One of the PS4’s big exclusives that made a splash during E3 2013 was The Order: 1886 from Ready at Dawn Studios, who previously worked on the God of War PSP titles. Following the big reveal, Ru Weerasuriya, CEO and Creative Director at Ready at Dawn, talked about how the footage originally shown was in-engine, while calling The Order a “filmic experience.”
Ru recently talked to GI.Biz about The Order and used games, saying how he thinks “the problem is right now there are retail outlets that are really taking everybody for a ride” and “you can’t make a living at the expense of everybody else.” Going into further detail, he explained:
Unfortunately, they’re not just making a living at the expense of developers but also the consumers because the consumers will see less and less games come out if developers can’t get revenue to make more new titles and keep going as a business.
I think this is something we need to curb on the retail side. We’re putting the consumers in an awkward spot and we shouldn’t have to. Why should they be the ones to deal with a flawed system? They are the guys we do this for. They are the ones who should be able to benefit the most from being able to buy it.
Weerasuriya also added that he doesn’t “think we should stop used games, but we should do something about getting part of the revenue back from GameStop and places like that. That’s not penalizing the consumers; they’ll still get what they want. But I don’t know who’s going to address it.”
Diving into The Order: 1886, Ru detailed how we’ll “still get to experience a lot of the things that really happened in the [real] world,” while also being able to “interact with real people that lived in our world.” Although the game takes place “in that moment of post-inustrial revolution London” and has been labelled as Steampunk, he calls The Order “neo-Victorian London,” because “Steampunk is usually not believable.”
Being a PlayStation 4 exclusive, The Order: 1886 will have a tougher time selling as many copies as possible, but on the subject of going multi-platform, Ru said:
We saw the initial talks about PS4 and what it was going to be and we’ve had a relationship with Sony for 10 years, so we felt it was the right time to not only move but to move to a single platform again where we could bring our expertise to something that could make us realize the game we wanted. Once we knew that internally, we approached Sony and said this is what we have and here’s where we want to go, and they listened to us and we had a great discussion about how big it was going to be, and it turned out to be bigger than expected. So it’s a good conscious decision from us to target a platform that we could make the most of.
He continued:
For us, the number one factor in making our decision was always creative. And to a fault over the last 10 years, we sometimes chose creative over a lot of other things. Yes, of course, there’s an opportunity to make a dual-platform game and there are third-party publishers we can go to, and it’s not something we’ll ever dismiss, but for now since we’ve been so targeted towards working on a single platform it felt natural for us to make that decision regardless of the financial hit we would take.
Ru would like to see the IP expand into other forms of media, but since that is tied into the success of 1886, we’ll just have to wait and see if it sells well enough to warrant those extensions.
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