Hi guys,

first I want to tell you that I don't have any experience in game development. I work as a developer but in a totally different environment, so I got some basic knowledge about programming and stuff but not for games in general.

I have a question that has bothering me for a long time and which is serious. I don't want to blame anybody!

The question came up fresh again yesterday after the early access release of the game "The day before". Maybe you already heard about it. It was announced as a open world mmo with some incredible looking gameplay trailers since years. Since yesterday we know that the game is totally different.

If a game is done by a small team I can totally understand when the final game has graphical downgrades to the trailers. I can also understand if the ope world is not that big as promised or if the game misses some gameplay features that were promised. I can imagine the reasons for that.

But there is one thing I really don't understand and I want to understand. The trailers showed a nice gunplay with some nice hit feedback and so on....but the final result looks and feels not really good. What is the reason for such a downgrade. In my ( noobish ) thoughts, this is some pretty basic feature every game engine delivers and it's not restricted to technical restrictions or so. When they created the gameplay trailers they already had it implemented. Ok, they created some fake gameplay but there was gameplay and it showed: they can do some proper gunplay. Even if they realized "we can't do this graphics, this huge world etc.." why not keep the gunplay at least.

This question really bothers me!

I don't want to blame the game, I just used it as a fresh example. I wish all the luck for the developers that they can deliver a great game in the near future that every player is happy with!

Thanks in advance

The nasty thing about The Day Before is that it wasn't "meant" to be a game like the ones from its super-early trailers. Those developers aren't exactly small either because they have worked on mobile games before and have a track record coming from old developer studios (or quite literally, an older name). They've had a nasty history of making big hype for their games and expecting it to be the next big thing .. but not putting in the work to legitimately make it happen. Prop Night was one of their previous games where the early tests and release had that strong hint of, "this isn't completely original but it could be fun and shape up nicely" and then the developers literally ghosted everyone and disappeared. Some of the super die-hard fans of that game are now community managers for the newer develop studio .. and were legitimately hyper-defending The Day Before.

The main point of the game was to essentially blow up and become hyped .. so that other companies would consider donating/investing in the game. For example, you had IGN put a spotlight on the game for its trailer alone .. and Nvidia even was on board with delivering what were at the time super high-end GPU's in mass numbers to the developers. And during the period where the game was announced, you can imagine all this could have gone straight into the crypto boom because the developers already "won" when they have investments and big names backing them.

It wasn't until the game was nearing its supposed release date when they realized they had to deliver on a game .. and their trailers were clearly too polished under what could've been the older engine they were used to (specifically Unity) .. and they made the super-brave decision of, "we'll delay the game because we're switching to a superior engine" which can be understandable .. but they missed almost all of their big announcements and release dates with excuses after excuses and playing the victim to it all (a Steam Maintenance suddenly "broke" their Steam Page, a Calendar app already copyrighted/trademarked the name .. because the developers didn't even think to try doing or clearing that up and went into a very public "go attack this small developer and bully them into giving up the name" outcry.

If that doesn't get into it deeply enough, the developers also called for "volunteers" who get to help work on the game but at no cost .. and some of these people became "paid volunteers" over time. But otherwise that I know and can say, there are definitely very fishy and suspicious people on the moderation team who've been on other similar games (specifically a Phasmophobia-clone that was shamelessly delving into very shady and suspicious practices you'd hear from everywhere else that would've been bannable anywhere - such as buying viewers for a perpetual livestream that was in actuality a 20 minute video on loop over the course of several months and no dropping numbers of viewers who are clearly bots). That person didn't get the credit they wanted for being a "professional developer with decades of experience on numerous AAA games" so they apparently threw a tantrum and left that game to become one of the head moderators of The Day Before's development team. It's wild to me .. the amount of delusion in the whole "this is the BEST GAME EVER" and the sheer amount of reactionary bans they deliver because they were offended on behalf of the game they're such a big fan of .. and then they walked away because they didn't get the glory they wanted.

So at least to try and answer you, The Day Before has A LOT of drama because the red flags were all there to those who saw it building up. It was likely a real game - but it absolutely was something way too big for developers who are used to creating literal shovelware and asset flips expecting for big companies and for HUGE masses of potential fanboys wanting to jump in and clout-chase their way into what was supposedly going to be the next big thing ever (tm). I seriously wouldn't consider it to be an example of game development gone wrong because there are way more examples of it being resolved and developing because of a real programmer background and conflict of scopecreep/feature creep/project management woes.

One thing that comes to my mind is that they initially didn't have that game and just animated something to hype people. I have to say I haven't seen the game, neither in trailers nor in game, so i'm just speculating with my knowledge for this type of things.

However, there are some other options in case the animation is not the one.

Change in development

It could be that at one point, they decided to change that system for a better one they thought about, but either became very complicated to add, or was not added in time, and as a result, lost the original system, or similar. Sounds very unprofessional, but could be a possibility.

Gameplay editing

Similar to the first paragraph, but instead of an animation, they simply edited a gameplay with nice fx for the trailer. It's similar to how, for marketing, a brand like McDonalds puts photographies of amazing burgers, but once you buy one, it's a totally different story.

Bad management

When you make a small game like the ones you see in NG, is easy to make a system like that, call that a day, and continue programming the rest without further trouble. In a bigger game however, there are changes constantly, mainly because of the search for innovation.

If they wanted to achieve a great open world game, they probably wanted to make everything as good as possible, which in some cases would mean changing things that used to look good, but needed a change. If they didn't organize for those possibilities, it's very probable everything fell down from there.

There could be many other reasons, but I believe those are the most common ones