The Order: 1886 was a one-and-done game released on PlayStation 4 in 2015. It was a pretty good title, pieced together by Ready at Dawn and offering players an immersive, original single-player campaign. It plunged gamers into an alt-history version of London in, you guessed it, 1886, pitting them against werewolves and vampires, among other things.
The Order: 1886 was a deeply cinematic affair, and even the game’s aspect ratio promoted a sense of ‘playing a movie’, but it wasn’t enough to warrant a follow-up title, despite one being planned by Ready at Dawn. In a recent interview, the studio’s co-founder explained why a sequel never arrived.
Missed it by That Much
In an interview with MinnMax uncovered by VGC, it’s revealed why The Order: 1886 didn’t receive a sequel, despite many players asking for one over the years. As the discussion unfolded in the 24-minute sequence, Ready at Dawn’s Andrea Pessino explained:
I don’t think it was the sales – I think it was the critical reception.
Sony is a very proud group and rightfully so, and the critical reception, if it had even been just in the 70s, we would have had the sequel, I’m convinced.
Pessino was referring to The Order: 1886’s Metacritic score, which landed on a not-so-good 63 post-launch. That was despite the game testing well and generating solid responses from previews and mock interviews, Pessino reported.
The Order: 1886’s follow-up title should have arrived in 2018 if everything had gone as planned. Ultimately, the team at Ready at Dawn had to slice and dice the opening game to meet Sony’s deadlines, resulting in some of the game’s more innovative and engaging segments effectively becoming sheer cinematics:
One of the problems is that so much was cut.
A lot of the more subtle narrative parts were lost because so much was chopped away and things that were supposed to be interactive became a movie.
We needed another year, that’s the reality. We needed at least one more year, we didn’t get it.
Here’s the full interview:
The Order: 1886 is one of those games that’ll go down in history as needing a sequel. It fits in nicely alongside the likes of Bloodborne, another PlayStation 4 game that, for many years, fans worldwide have cried out for a follow-up title to.
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For more GPlayr coverage, check out the news that Delta Force’s single-player campaign releases next week