The Day Before is an upcoming open-world multiplayer survival horror game, where players fight and scavenge to survive in a post-pandemic America infested with zombies. This is obviously not an entirely unique idea for a game, as quite a few games have done this or some variation of this in the past, but it does have the chance to make its mark the genre.
One game that The Day Before looks like it draws some inspiration from is DayZ, which has a very similar premise: it’s a post-apocalyptic open-world multiplayer survival horror game where players fight and scavenge to survive. There is specifically one mechanic from DayZ that’s is very important to the game’s success, and it’s something that The Day Before should absolutely include.
In DayZ, when a character dies, there’s no coming back. They’re gone. All of the loot that they had is on the ground, and while a character that looks just like them is likely controlled by the same player now somewhere else on the map, they’re never going to get the things that character had back. (Unless, of course, they make the trek across the open-world to where they happened to die, and their loot was miraculously not taken by another player.)
This is a mechanic that should be included in The Day Before, at least with the idea of the game that’s been presented thus far. It shouldn’t be a case of a character dies and they spawn a couple of blocks away, or they die but they get to keep so of their stuff—if a character dies, it should be extremely punishing.
One reason for this is because permadeath adds tension to each and every situation. The knowledge that, if something goes wrong and a character dies they’ll have to start from scratch, makes players stop and think about the risk/reward of every situation. If they decide that a certain situation is worth the risk, it’s an a sure thing that their hands are going to be shaking as they do whatever it is they’re trying to do. Every little sound is going to make them jump, every shadow is going to make their heart stop, and this is only possible because of permadeath.
Without permadeath, death in a video game just seems like an inconvenience. Dying just means it’s going to take a player longer to accomplish something than they’d hoped, but at the end of the day, they aren’t going to remember that death. The decision that they made leading to the death isn’t going to keep them up at night, because there weren’t any stakes. This is what makes games like DayZ and other video games with unavoidable death so memorable. It’s what creates those moments that players don’t forget.
Permadeath also comes with the added benefit of making every item that players loot feel like it has much more value than it would otherwise. In a game where dying means losing everything, suddenly every single item in a player’s backpack, from a water bottle to a rifle, has a lot more value. Every single thing took effort to obtain, and that might not be possible in the next life.
The Day Before and DayZ comparisons will likely continue until The Day Before releases, and it will be interesting to see if the games are similar enough that one becomes the premiere open-world zombie survival game, or if their differences are severe enough that each has its own crowd.
The Day Before is currently in development for PC.
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