The latest footage for The Day Before looks awfully similar to a trailer for Call of Duty.
Fntastic’s upcoming open-world zombie survival MMO The Day Before has received a lot of bad publicity of late. Last week’s lengthy gameplay video left fans more than a little disappointed with what they saw. And that’s not the worst of it.
As reported by PCGamesN (opens in new tab), in addition to the footage being underwhelming, fans are now finding that it bears a striking similarity to a Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Zombies reveal trailer from 2020. The likeness was spotted by Twitter user Chroma, who posted images of the two games side by side.
I saw someone say I was “reaching” and another person say “I mean shots through ducts/vents and red moodlighting is fairly common cinematic’s”….So here’s both trailers side by side… pic.twitter.com/vz6YngKLR6February 4, 2023
The Day Before trailer starts with a scene of soldiers slowly making their way through a building, the camera placed behind a grate. As you can see from the images Chroma shared, this is almost identical to a shot from Black Ops’ Zombie mode. The red-hued image of a soldier pointing a gun just off-camera is also questionably similar.
Of course, this could all be a huge coincidence, but a follow-up tweet of the videos running together shows them to be almost identical, down to the very last frame, making this one heck of a fluke, if it is indeed one. The Twitter user also pointed out previous comparisons between The Day Between and other series, including The Division and Resident Evil.
Over on The Day Before, subreddit user BeardyBaldyBald discovered a number of assets from the trailer that Fntastic bought rather than creating them in-house. A separate post (opens in new tab) reveals more premade assets that the same user says are made by PropHaus and sold on the Unreal Engine Marketplace.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using an asset library – it can be a great time-saving approach for developers – this, on top of all the red flags, has left fans worried about “how little effort” Fntastic has put into The Day Before. Discussing the recent trailer, BeardyBaldyBald says, “There’s practically no gameplay, and their assets are mostly bought. So all they did is they put together a level out of premade blocks and walked a character through it.”
The Day Before was once the most wishlisted game on Steam, but mysteriously vanished from Valve’s platform in January. At the time, the developer said this was due to a “minor technical difficulty” but subsequently revealed that it was actually removed because of a copyright claim against the game’s title.
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