http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/13/e3-2013-the-order-1886s-obsession-with-alternate-history


E3 2013: The Order: 1886’s Obsession With Alternate History
And you thought the 19th century was dire in real life.

by Colin Moriarty June 12, 2013


PlayStation 4 is getting perhaps its most intriguing exclusive from a very unlikely source. Ready at Dawn, the Sony-affiliated (but technically independent) developer, well known for its God of War games on PSP, has made the great leap from handheld to console. The Order: 1886 is the result, an alternate history take on 19th century England that merges a familiar and well-worn setting with unique technology and a mysterious, monster-like foe.

In a conversation with IGN, Ready at Dawn co-founder and creative visionary behind The Order: 1886 -- Ru Weerasuriya – explained a great deal about his upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive, including what it’s about and where the inspiration for the game comes from.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/06/10/order-1886-e3-announcement-trailer

At the PlayStation E3 press conference, we caught our first glimpse of The Order: 1886. It was an unfortunately brief moment that left us with more questions than answers, but believe it or not, the entire cutscene is captured in-engine. Weerasuriya promised that The Order’s actual look was very reminiscent of what we saw in that crisp trailer. “This is what you can expect when the game comes out,” he said.

The Order is about as far from a handheld game as possible. Indeed, from the looks of it, it’s a bona fide triple-A next-gen title. Not surprisingly, Ready at Dawn’s plan was always to take on a project this ambitious, broad, and complicated. “We’ve been wanting to scale up for a long time, to do something that we’ve wanted to do from the very beginning, when we started the company ten years ago,” Weerasuriya admitted.

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Before Ready at Dawn jumped into creating The Order, the studio “never felt like everything aligned” to undertake such a project. “We never felt like the team, the technology, the hardware, and the idea, we never felt until now, until 2010, right around then, when we started having conversations about the PS4, that’s when we felt like, funny enough, this is the right time.”

In an age where exclusives from outside of a hardware manufacturer’s first party are becoming increasingly rare, The Order stands out. Then again, Ready at Dawn has established a long-time working relationship with Sony Santa Monica, which will help the much smaller studio bring its game to the masses, even if that studio isn’t owned outright by Sony.

“I never wanted to pigeonhole ourselves as being, you know, we’re just going to do one thing, we’re just going to be a first party, work with first party,” Weerasuriya confessed. “There’s always the question of what’s best, right? And the beauty of our relationship with Sony was that they’ve always done something that was right for us… it always felt like they always understood us. And we always understood them in some ways.”

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/06/11/the-order-1886-ign-rewind-theater-e3-2013

And it was with that in mind that an exclusive next-generation title made sense. “The jump to PS4 was a conscious decision, knowing that we could get the best out of a single piece of hardware. Our team is that kind of team. They can concentrate on one piece of hardware and take the most out of it, like we did for PSP” when the studio created Daxter and the two handheld God of War games.

The Order: 1886 is a third-person action adventure game that relies a great deal on battling with futuristic-looking guns, as seen during the latter half of the trailer. However, Weerasuriya noted that The Order doesn’t rely on a “single tone.” It will deliver different kinds of gameplay experiences and combat situations in its campaign, which is story-driven and linearly delivered.

In The Order, players take control of Galahad, the bearded male prominently displayed in the game’s lone trailer. However, there are three other characters in the game that are part of his group, not surprisingly known as The Order. In the game’s lore, The Order’s existence spans a millennium of alternate history, as humanity finds itself in perpetual combat with a mysterious, decidedly inhuman force.

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“The Order is the group that has been watching over mankind,” Weerasuriya said, and the tides have recently turned in their favor following humanity’s headlong stumble into the Industrial Revolution. With all-new weapons at their disposal, humans have finally been able to hold their own against this mysterious threat, and it’s at this point that The Order: 1886 begins in earnest.

But where did such a strange idea come from? Where did Ready at Dawn come upon this alternate history plot? Weerasuriya explained. “The idea came from a lot of places. Of course, it takes a team to build an IP. A big part of the original genesis of the project was ideas that I have been toying with for a long time. I’ve always wanted to write something that was less created, as in I could make anything I wanted to. I was always thinking of how much better we could make things if it was grounded in the reality that people knew.”

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“The genesis was really about trying to build on the common consciousness of people, like the things they know. But what if the things they know weren’t really the way they thought they were?”

Things in The Order: 1886 are certainly not as you would think. The Industrial Revolution happened in the 19th century as it does in actual history, but the results of the revolution were different. Weerasuriya emphasized “the suspension of disbelief” in the story, because things like The Order’s firearms are incredibly advanced, while normal folks use horses and carriages to get around.

Meanwhile, there are blimps and zeppelins floating in the air decades before they were actually invented. In this way, The Order relies on a hodgepodge of elements that don’t necessarily fit together, but don’t quite look awkward alongside one another, either. Weerarsuriya believes that this combination of elements makes sense if you make the world around it believable. “If you sell it to people, if you show it to people, they’ll believe it,” he said.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/06/10/ign-news-ready-at-dawn-announces-the-order-1886

That realism transcends the characters in the game. Real people from history are set to appear in The Order: 1886, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that those people will be as they are in the real historical timeline. When asked if a character like Jack the Ripper would appear in the game, considering the game at least partially takes place in the London district of Whitechapel during the decade when the Ripper’s murders took place, Weerasuriya was evasive.

What Weerasuriya was decidedly candid about was his game’s complex mythology and backstory. “There have been a lot of branches in this history that have happened very early on, way before 1886,” he said. “The big change that really happens and the reason why we picked 1886 is the change that happened during the Industrial Revolution… the moment where the most amazing minds in the history of humanity, where man basically changed from an agricultural society to an industrial society… we used that as a catalyst for something else, this war that was going on for a long time was stagnating. As a matter of fact, humans were losing the war for a long time. And the Industrial Revolution allows man to basically get weaponry that finally puts the advantage in their hands.”

The Order is a group that has a presence the world over – “the IP is broad,” Weerasuriya noted – but 1886 will take place entirely in England. “I’m a history buff, I love the Victorian era,” he later continued, noting that late-19th century Britain was the perfect place and time for a game that melds so many different, conflicting elements. Just don’t call it steampunk.

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“We didn’t want to make it to the point where it felt too futuristic. That’s why we wanted to stay away from steampunk. It’s not that far, it’s not ,” he noted. “We picked this moment because it felt right visually, it felt right contextually, it felt right for everything we wanted to build.” Bladerunner and From Hell were two licenses that Weerasuriya admitted helped influence the game, especially the latter, “where you see the dark, gritty side of London.

The Order: 1886 is a ways out yet; neither Weerasuriya nor Sony would confirm when the game was slated to be released for PlayStation 4. But in the meantime, will Ready at Dawn ever return to its handheld roots, perhaps with a Vita iteration of God of War?

“We’ve never said no to anything. Our company is a one-game-at-a-time company, we’re not going to split off and do multiple things. Our technology does run on Vita, we’ve always made sure that our technology always kept up with anything that was out there. So, maybe? All I can tell you is maybe.”

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