The Day Before: Will We Ever See It Launch?
I was looking forward to The Day Before, it had all the elements of a game that looked cool. It reminded me of The Division with elements of State of Decay. However, since there have been numerous reasons for delays and questionable ones at that. Will we ever see it launch?
Is it a Hit or a Miss ?
There has been multiple reason for delays like switching to Unreal Engine 5 from UE4. An error with Steam which involved the removal of the game and passing it off as a bug. Then the biggest questionable delay for me was a trademark issue.
The game was supposedly ready to launch on March 1st and as far as we all knew, it was coming. However, on the week that they were ready to release a gameplay video, they told us about trademark issue and that the game would need to be put back 10 months. Then they announced that the video could not be shown and would need a discussion with their lawyers. I mean what??
If the delays where all about a trademark, surely you would remove the name from your website, YouTube channel and videos, your social media accounts and so on… Then in an interview they told IGN that they were always planning to delay the game. So, from all this you can see why so many of us who were interested have now become sceptical that this was a real title.
So, we finally got some gameplay to watch, a full 10 minutes of the game (check the video above). Yet again, there is something not completely right about it. There are good points and negatives ones to take away from the video, but for me, it’s mostly negatives.
The Good
First of all, we have something that resembles an actual game. While it’s not the same quality as what we saw from the teasers and reveals, we finally saw something. The video focuses on two characters, though we mainly see the gameplay from only one characters perspective. It starts off what looks to be a quiet part of a town or suburban area. There are a few houses that look like we can venture in. However, we are guided towards one particular house where we see some looting and a craft bench. This for me IS the highlight of the whole video. The craft bench showed us what we could put together and what mods we could put on our chosen weapon. There seems to be quite a bit we can customise as well.
The environments, the world that The Day Before is set in does look aesthetically pleasing. You get a sense of the scope of the map when you finally enter the city. However, that’s probably as far as I would go in terms of good points.
The Bad
The Visuals like I said, the environments do look good, yet the character models seem to be a bit fuzzy. They don’t quite yet fit the world that they inhabit. This may change in time, but by how much? The two characters we saw on screen didn’t move as fluid as I’d hoped for a title that was due to launch in a few weeks. Their movements seemed quite awkward at times or rigid during certain areas of the map.
The world itself seemed empty or lacked any substance. I know it’s a zombie survival game, however, you think there would be more ‘life’ to it. There are probably no more than 10-15 zombies in they video that we saw. The zombies don’t seem to react all that well either and when they do, they seem to just run forward at you in a straight line. This is evident from the start of the video when you see 3 zombies standing in a line. It’s like they were ready for the player (more on that in a moment) when they popped around a corner.
When they first enter the city part of the map, the entrance looks like it was ripped right out of The Division assets. The way the walls, barriers, gateway and even some of the vehicles looked to me screams The Division Dark Zone. Once past the entrance we saw a group of zombies, which I had hoped they would engage to see some action. This was not to be the case, instead the player moved around to a shop or food outlet. You could argue that they wanted to avoid conflict with the aim to survive. This is a valid point, however, if you are trying to showcase your game, you want to show off certain features.
I was expecting them to show us some zombie horde action, how they act or to see how many of them could be on the screen at once. This was probably not shown due to performance issues or possibly crashes that might have occurred. Some of the play seemed more of a rehearsal than a walkthrough as some areas were purposefully avoided. I was hoping to see more interactions with the world around them, entering more buildings and more gunfights. Again, I understand that we are seeing a survival game, but this was the time for FNTASTIC to show off their work. Yet all we got was nothing more than a walking simulator.
Then there was a small second video that the developers released. This was to show them ‘playing’ the game, which for me did more harm than good. The video shows them sitting in front of their PC/monitor playing the game for about 40 seconds or so. If you look closely, the movements of the player on screen and the developer who is playing don’t quite sync. It’s as though he was forced to sit there for the appearance of him playing. The movements across the keyboard and mouse were rigid and minimal. IF they wanted to use a video to show them, they were playing, they should have setup an action sequence with different gameplay or something.
I could go on and on about all the negative aspects that I noticed, but I feel it would be like shooting fish in a barrel at this point.
This was a game that was supposed to be ready by March 1st. So, you can see why they delayed it for another 10 months. At this point I’m not that impressed with The Day Before. The developers over at FNTASTIC really need to dig their heels in to make this work. A big showcase at E3 would be a huge move for them, if possible, yet I can’t see this happening.
I would really love this title to be an outstanding game. However, I’m just not feeling it now. I guess as always, time will tell.