Three years and a half after the release of The Order: 1886, the PlayStation 4 exclusive action/adventure game is still the game people identify Ready at Dawn with.
In an interview with Polygon, Ready at Dawn CEO Ru Weerasuriya looked back at the game's sales and described them as steady over time. He also maintained that the developers had written a lot of story to lay the ground for potential sequels, though obviously the decision to go forward with another game in the series is squarely in the hands of Sony.
I would say it’s pretty steady since the game has been released. Of course, counting out the first few months for any game is pretty huge, it’s been pretty steady. There’s been kind of a constant group of people playing. And every time people play ... they’re kind of like, ‘Hey, just played your game, loved it. When’s the next one coming out?’ We keep on getting those. So yeah, I think it’s got a long life as far as the game’s concerned.
It’s hard for me to answer that one. I will tell you the same answer I would’ve given in the past before The Order came out, that the IP was built with a lot of work behind it. Even before the release of the game, we put a lot of work on the foundations of why each of these characters are who they are, where they came from, what is behind the story. Not 1886, but what’s behind the story. We asked, ‘Where did it start? Where is it going?’ There is a lot of story that was already written, because we felt, again, writing a game and just kind of isolating it to just the story that it would’ve been was not enough for us.
Ready at Dawn has since released two games. Deformers, published by GameTrust, is a multiplayer brawler game that never really took off with critics or gamers. On the other hand, the narrative adventure game Lone Echo, published by Oculus Studios as a VR exclusive for the Oculus Rift, received praise and awards including 'Immersive Reality Game of the Year' at last year's D.I.C.E. Awards.
Still, Weerasuriya mentioned in the interview that the studio would like to go back to making triple-A titles like The Order: 1886.
Yeah, absolutely. We have it in our DNA. We’ve kind of gone many different places in game design, in game genre, in the ways stories are told. From a platformer, to an action game, to an RPG, to a combat game, to a VR experience, to a third-person shooter, for 15 years we’ve done a lot of different things. But also, again, it’s a tribute to the team and the talent of the team. They had a drive to basically explore, become better. Like, ‘Personally, as a developer, how can you improve your craft?’ All of these people took those challenges on. So, for us to go back to bigger budget and make something on console, yeah, it’s in our DNA. We will always kind of have that balance. I think the studio is never stuck on one thing.
What would like you to see them try next? Tell us in the comments.
