Announced just a few days ago, The Day Before is an open-world survival MMO set in a post-pandemic America, where players have to cope with flesh-hungry infected (zombies) and scavenge anything they can find to survive.
While a gameplay trailer did reveal a little bit about the game, there still isn’t an overabundance of information available yet. It’s not certain how big the map is, if there’s one big map or many smaller maps, what exactly happens when players die, or how progression works. That said, what has been shown looks really promising, though some aspects of it look vaguely similar to another game: The Division. The Division is another post-pandemic MMO, though it seems like The Day Before is going to handle many things in a meaningfully different way.
The biggest difference right off the bat between The Day Before and The Division appears to be the former’s emphasis on survival, as opposed to The Division‘s emphasis on upgrading a character. At its core, The Division is still an old-school MMO, where the gameplay loop revolves around acquiring better and better gear for a character in order to do harder and harder content.
The Day Before appears to be handling this differently: it seems to be more about simply surviving. In order to do this, players need certain supplies. In the gameplay trailer, ammo, medical supplies, gasoline, shelter from the cold, and energy seem to all be things that players need to keep on top of in order to not find themselves stuffing someone else’s backpack. This creates an entirely different style of game from The Division. In The Day Before it seems like deciding whether or not to take a fight or if a location is too risky to loot becomes important, as opposed to The Division where every situation represents an opportunity to give a character XP.
Running around the open-world of The Division doesn’t really create any tension; after all, if a character dies, they’ll simply respawn with their things at the nearest respawn point. This ensures that few situations in the game are truly stressful, and the engagements players choose to get in don’t really have any ramifications. That’s not a shortcoming of the game at all, it’s simply the kind of game that it is.
The Day Before appears to be a much different experience than that. Any situation in The Day Before appears to be loaded with dangerous possibility. Even if players feel confident in their ability to take down opposing players without much effort, the sound made in the ensuing fight has the possibility of drawing the attention of the zombies. This game doesn’t appear to have any problem throwing hordes of zombies at a player at any given time, so it seems like situations have the possibility of spiraling out of control with terrifying speed.
This sense of danger is going to make players think before just about any decision they make. It might even create situations in which players find each other in the world, but because of one problem or another, decide not to fight each other. Every fight is going to drain useful supplies, and a fight or escape from zombies is going to further drain that, not to mention possibly separate players from each other or their vehicle.
Plus, it’s not clear exactly what happens to players when they die. Losing their loot definitely seems to be the case and would absolutely be a solid punishment, especially if the player has survived for a long time and amassed quite a bit of useful gear. But things could be further complicated too, depending on where players respawn. If the map is huge and players could spawn anywhere inside of it, dying could create a situation where regrouping as a team proves difficult.
Some types of danger in The Day Before seem a bit similar to the tense feelings present in The Division‘s Dark Zone, though the mechanics that seem present in The Day Before seem more complex and punishing.
The open-world in The Division is very well-detailed and looks beautiful, but it’s not a very organic or dynamic world. Things are more or less going to be the same every time players step outside; with a predictable open-world like that, exploring it isn’t really a part of the gameplay loop.
Not much is known about the open-world in The Day Before, but the simple fact that other players exist inside of it and can be hostile or friendly makes it an open-world that has the possibility of being fresh each time. It’s impossible to know what to expect from another player, and so it would be impossible to know what to expect each time players log onto the game. Players could set up ambushes at well-known looting locations, multiple groups of players could show up at a location at the same time; anything could happen.
It’s also unclear as to how exactly the zombies are going to work. They might roam around the world in hordes Days Gone style, or they could be a bit more static, more something like 7 Days To Die. Zombies are likely going to be a huge factor when it comes to where players decide to go and where they decide is too dangerous. While The Division does have enemies in the open-world, nothing surprising ever really comes from them once players spend a few hours in the game.
The size of the world could also be an important distinction between these two games as well. The Division has a reasonably-sized open-world that can be traversed without too much time investment. Other games of a similar nature to The Day Before, such as DayZ, have absolutely huge open-worlds, which are especially difficult to traverse both because of the size and the danger present. The size of the world is going to have an impact on how often player encounters happen. A smaller world means running into other players is likely, as well as running into the same player multiple times. This is a bit how the Dark Zone in The Division feels, especially in The Division 2 which is split into multiple smaller DZ’s. This can create a more predictable experience for players, so a larger world is probably for the best in a game of this sort.
The Days Before is currently in development for PC.
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