The Day Before gameplay trailer shows 10 minutes of zombie shooting and farmhouse looting

We first got a glimpse at The Day Before when its announcement trailer appeared back in January. The "open-world MMO survival" game looks like it's part DayZ, a smidge The Last of Us, and a bit of The Division thrown in for good measure: explore, scavenge, shoot zombies, and battle other players for resources in cities in the post-apocalypse.

Today you can see a bit more of The Day Before. IGN has an exclusive new trailer showing about 10 minutes of gameplay, which you can watch above, and instead of the city we saw in the announcement trailer, this time we're off to the countryside.

The trailer begins with a radio broadcast lamenting the lost opportunities of the pre-apocalyptic world (with gunshots and snarling heard in the background) before we follow two players in vehicles slowly splashing along a riverbank and driving through a gorge, which shows off some pretty nice looking mud and water effects. Eventually the players investigate a gas station, and some zombie-shooting and supply-looting follows. Then there's some more driving to an isolated farmhouse.

Things get a bit dicier when one player tries and fails to guess the farmhouse's alarm code (I don't know why, since they're already inside the house) and the blaring siren attracts the attention of more zombies, followed by what appears to be enemy players who arrive in a police car. The two players we've been following escape into some sort of fallout bunker as the trailer ends.

I can't say I'm super excited by what I've seen of The Day Before—it really just looks like a mash-up of other games I've played before. I am still interested, though, because I like those other games, and the idea of skulking through the post-apocalypse, gathering supplies, shooting zombies, and encountering other players continues to hold some appeal.

The Day Before is being developed by Fntastic, the team behind open world survival game The Wild Eight. No release date has been set, though it's "coming soon" to Steam. We also don't yet know how many players the MMO will support, how big the world is, how persistence works, or really much of anything else. Hopefully we'll learn more soon.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Read more
Someone holding a compass in nature
The first gameplay trailer for PUBG creator's 'brutal' survival game shows off deadly weather and cozy cabins
Exodus trailer still - our intrepid hero throwing a little side-eye
Exodus, the new game being led by BioWare veteran James Ohlen, finally reveals some gameplay, and boy it sure looks like Mass Effect
A fantasy character aiming a bow while a wizard readies a staff to fight monsters
Enshrouded 1.0 target date and 2025 roadmap revealed, new update arriving today, and dynamic water on the way
Atomfall Gamescom screenshots
Atomfall dev says Rebellion's open world shooter has 'some experimental stuff' that can have a 'huge influence' on the game world: 'It might work out. It might not'
Paul Attreides
Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO
Sci-fi character from Dune
Survival MMO Dune: Awakening launches in May and I am way more excited about it than I thought I'd be
Latest in Action
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
GTA 5 characters
GTA 5 publisher takes legal aim at account-selling site for allegedly raking in 'millions in revenue', while recruiting hackers to keep its cogs turning
Monster Hunter Wilds palico
One of the biggest victories of Monster Hunter Wilds' streamlining is I don't have to deal with those awful gimmick fights anymore
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
Chatacabra from Monster Hunter Wilds
The latest Monster Hunter Wilds event quest gives piles of Armor Spheres for hunting a Chatacabra, making this a very bad week to be a frog in the Forbidden Lands
A hunter posing with an absurd Blangonga outfit in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Attention, fashion hunters: There's a Monster Hunter Wilds mod to disable all those obnoxious glowing buff effects that distract from your fits
Latest in News
Recently appointed Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Here comes Intel's new CEO: a semiconductor veteran that won the same prestigious award as Jensen Huang and Lisa Su
BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 15: Protestors attend the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Picket on August 15, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Lila Seeley/Getty Images)
8 months into their strike, videogame voice actors say the industry's latest proposal is 'filled with alarming loopholes that will leave our members vulnerable to AI abuse'
Orithopter shooting down another in Dune
Dune: Awakening confirms air-to-air combat in ornithopters
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
LocalThunk forbids AI-generated art on the Balatro subreddit: 'I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds'
Inzoi - A Zoi's face in three graphical presets showing a progression from a slightly blurry minimum specs to a higher fidelity recommended specs.
Oh great, the full Inzoi system requirements are posted and I'm barely above the minimum specs so I guess my Zois will be beautifully blurry
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran says a big delay is better than lots of little ones, because sometimes you just gotta 'burn it down and take the other fork in the road'