In a series of new interviews, Ready at Dawn founder Ru Weerasuriya has reflected upon the successes and failures of its PlayStation 4-exclusive, The Order 1886, stating that the experience made the team “a lot smarter” and that he’s proud of some of the game’s achievements. The Order 1886 failed commercially and was panned by critics but it was universally praised for its technical and artistic achievements, with majority agreeing that the game looked beautiful. Speaking to MCV, Weerasuriya said that RAD attempted to break boundaries and take risks, and the entire experience was a lesson learned.
The Order was really us trying to break certain boundaries, whether it was technical or artistic. We were willing to take risks to see what would work and what wouldn’t. It changed the way we are developing and it cemented certain other things that we have always been able to do well. We have always been at the high end of showcasing what a console can do visually and technically. But it also taught us how and where to take risks, how to approach certain problems and where to manage ourselves, and those lessons we have taken to our co-publishing operation. The self-management lessons we learned over the course of The Order has made us a lot smarter.
In a separate interview with Eurogamer, Weerasuriya seemed least offended by the critic reception and showed that he was proud of breaking technical barriers despite being a small team.
We stayed a small team until the end of that project. People didn’t know that, but we were probably a quarter to a fifth the size of most other AAA teams. For us it’s a proud moment. Like we broke through certain barriers when it came to technology.
He also revealed that while The Order 1886 wasn’t well-received critically, RAD received a lot of praise from within the industry, with studios such as Naughty Dog and professionals such as Hideo Kojima lauding the developer for its work. He then pointed out that The Order 1886 is one of the few games that received a higher user score on Metacritic than the average critic score.
Often times I see Metacritic player scores being usually 20 or 30 points under the critics’ score. That’s most games, actually. It’s funny to see that our scores were at one point the other way around. Our critics score was actually lower than the user score. And then at one point it balanced out, but we broke certain known trends when it came to that kind of stuff.
RAD recently announced its partnership with GameTrust to release De-formers, a physics-based arena combat game coming to the PS4, Xbox One and PC.
What did our readers think of The Order 1886?
