The Day Before is an open-world MMO survival game set in a post-pandemic America that has been overcome with a combination of zombies and humanity trying to survive. All of this may seem like the polar opposite of the joy-filled experience that is Animal Crossing, but The Day Before developer Fntastic recently revealed that a part of its game was inspired by Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
It is hard to imagine any connection between the animal-filled social simulator about building a community, fishing, and shopping and a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse. But Animal Crossing: New Horizons recently hit the 30 million units sold, so it may be wise for Fntastic to pull inspiration from the hugely successful game.
What Fntastic pointed to was the mysterious Tom Nook, who is in charge throughout the Animal Crossing games. In many survival-style games, the base building often relies on simple sticks-and-stones resource collecting, but the developer thinks it should utilize more than that. In the same way that Animal Crossing players are in debt to Tom Nook and always working for him, Fntastic may be hinting it has a similar idea for The Day Before.
"In The Day Before, we have the concept of a base different from other MMO survival games. As a hint - we really like the concept in that cute game where there is a greedy raccoon boss," developers Eduard and Aiden Gotovtsev said in an email to IGN.
Fntastic claims that in a post-apocalyptic world, there will be people who are gentle, kind, and want to help as well as people who are selfish and in it for themselves. The story of a game like The Last of Us handled this very well. It looks like for the sake of story, Fntastic wants to make sure it handles this with care, and the gameplay should also align with this fact. That is why something like building up a base should be less about simply finding material and bringing it back to the base and more, perhaps, about working with complicated characters.
This hint the developer of The Day Before laid out is ambiguous, but it does show that Fntastic is thinking outside the box. The idea of building a base through character manipulation, difficult decisions, and building teamwork sounds a lot more intriguing than simply picking up a piece of material.
The Day Before is currently in development for PC, planned for release in Q2 2021.
Source: IGN