‘No clans, no raids, closed hubs’: The Day Before was never an MMO, according to dev

Shortly after The Day Before Developer FNTASTIC shut its doors citing a financial failure, in an interesting turn of events, a former member of the studio’s staff revealed that despite all the marketing claiming it’s an MMO, the game was never developed as one.

Speaking to Dual Shockers on Dec. 12, the anonymous ex-dev claimed no one on the development team knew why The Day Before was marketed as an MMO. “It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics,” they shared. “Not one RPG mechanic was implemented — skills were an idea, and they were in the prototype stage, but nothing more.”

Highlighting miscommunication between the FNTASTIC founders and its dev team to be a driving factor behind the game’s questionable marketing, they further explained why The Day Before was never built as an MMO, but was meant to be more like a mix of Rust, DayZ, and Escape from Tarkov. Well, we now know why it turned out to be a disappointing extraction shooter. 

“There was no possible way to put a lot of people in the world or make the world bigger,” the dev shared. “From the beginning, the idea was that servers would be under 100 people — that is not an MMO. No clans, no raids, closed hubs. It’s been that way for over two years.”

The dev also claimed that every decision regarding The Day Before, including gameplay and design tweaks, was made by the founders—Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev—and it led to many “good ideas” being discarded and “a lot of stupid ideas” being implemented instead. 

“Anyone who complained too much was kicked off the team,” they said. “A lot of stupid ideas were implemented, removed, and re-implemented because the brothers thought they knew better than us about what people wanted. A huge amount of time and work was wasted because jobs had to be done and re-done.”

After its first gameplay trailer dropped in 2021, The Day Before became the most wish-listed Steam game, thanks to the striking visuals and exciting gameplay features that FNTASTIC promised. In fact, for many players, it was too dreamy to be true; they were convinced that the game wouldn’t be half as good at launch. 

Well, the community’s worst fears turned out to be true, with The Day Before became one of the most controversial video game projects of all time. FNTASTIC is now permanently shut down, and while the game’s servers are still available, its future is bleak. 

The fact that The Day Before was deliberately mismarketed as a survival MMO when it was meant to be a third-person zombie shooter is outrageous, begging the question, are the scam allegations against FNTASTIC really true? 

In the absence of any point of contact for FNTASTIC, which has now closed its doors, Dot Esports has reached out to Mytona—The Day Before publisher—for a comment.