The Day Before, one of the most controversial games of 2023, now has modders working to put together an offline mode for the game.
Before launch, The Day Before was Steam’s most wish-listed game prior to release. The game itself was launched in December 2023, to extremely negative reviews. Indeed, four days after the game had launched, it had over 10,000 negative reviews on Steam, due to a large number of bugs and a lack of features.
One reviewer noted that players will be “blown away by the level of scamming this game represents. Do not buy this game, you will be sorely disappointed”
Developer Fntastic announced a shutdown on December 12, with the studio later confirming that the game would be shut down.
“The Day Before will be retired and the servers will be turned off on 22 January 2024. As previously communicated, Mytona, as the investor, has been working in collaboration with Steam to facilitate refunds for all game purchasers,” read a post on the game’s X account. “For any players that have not already had their purchase refunded, Steam will now proactively refund all remaining players.”
Now, modders Luci0 and fskartd are working to make the game available offline. In a Discord message (posted to Reddit) from Luci0, the situation is made clear.
“We’ve managed to bypass the Steam DRM to open The Day Before. We’ve also extracted all game assets using FModel and possess the AES decryption key that was used to encrypt the PAK file. Loading into maps is entirely possible by using the ‘open’ command so, for example, open hub_instance. Upon loading inside hub_instance it turns out that, the game actually does spawn a player but there’s currently no way to possess the character controller. And because of that, we can’t move the player.”
Luci0 specified that the current plan for this mod is to have the “easiest way of starting an Offline game possible, and after that, we’d like to look into actually starting a custom server so that Online Play would also be possible.”
Over on Twitter, Luci0 has said that there’s no release date currently planned for the mod, with it being “very early” in development.
In other gaming news, Star Wars Outlaws has been listed for a late 2024 release date.