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

The Order: 1886 is going to be one of Sony’s major games for 2015 when it launches for PlayStation 4 on Feb. 20. If all goes well, it could be one of the company’s next big franchises, like Uncharted or The Last of Us.

I’d love to see this game live up to its previews. It has great 3D graphics, including realistic human faces and incredibly detailed imagery of London in 1886. It’s also got an interesting story and fleshed-out characters, such as the order of knights who keep the world safe from half-breed monsters.

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Irvine, Calif.-based Ready At Dawn Studios, the developer of The Order: 1886, made the game over four years, after years of working on secondary titles such as ports of the Daxter and God of War franchises to Sony’s portable devices. Ready At Dawn recently announced that it had finally finished the code for the game.

Ru Weerasuriya, the chief executive and creative director at Ready At Dawn Studios, spoke at the DICE Summit — the elite game industry event last week in Las Vegas — about the challenge of staying alive as an independent triple-A game studio and the need for universities to train students for the real world of game creation.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: Your talk was interesting. You said you wanted to see better curricula in colleges to prepare people for the kind of jobs you have?

Ru Weerasuriya: Some schools are doing it right, but the reality of education right now on the gaming side seems like it’s very weak, weakly structured. I see a lot of guys starting out, getting out of school, who aren’t ready for jobs. They lack the foundations of traditional art. You need that in so many disciplines.

Right now so many schools are just saying, “You should specialize. Specialize as much as you can.” So they specialize and then they come here to work and you have these guys who are good at one thing they can do, but they need to be supervised 24/7 because you can’t just allow them the freedom to do whatever they want. They don’t have the tools to use that freedom. There’s a disconnect between education for games and what we need from graduates.

GamesBeat: I wonder about some kinds of schools. [University of Southern California] seems to at least have these upper-division classes with large teams. The people on those large teams learn to find different roles within really big projects. That seems like one good way to do it.

Weerasuriya: Like I said, some schools are doing the right thing and taking their own approach. But they’re also asking a lot of advice from people in the game industry. USC is a good example. Champaign has reached out to a lot of people. Southern Methodist University does the same thing. But the problem is that those are the exceptions. USC, in so many ways, is doing a great job. They’re providing a lot of what we need in the industry. But when you consider the number of schools there are in the states and the number that have a game curriculum — enticing kids to say, “It’s a career, come study here and you’ll get a job” – I don’t think they’re prepared to give those kids the education we need.

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GamesBeat: How many people do you have working for you now?

Weerasuriya: Overall about 120, but that includes some contractors that we use.

GamesBeat: How many worked on The Order?

Weerasuriya: All of them, working for about four years. Four years exactly, in fact.

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GamesBeat: What were some of the lessons from that process?

Weerasuriya: My God. Never underestimate what you have to do on a game. It doesn’t matter if it’s a PS4 game or a PSP game. You always start high, big, and then you realize you have to make the game manageable. I don’t think we’ll ever change that. It’s the way we work as a team. But the takeaways, more than anything, are about the things we did tackle well, the things we’d like to tackle better, the things we learned along the way on the technology side and on the design side, the gameplay mechanics, navigation. There are things we wanted to put in, but never did. The takeaway is that this is a first step into a lot of things we want to do. It’s cool to put it out because we needed this in order to build on it.

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?

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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?

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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.

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.

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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.

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.