The controversial Survival MMO, The Day Before, was finally released on December 7, 2023, after several delays. However, it has encountered some initial problems. Additionally, the game features a questionable anti-vaccine storyline.
Here's a summary of the news:
After numerous release delays, the Survival MMO, The Day Before, was finally launched. However, the initial launch has not gone smoothly. Insufficient servers, consistently full capacity, lack of waiting queues, crashes, and game-breaking bugs paint a negative picture of the game. The community's response on Steam is overwhelmingly negative, with a rating of only 13% positive reviews, categorized as “Overwhelmlingly Negative.”
Those who managed to access the game encountered peculiar animations and bugs, but our focus was on the storyline presented through various NPC dialogues in the player hub. One aspect that has drawn our attention is the background story of the zombie apocalypse.
In this narrative, survivors are portrayed as anti-vaccine advocates, while the vaccinated are depicted as turning into zombies. According to the story, a SARS-BG-55 virus, similar to the real-world SARS-CoV-2 virus, existed in The Day Before. The game's story suggests that a vaccine was hastily developed, and those who received it initially improved their condition.
In contrast to the real world, where Covid-19 can have long-term effects like Long Covid or ME/CFS, the developers at Fntastic have taken a different approach in The Day Before's story. Those who got vaccinated turned into zombies after only a few months. In this narrative, anti-vaxxers are essentially portrayed as the heroes of the story.
Leonard tells us where the zombies come from.
"Well, its unfortunate that humanity faced the SARS-BG-55 virus, but even more tragic is what the Azure X vaccine did to those who trusted it in the hope of "curing all diseases". While I was at the hospital, I kept a research journal and monitored the condition of all the patients - both those who received the vaccine and those who didn't.
Three months. Three month after receiving the vaccine, the patients ceases to be a human in the conventional sense. They become so aggressive that this aggression completely overwhlems their human "self". It's a horrifying sight. It seems like we were all so eager to defeat the virus quickly that we took an excessive risk in cheating the vaccine.
So when the Azure X vaccine arrived at the hospitals with positive test results, we immediately started administering it to all SARS-BG-55 patients, hoping to put an end to the widespread suffering. And initially, the vaccine seemed to work! people were visibly improving, expressing gratitude, and reuniting with their families. Little did we know that an inevitable fate awaited all of them in the end.
Too many people received the vaccine. It was even exported abroad. When the aggressive infected individuals took over the streets, it only took a couple of wekks for New Fortune City to completely fall. Thats why we still dont know what happened in other countries. I sincerely hope that the scale of vaccination there didnt turn out as disastrous as it did for us." - Leonard
This draws direct parallels to reality, as during the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers criticized the rapid testing and approval of vaccines, often claiming that the vaccines were harmful, and their long-term effects were insufficiently studied. However, unlike the game's storyline, COVID-19 vaccines underwent extensive clinical trials involving tens of thousands of individuals and did not lead to a zombie apocalypse.
We have reached out to the developer, Fntastic, for a statement and will update the article accordingly if they respond. However, the impression remains that Fntastic may be promoting an anti-vaccine narrative in the game. The storyline could have worked without questionable parallels to reality, with a virus or failed experiment from the Azure Group causing the zombie infection.
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