend that is Propnight which received mixed reviews on steam. Otherwise, their work lies outside of gaming, with the team meeting software Continent.
The Day Before is an ambitious project for the small Singapore based studio who will need to handle server infrastructure, gameplay balance, progression, enemy design, and many other in-depth tasks that aren't to be taken lightly, far more work than a match-based hide-n-seek game.
Having difficulty defeating the claims that the game isn't real, and that this isn't a ploy to garner attention for Propnight or Continent, FNTASTIC promised to release a raw-gameplay footage demo by the end of January. Instead, The Day Before was removed from Steam, as evident by timestamps on SteamDB, a reliable service that shows when games are released, edited, and updated. When asked about its removal, FNTASTIC claimed that it was part of a common glitch with Steam Maintenance, a claim proven implausible thanks to the timestamps on SteamDB showing the page's deletion on January 24th at 10:25pm UTC, nearly 30 minutes before Steam Maintenance began. A few hours later the page remained down and FNTASTIC released this statement.
Why a 9-Month delay for even footage of gameplay is necessary over a trademarking issue remains to be answered, and FNTASTIC isn't helping themselves any further with banning people from the community's Discord server who ask questions.
FNTASTIC sent a statement to IGN, revealing that the delay was planned before the trademark dispute. "We planned to move the game's release before and plan to announce it with [publisher] Mytona in a 10-minute gameplay video. And then you all know what happened. So to be on the safe side, to ensure there are no more transfers, we, along with the publisher, chose November 10. That is a safe date, given the trademark dispute," claimed FNTASTIC.
The skepticism surrounding the game has reached a fever-pitch, so much so that even people who supposedly worked on the game, such as Head Moderator "Wholf" who goes on to say, "Those who wonder if the game is real, I'm wondering the same right now as well. So far, nobody has seen gameplay."
The Day Before was originally slated to launch June 2022, the game was then being swapped to Unreal Engine 5 and the release date was moved to March 1, 2023. The new announced release date is now November 10, 2023.