It had everything to succeed and it became the first great exclusive third-party for PS4. The Order: 1886 launched us into a Victorian London with steampunk aesthetics back in 2015, but the result was a disaster. the adventure of Ready at Dawn It did not meet expectations by any means, resulting in a critical failure among the public and the specialized press. Despite this, everything pointed to a sequel that never saw the light of day, but the history of the project goes back much earlier.
Staging in style
The development of The Order: 1886 It started from 2010, but it wasn’t until E3 2013 when Sony announced its existence to the world. A title that would come only for PS4, with an absolute scandalous graphic power even by today’s standards, and with a very clear commitment: a steampunk shooter with a very clear tendency towards narrative. The plot would involve us throughout the game, but the action sequences looked really promising, albeit without any multiplayer component.
The play would be played solo, embodying Sir Galahad, a member of the lLegendary Knights of the Round Table. The mission of this century-old organization is none other than to prevent the world from being dotted with problematic mixed races such as werewolves or vampires. Their political rule is harshly exercised throughout all these years, as the discovery of an elixir grants members extremely long life along with unique healing abilities.
So we are in 1886 in the capital of England, with the Industrial Revolution fully established and enabling the creation of unique technological gadgets. Nikola Tesla, King Arthur and the Marquis de Lafayette are some of the emblematic characters with whom we will come across in a plot that will begin to reveal betrayals, plots and very dark stories referring to what the participants of the Table are really up to. round. Beyond script twists and plot details, the truth is that the ending couldn’t be more illuminating about the future of the franchise. A post-credits scene between Galahad and Tesla makes it clear that a sequel was on the minds of the Ready at Dawn team, but it never came to fruition.
Gold seems silver is not
Although specialized criticism was yet to be known, the damage had been done a few days before launch. A video was posted on the Internet with a complete game to The Order: 1886 and everyone pointed out the same problem: it only lasted five hours. The debate spread like wildfire through social networks and became the talk of the title. Many argued that it was not worth paying 70 euros for a launch game, to which they got the answer from Ru Weerasuriya, the developer’s executive and creative director.
In an attempt to placate these opinions, the person in charge pointed out that “it is a question of quality, not quantity”, while Andrea Pessino, a member of the study, indicated that in reality the approximate duration was between eight and hours for a standard player. . Faced with such a panorama, February 20, 2015 arrived and opinions were not that they did not change, they intensified enormously. Many conflicting points were pointed out towards the game, especially regarding the very little freedom that it offered to the player.
The scenarios felt excessively linear, typical of a corridor, in which everything was reduced to running into enemies and obstacles head-on. The combat mechanics did not shine for being innovative, encouraging us to look for cover to entrench ourselves and avoid melee encounters. In fact, these are executed with a button press, which results in the automatic knockdown of the enemy without us doing anything else.
QTEs were also another nightmare reported by users. The fights against the final bosses were reduced to correctly pressing the commands that appeared on the screen and we had situations as ridiculous as counting to three by pressing buttons. All this corseted in sequences where many times we barely had to do anything with the controller and with a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, offering the classic black bands as if we were watching a movie. We had different weapons such as rifles, grenades, crossbows and pistols, stealth sequences and we could collect different collectibles in each area to learn more about the world of the title.
game over
Despite the fact that the launch was supported by good sales, the truth is that after a few weeks they fell drastically. A real figure regarding the games sold has never been provided, so we were left wanting to know exactly how the PS4 exclusive performed. The maelstrom of criticism marked the beginning of the end for a game that had already appeared on the market mortally wounded, despite Ready at Dawn’s intentions to produce a sequel. A 63 on Metacritic from the press and a 6.8 from the public was sentence enough.
However, that decision was not in the hands of the company. As Weerasuriya explained, they had ceded the intellectual property rights to Sony, which seemed unwilling to risk such a misstep again.
As for The Order, it was absolutely the company’s desire to have it. We love that game and we are proud of it. Unfortunately, we were at a point in the company’s evolution where it was not possible to own that intellectual property. We hope we never find ourselves in that position again.
Thus, Ready at Dawn continued its course in the industry with De-Formers, a fighting game with special attention to physics that appeared in early 2017 and closed its servers in August 2018. One more failure that did not stop Facebook bought the company in 2020 with the aim of creating content for virtual reality. Therefore, it does not seem that we are going to see a new game based on the universe of The Order: 1886 never more.