Despite its tumultuous development and abrupt closure, The Day Before may be seeing new life thanks to modders. Following the game’s removal from Steam and the shuttering of developer Fntastic, a group of programmers are working on an offline mode that would allow players to experience the world of The Day Before independent of online servers.
The project, spearheaded by Twitter users Luci0 and fskartd, aims to bypass existing online authentication by rerouting server connections to a local environment. This would allow players to launch and explore the game’s environments without relying on Fntastic’s defunct infrastructure.
Progress is still in its early stages, and initial tests have successfully loaded maps and spawned player characters. Unfortunately, movement and interaction functionalities aren’t working yet. Additionally, the game’s online-focused nature presents challenges in making things like server-maintained economies or multiplayer interactions stay in offline mode.
The modders have expressed cautious optimism, and there’s no timeline for completion. What most people are likely wondering is why even bother. Plenty of YouTube videos show how The Day Before was very likely a scam that didn’t work out well, and the game is awful. GamesRadar also has a good timeline that tells the facts, but even that shows that the game was a cash grab at best.
While definitively calling it a scam requires legal judgment, the evidence paints a damning picture. Maybe the idea is to make an offline version as a way of letting people look around and see one of the biggest gaming controversies of all time. I wish the team luck, and I hope that they are successful. They don’t have to make a game, but it’d be nice to see if there was a real story or something there.
