The Day Before Ex-Staffer Says It Was "Never An MMO"
This despite all the marketing of The Day Before as an MMO.
"The Day Before offers players a uniquely reimagined journey into post-apocalyptic open-world MMO survival set in the present day on the US East Coast following a deadly pandemic." That's the description of The Day Before on Steam, even now following the failure of the game and the closure of the studio. However, an ex-Fntastic staff member says that they were never developing an MMO.
“I never saw it as an MMO project,” the former member of the Fntastic team told DualShockers. “No one from our team knows why they called it an MMO. It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics. Not one RPG mechanic was implemented — skills were an idea, and they were in the prototype stage, but nothing more.”
This is despite much of the video and written marketing referring to The Day Before as an open-world MMO throughout the advertising campaign.
Steam reviews are quick to point out how much The Day Before was not an MMO despite all of the marketing claims. The game wound up being a small extraction shooter. But according to the ex-staffer, the game development of the game was always “a mix of Rust, DayZ, and Escape from Tarkov.” This is a much more apt comparison based on what is being said about The Day Before by players.
"From the beginning, the idea was that servers would be under 100 people — that is not an MMO. No clans, no raids, closed hubs. It’s been that way for over two years,” they explained.
Even the idea of putting voice chat in the game, something that makes a lot of sense for a game like this, was shot down by leadership. The former Fntastic employee says a lot of good ideas were shot down by leadership who thought they knew better.
A leaked screenshot allegedly shows that The Day Before sold approximately 200K copies and was refunded around 90,000 times. The staffer confirmed that their CEO showed that screenshot to them...a CEO that has since gone dark and vanished. We're following all of those updates in one place for you.
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Troy “Noobfridge” Blackburn has been reporting on the video game industry for over a decade. Whether it’s news, editorials, gameplay videos, or streams, Noobfridge never fails to present his honest opinion whether those hot takes prove to be popular or not.
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Them shooting various ideas down likely had to do with how as can clearly be seen from what they released, we were not dealing with a seasoned group of skilled developers. I'm sure the ideas were good, and said senior staff likely thought so as well, the ideas were just beyond what that team could manage.
Then especially with the move to action combat, MMOs have come to have decidedly less people per map/instance/whatever than they used to, with Blade & Soul for instance sitting at around thirty something people, which is about the same as the The Day Before.
All it means to be a MMO, is that it is an online service game, that allows a "large" number of people to actively play together. What one would define as large is open to debate, but given how things have gone over time, I'd say anything around thirty, or more works, so The Day Before could be called a MMO, it was just shit, and failed due to being shit.