The Day Before May Be Done And Over With, But We May Be Hearing About The Drama For A While

If you thought you were done hearing about The Day Before now that the project has been shut down and Fntastic has shuttered its doors, you are not. Now’s the point in the timeline when former employees begin telling stories about what they had to deal with while the company was in operation. According to a report on PCGamer, German site Game Two and GameStar spoke to several former Fntastic staffers, including one of the “volunteer” employees, as well as people from the game’s publisher Mytona.

Reading through everything the staff had to say, some might get the feeling they’ve heard something like this before. It very much has the same vibe as some of the things we heard about Firefall after it was all over.

According to stories told by the staff, the development team had to constantly deal with the Gotovtsev brothers changing direction based on whatever game they felt was the big deal at the time. This resulted in changing the character creator about three times to emulate other games. Included in that list are Hogwarts Legacy and Baldur’s Gate 3. Other changes included swapping out the game’s setting completely, and at least one developer said they didn’t even realize they were making an MMO. That is, they didn’t realize until the trailer came out.

The report goes on to discuss the treatment of the staff themselves, noting that Fntastic hired inexperienced staff from places where they were short on options and subjected them to unpaid overtime and crunch. One person is even noted as saying that they begged for a few hours of a break in order to eat or take a shower.

Beyond that, employees are reported to have been fined by the company if they turned in “substandard work”. One fine noted was a $1,930 fine for voice recording that didn’t meet standards. Staff also noted that they lived under a “company policy of spontaneous termination”.

Of course, at this point the company has been dissolved and the game has been shuttered. But that doesn’t mean the Gotovtsey brothers are done. In fact, just recently there were reports that they were working on another game as they blamed content creators for The Day Before's demise, and they have reportedly even invited former Fnastic employees – even those they fired – to join them. Hopefully, their former staff will find something a bit better instead.