How Ready At Dawn finally delivered on its vision for The Order: 1886

GamesBeat: The last year or so, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the quality of motion capture graphics in games. Call of Duty, these kinds of games. They’re well-built enough now to preserve that illusion, that it’s a real person. The Order certainly looks like that as well. Are you happy with that aspect, or did you feel like the tech is still changing?

Weerasuriya: We’re in a good place, a very good place when it comes to that, but I can definitely tell you there’s a lot more common. There are things that, right now, we could do — and that I’m hoping we’re going to do pretty soon – that are going to give people the little things that were missing.

When you watch something, you can’t really pinpoint why something’s wrong. You just think, “It’s cool, but something’s missing.” You can’t put your finger on what it is. One thing we’re going to pursue, hopefully, is capillary dilation in the face, to get the blood flow changes in the face with temperature. You can see those things when people’s emotions change. It’s surprising, but you don’t have to be an expert to notice those. Everybody who sees a person emoting will say, “Oh, it’s really cool, the animation is perfect, but there’s still something…” You know there’s something lacking, and it’s things on that level. Because we’re so used to dealing with people — people know people. We’re the best judges of what is real and what is not.

You’re right. We’re in a great place. But between what we’ve achieved with this and what we want to do, there’s always something better. Hopefully we’ll get there very soon.

GamesBeat: How was that last stretch for you guys?

Weerasuriya: Gruesome. Hell. [Laughs] It was really hard. It’s never been easy. This one was particularly hard, though, because we poured so much energy and so much of ourselves into this game. The last stretch was this idea that—We talked about this a little earlier in the morning. You know what you have in your hands, but you only see the game come into its own right at the end. It’s always the same. You get there so late. Only at the end that can you fully realize that you have a great game on your hands. Meanwhile you’re criticizing everything along the way, everything that isn’t what you want it to be or that you don’t see yet.

That last stretch was very trying, especially because we’re a bigger team than we ever were. It takes a lot more people, a lot more hands on deck to finish something like this. It was challenging.

Above: From left to right: Lafayette, Lady Igraine, and Galahad.

Image Credit: Ready at Dawn

GamesBeat: Did the PS4 live up to your expectations?

Weerasuriya: That’s one thing I’m pretty happy about. The PS4 gave us an amazing platform to work on. We all had reservations early on, when it was being designed, about things here or there, but the reality is that those were addressed as we went on. That’s what was so gratifying about all of it.

When we started the project and the PS4 was very early, we were talking about the hardware, talking about the specs, and they listened. It’s amazing to have a platform manufacturer listen to all these people saying, “No, this will be better.” Because those changes were made, we ended up with the platform we asked for. We got what we wanted. Because of that, it gave us an amazing platform to build a game on.

Above: The Thermite Rifle burns enemies by melting aluminum pellets over their heads.

Image Credit: Ready at Dawn

GamesBeat: Anything you’d look back on as critical decisions you made, things that turned out well?

Weerasuriya: On many sides. On the tech side, everything was a risk, it seems like. We tackled certain systems that hadn’t been done. I talked about physics. Certain systems there hadn’t been done in games. We didn’t know if it was going to work until we attempted it. Certain things had never quite gotten there. For us it was a proud moment to know that it worked, that it made the game feel more real. When you run around with Galahad and see the cloth flapping in the wind on top of the airship, you suddenly feel like, “That came together. That’s cool. That’s what we were looking for.”

Beyond that, on the story side, on the gameplay side, we took a lot of chances – how the gameplay was going to play out, how the pacing was going to play out. I have to say, it broke through. It made for a game that’s paced differently. It’s not what people are going to expect, but it’s something we wanted to try. Especially with a new platform, you want to give players something they haven’t seen before, rather than just giving them exactly what they’ve expected.

GamesBeat: Anything you feel like you’d go back and change?

Weerasuriya: What could I go back and change? The size of the stuff we wanted to do — the game was originally, my God, it was massive. When you start that way it’s both good and bad. It gives you goals to achieve, but it also gives you a lot of fear, about how much you can do. We managed that well, although I think we could have taken a little bit more time early on to get to the core of everything. Lucky for us, we did get to it eventually.

GamesBeat: Did you leave a lot of room for sequels, then?

Weerasuriya: Honestly, yes. The whole idea behind writing this was to give you the first window into the intellectual property and tell a story. As an IP, a large IP, absolutely. There’s a lot of marketing stuff that’s in the present day, so you can imagine that this world spans a long time.

GamesBeat: When you were making those other games, like the God of War games, what were you thinking about as far as this title? What did you dream of doing? Where did that original vision came from?

Weerasuriya: We were always discussing the type of gameplay we wanted to do. We knew as developers, especially the directors — we were talking about how we wanted to achieve the goals we had. We slowly took the core ideas and decided this was where we wanted to stand – a third-person action shooter – and that was the start of how the gameplay came to be. But the IP was something that existed before. We infused it and melded it and made it work. Ultimately all of what we’ve done in the past was a means to an end. The end was getting to do our own IP.

Above: The Order: 1886

Image Credit: Sony