After many maligned months and several controversies, The Day Before finally launched into Steam’s early access. Despite many delays and constant back and forth over the legitimacy of the game’s trailers and how the developers treated volunteer workers, the game is actually real and it is a dumpster fire.
At the time of writing this, the game has received over 9,800 reviews on Steam and is rated as Overwhelmingly Negative. Among the many complaints, there are mentions of server issues because they were full or simply crashed, horrendous visual bugs, game crashes, terrible animations, and the accusation that the game has somehow switched genres from MMO to extraction shooter.
The Day Before has let down thousands of players with an awful launch
I can personally attest to all of these things as I was playing it, plus watching streams of the game as soon as I could download the game. It doesn’t start well, as our character wakes in a doctor's office and it takes several minutes of pressing ‘F’ to exit the room. Simply put, The Day Before shouldn’t have been released. It's a bad Escape From Tarkov, but with zombies.
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It only took an hour before social media was awash with clips of players falling through the floor of the opening room. The list of issues and bugs became so long that the game’s official Discord had to apply a 30-minute posting rule on members so they couldn’t spam the channel with complaints.
Thousands of players are angry and are refunding the game calling The Day Before “a scam”. Among the negative reviews are complaints from the large, “not an MMO, not open world. Lying about the genre is a bad start.” to the small, “No melee in a survival game?” The developers Fntastic have seemingly backed themselves into a corner. Will the game be updated and patched to satisfy gamers? It’s possible of course, but it won’t change the fact that the game isn’t what it was advertised to be and they’ll have to go some way to repair the faith that players had kept right up until launch.