Zombie-based survival MMO The Day Before is out as an Early Access title, and the game’s launch has been met with quite a bit of negativity from its playerbase. At the time of writing, the game is sitting at almost 11,000 player reviews on Steam, with an overall rating of Overwhelmingly Negative.
The negative reviews list quite a few reasons for the response, with several player reviews lambasting a game for mis-representing its genre. Rather than being an open world survival game, The Day Before instead seems to be an extraction shooter that takes place in a relatively small map.
Players have also criticised technical aspects of the game, including laggy online play causing combat to be unsatisfying when fighting against other players, and various bugs throughout the game. One player states that you can fall through the game’s floor and get soft-locked while playing.
As a result of the negative response, developer FNTASTIC has shut down discussions in most of the channels in The Day Before‘s Discord server. The studio released a statement explaining that it needs to curb the overwhelming toxicity coming about after the game’s release.
“We’ve made the decision to temporarily lock the channel for several reasons,” says the statement. “Firstly, it’s essential to let things calm down due to the overwhelming toxicity that we currently cannot manage effectively. Secondly, we need to channel all bug reports to the development team, and we can’t accomplish this if we aren’t allowed to share those reports.”
“Continuous moderation here is diverting our time away from addressing major bugs and making crucial fixes. A patch is in the works, so please be prepared for an upcoming game update.”
Earlier this week, FNTASTIC issued quite strange statement about the game’s release, complete with a segment dedicated to those who “didn’t believe in us,” where the studio states that it doesn’t “hold a grudge” against critics. Curiously, the statement also asked players to stop accusing the studio of “scamming” players or having developed an “asset flip”.