By Jade King
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Remember The Order 1886? If you don’t, it’s okay, I forgive you. Ready at Dawn’s PS4 exclusive released in 2015 and was marketed as a narrative experience to rival The Last of Us - except it was filled with vampires, werewolves, and accents so British they’d make Margaret Thatcher blush. Well, they would if she wasn’t dead.
Thousands couldn’t wait to play it, but the finished product was far too under baked. Despite boasting a gorgeous aesthetic and a compelling world, the full game was far too short with an ending that teased a sequel that would never come. Repetitive combat sequences and mechanics that spent far too long holding your hand didn’t help either. It was a story-driven blockbuster in the best and worst ways, content to put visual splendor above interactivity in a way that only served to hinder investment. Yet it still had a spark, one that remains.
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Like many new intellectual properties, The Order 1886 is in possession of teething issues. Ready at Dawn was clearly feeling out characters and mechanics and how far it could push them while maintaining the cinematic quality it was trying to convey. It didn’t strike the right balance, but such blemishes could easily be addressed and improved upon in a sequel. We’ve seen a similar thing happen with Horizon Forbidden West, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Infamous 2, and so many others I’d be here all day recalling them all.
Games are an iterative medium, with new things being learned and built upon each and every day as developers gain more experience and seek to better themselves. The finished products we as consumers end up playing reflect that ambition, and The Order 1886 was filled with clever ideas that a sequel could do so much with. Back in 2015 it felt like the inverse of so many third-person shooters at the time. It wasn’t deliberate misery porn or grey and lifeless in its visuals, but teased a gothic world dripping with intrigue and atmosphere. So it’s a shame the game we ended up playing failed to capitalise on so much of it. Heck, one of the few Lycan encounters in the entire game is completely recycled.
The Order 1886 was a polarising tease. It played with our expectations by providing an alluring Victorian setting before doing absolutely nothing with it. This is a foreign universe where society and technology progressed in wildly different ways, but instead of allowing us to explore London on our terms we were thrown into loathsome cutscenes and gameplay sequences that often asked you to partake in slow, plodding stealth when electrified rifles and giant werewolves sat waiting just out of frame. It was clearly trying to build a universe where we cared for its characters, but when your campaign doesn’t even hit six hours and manages to feel slow then you know something has gone wrong. All of these pieces eventually come together by the end, but the credits begin to roll long before we have any time at all to appreciate them. It’s boring, which is a bold achievement thinking back on it.
It was all weirdly disparate in its execution, seeking to ape existing trends of the time while striving to be something more. Ready at Dawn didn’t extend into either direction far enough, leaving it to dangle in a pool of mediocrity there was no escape from. Despite everything it does wrong and all the abandoned potential, there is something to this universe that sticks into memory. An ancient order entrusted to hunt down paranormal creatures in a fictional reimagining of London is perfect for a video game series, so much so that it hurts to see it squandered with such magnificence.
A sequel (please call it The Order 1887) could take all of its stronger ideas and turn them into something that reflects narrative blockbusters of the current generation, aiming for something longer and more emotionally resonant without any of the needless bloat. Sony trades on such exclusives nowadays, so it would hardly feel out of place alongside games from Naughty Dog or Sucker Punch.
I doubt we’ll ever see it, with Sony all but wiping The Order 1886 from memory following its lukewarm reception. Yet as the game celebrates its 7th birthday, I can’t help but think back to what could have been if things went just a bit differently. Think about it, we could have been taking down werewolf Margaret Thatcher in the theoretical sequel. GOTY every year.
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