I'm pretty sure that survival MMO The Day Before had one chance, and it's blown it. The game - which has been marred by repeated controversy despite spending months at the very top echelons of the Steam wishlist charts - launched into early access today, and players are already documenting repeated serious bugs.
On the game's subreddit and that community's Discord, multiple bug reports are coming in thick and fast. One of the most substantial issues affects players from the very instant they first get their hands on the controls - there are several clips circulating of players immediately falling through the floor into an infinite grey void. In another clip, a player was teleported through a nearby wall, finding themselves trapped away from the NPC they needed to speak to in order to progress the game.
To add insult to injury, the only way to get out of that void is to start over, and there are further reports that players have been locked out as servers have filled up - in spite of the uncertainty around the game, it remains highly-anticipated by some members of its community, and as such the popularity at launch possibly shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
- "We never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player-focused": Ex-Dauntless dev "can't be silent" after an update under the dev's new owner "gutted the core gameplay and crafting"
- "If someone can’t play the game, the game sucks": Hyper Light Breaker devs explain what went wrong with their open-world roguelike and how they're fixing it
Elsewhere, players have been hit with an entirely game-breaking 'Fatal Error' issue that crashes the game and doesn't appear to fix things even after manual file verification. I've seen footage of some players progressing into the rest of the game, where things do seem smoother, but it's certainly not a strong start.
The issues that The Day Before has faced over the past year are myriad. After initial enthusiasm, the sheer lack of updates from developer Fntastic led some fans to seriously doubt its ability to live up to the hype. After that, a copyright dispute with a calendar app led to a nine-month delay, and the ensuing chaos from that led to the community manager attempting a coup of the game's subreddit. When gameplay footage was finally forthcoming, fans labelled it a serious disappointment, and months later, the game's console release was delayed indefinitely.
After that odyssey, it was pretty clear that much of what remained of the community were either never going to refund their ticket on the hype train, or were simply following along to see just how long it could actually stay on the rails. Fntastic tried to bring people around with a last-minute message to the doubters, but for that message to have worked, launch would likely have had to be flawless. It's definitely not that, and with multiple early adopters suggesting they're immediately refunding the game, The Day Before might not be long for this world.
