Video games and zombies go together hand in hand. While the zombie boom of the mid-2000s seems to have died down in most other mediums, games featuring the brain-obsessed dead are still coming out at a consistent rate. As The Day Before potentially shapes up to be the next big zombie hit, the game needs one major change from what's been shown so far: the gunplay.
The Day Before is an open-world MMO zombie survival game set in a post-apocalypse United States. In it, players will find themselves dealing with the constant zombie threat along with threats from other online players. It's being marketed as a survival game, but based on the gameplay trailers that have been shown off so far, it seems like bullets won't be too hard to come by. The liberal use of automatic weapons and missed handgun shots seem to throw any notion of real survival out the window.
DayZ Gone
Like many games, The Day Before wears a lot of its direct inspiration on its sleeve. Much of the survival elements, menus, and gunplay seem to be heavily inspired by the popular zombie survival game DayZ. Back when it released in 2013, DayZ took the world by storm as a genuinely scary game that took its survival elements as seriously as it took its zombies. Despite a few hiccups, there had never really been a game like DayZ where the player's chances of dying to the elements were just as high as they were of dying to the undead.
However, it seems like The Day Before is taking a little too much inspiration from DayZ. There's nothing inherently wrong with a developer echoing ideas that work in other games, but as many people have pointed out, the two games look very similar. One way that The Day Before could distinguish itself from DayZ is by taking a look at another one of its inspirations: The Last of Us.
As stated above, the gunplay in The Day Before broke some of the tension for viewers of the gameplay trailers: there was a lot of ammo consumption. For many players, there's a direct correlation between the availability of ammunition and tension/fear, and one game series that knows this well is The Last of Us.
Tension and Atmosphere
The Last of Us, another entry in the zombie video game pantheon, uses ammo scarcity to keep the tension high making the player really consider the risk vs. reward of engaging in open combat. If The Day Before wants to have the same high-tension atmosphere of games such as DayZ or The Last of Us, it's going to need to show another side of its combat mechanics.
This isn't to say that giving the player plenty of guns and ammo always deflates the tension of a game, all it takes is a look at the Left 4 Dead series to debunk that, but from what it seems like The Day Before is going for, an overabundance of ammo and weapons might be a problem. If survival is the main mechanic that's supposed to be drawing players in, then there should be some sort of challenge or thought being put into how to actually survive. Solutions to problems in The Last of Us aren't always solved by firing a weapon—and that's a good lesson. Of course, the game has more to show and hopefully there's another layer of gameplay yet to be revealed.
Significantly lowering ammo drop rates in some way would mean some major rebalancing and would potentially change the entire vision of the game. A fix like this obviously would take much more time, however, as The Day Before is going to be an MMO. There's definitely a future where that might happen. MMOs are constantly being rebalanced and reworked and, if The Day Before is successful, the game will be supported for several years after release.
The Day Before is set to release in 2021 and is currently in development for PC.