The Order: 1886 a ‘filmic, linear, third-person action adventure’

The Order: 1886, Ready at Dawn’s newly-announced PlayStation 4 title, is a “third-person action adventure with shooting mechanics,” studio boss Ru Weerasuriya told the PlayStation Blog.

“It’s very much story-based—it’s a linear story-based game,” Weerasuriya said. “We’re trying to tell a story. It’s what we call a filmic experience.”

The game is set in London, a city with “real diversity,” he said. “There are moments throughout history that have played out there. It has a very interesting history, particularly at the end of the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. Because this game is based in the real world, we wanted to feed off that and use some of the events, the people and the stuff that existed in that time to accentuate and bring our IP into a world that is believable.”

The Order‘s London won’t be a “1:1 mapping” of the city, of course, but it will “try and stay as true as possible to it.” Weerasuriya promises “you’ll recognize a lot of things.”

“There are obviously some things we’re going to put in there that don’t exist, and we’ve moved certain locations a bit, but as you can see from the trailer, when you pass in front of the Thames, Parliament is where it’s supposed to be and London Bridge is where it’s supposed to be. We don’t want people to go ‘Nah, this doesn’t look right.’ You’ll be interacting with real people, real events, and real places.”

Ready at Dawn, coming from hit PSP games like God of War: Chains of Olympus and Daxter, decided to move away from the portable scene in 2008, after learning “little by little” how to build its own IP.

“We’ve done well on a single platform,” Weerasuriya said. “We’ve tried to push the boundaries of what could be done. That’s the same mentality we’re bringing to PS4. We’re working on a single platform – we want to push it, we want to get everything out of it, and hopefully that’s exactly what we’re going to do – milk it for all it’s worth.”

Now, with The Order, the studio is teasing “very, very cool” gameplay features, which they’ll divulge later, and a “filmic experience” displayed through lens distorition and dirtiness.

“Games have a tendency sometimes to be too clean and crisp,” Weerasuriya said. “We thrive in the dirt. We just love the fact that it feels dirty. It’s filmed in a very realistic way.”