The Day Before – New trailer gets mixed reactions

It was quiet for a long time about the upcoming zombie survival MMO The Day Before. Now there is new footage of the game, but that leaves many excited players in doubt now, as does a questionable promotional video from the developers.

Radio silence after postponement of the release

After there had been some controversy around The Day Before in the past, the developers announced in mid-2022 that the game would be postponed to 2023.

The new release date is the first of March – but after that it was quiet around the game for a while. Then in December there was a hint that there would be news about The Day Before in January – and this was then given at CES 2023.

New gameplay footage disappoints

During NVIDIA’s CES 2023 presentation, a new trailer was released announcing NVIDIA’s two technologies, RTX and DLSS 3, for The Day Before and apparently showing them in the trailer:

However, if you look at the trailer, firstly you can again hardly see any real gameplay from the game and secondly, neither the upgrade to the new, graphics-rich Unreal Engine 5 nor the two NVIDIA technologies seem to have had much effect on the game.
Worse, some sequences even seem almost graphically inferior to what we have seen of the game so far.

What we get to see in terms of gameplay is also hardly convincing. A few zombies are shot from the third- or first-person perspective – and that’s it.
The scenes shown are not convincing in terms of graphics, sound or content.

The only thing that looks nice is the prefabricated camera angles, which hardly correspond to realistic gameplay.

The clock is ticking

There are still about two months until the title is supposed to be released as one of the most wanted games on Steam (Steam wishlist). However, we haven’t seen any really coherent gameplay or many elements from the game itself even up to this point.
Of course, we can only speculate about the exact reason for this – and the community has been doing so ever since.

Many doubt that The Day Before will be released on 1 March 2023, others fear that it will be a completely unfinished game, which will not live up to the big promises – and still others doubt that it is anything more than a tech demo.

Controversy around side projects

Shortly afterwards, the developer studio Fntastic then announced a video on Twitter, which was supposed to show the working conditions of the team in more detail. Many were naturally hoping for more impressions of The Day Before.

What the many waiting people got to see, however, was once again surprising. Working conditions of people from the studio, who seem to come from all over the world, were shown.
Some of the scenes in between, however, looked almost like stock footage that can be bought to complete videos – and many scenes also looked very staged and unnatural.

The only thing to be seen from The Day Before was a transmission or video, a tiny little snippet of motion-capturing and the creation of a female character model – as well as an already familiar view of the attachment customisations for weapons.
That’s because the video is actually to promote a side project of the studio – an app that will serve as a kind of platform for multinational companies.

But just see for yourself:

Both the nature of the announcement after such a long radio silence and the timing, just before the long-awaited release of the game, naturally raise questions.
Are the priorities on the right things? Why is there no marketing for The Day Before, but for an off-topic app? And why is all this coming now?

In the end, of course, there’s not much we can do anyway but continue to wait for the release and see what happens next.
But with the latest information about the game and the developer, it’s probably best to be cautious and not get your hopes up too high.