"The Day Before is the epitome of 'Can I copy your homework?'"
After a bizarre series of twists and turns, we finally got a full-fledged gameplay trailer from The Day Before last week, and it looked, well, pretty generic. More than generic, in fact, it felt familiar, and Twitter sleuths reckon they’ve figured out why: They’re accusing the game of copying many of its trailer shots and other marketing materials from completely different games.
In a post on Twitter last weekend, YouTube channel Force Gaming posted a series of clips and screenshots that drew comparisons between The Day Before’s reveal trailer and the original showcase for Call of Duty: Black Ops–Cold War’s zombies mode. If imitation is flattery, then Treyarch must be blushing pretty hard, because it’s almost impossible to deny that the shots in Force Gaming’s comparisons are remarkably similar to the ones in the CoD trailer from 2020.
They can’t even come up with their own trailer ideas. Straight ripping CoD Zombies shot for shot.If you’re following The Day Before for anything other than to watch the trainwreck you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.We’re looking at War Z all over again, for sure. pic.twitter.com/m2BVF2R8rLFebruary 4, 2023
Force Gaming noted that “Not only is the framing, composition, and coloring similar,” between The Day Before’s trailer and the CoD clips, “They’re also in the exact same order, one after the other”. It’s not just CoD, either: The YouTuber also highlighted similarities between The Day Before’s marketing and materials for The Last of Us, The Division, and even SnowRunner.
The response from the community was as scathing as the tweets themselves. The Day Before was once hugely anticipated—the second-most wishlisted game on Steam—but now relevant subreddits, forum threads, and Discord channels have the vibe of a crowd gathered to watch a house burn down.
A comment from thatguyned on Reddit joked that it would eventually be revealed that The Day Before was after someone “fed The Last of Us into some sort of game writing AI,” while another post from turbolasertron fumed that the devs “blatantly copy things from other games to use in their marketing to get people hyped”. The game’s subreddit, meanwhile, is mostly split between equal parts confusion and mockery.
That confusion mostly stems from people’s inability to comprehend what, exactly, anyone is getting out of this increasingly farcical spectacle. It’s not hard to find people ready to call The Day Before a scam, but the game hasn’t taken pre-orders and wasn’t funded by Kickstarter or anything similar, so it’s difficult to understand what the benefit to the game’s creators or publishers would be. While there’s plenty of idle speculation, it’s still hard to conclusively say what the heck The Day Before’s deal is.
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