In a chat with Ready at Dawn’s Garret Foster and Dana Jan yesterday, the pair delved into The Order: 1886‘s development on the PS4 platform.
“We had kinda kicked around elements and ‘what if’ scenarios as we were working on other games that became the groundwork for this IP [The Order: 1886], but we didn’t start working on this until January 2011,” Dana Jan, Game Director, said. “It was always meant to be a next-gen title; we didn’t have any PS3 target in mind. It was destined for what was next from Sony.”
Ready at Dawn’s internal RAD Engine 4.0 drives the game, but the developer has had close ties with Sony throughout production.
“Developing on the PS4 is actually pretty nice,” Technology Director, Garret Foster, said. “It has a lot of familiar hardware, but it’s arranged in a way – and there are some new additions – that make it really, really powerful. I’m a programmer a geek and I love that we have full access to the hardware; you can really maximize everything you want to do. It’s very useful.
“Sometimes, things can be hard to get up and running, but to make things right – well, that’s a lot easier.”
I couldn’t resist, asking — due to its Victorian era setting — if special moustache tech was built into RAD Engine 4.0.
“It’s actually the base kernel level of our engine,” Foster responded, jokingly.
“We joke about that, but doing hair in games is hard,” Jan added. “I think we still have some room to improve on that in the future. Tackling skin has been something that’s also been difficult.
“We have characters in the late 1800s in London, so we really had to tackle those hairstyles; facial hair was definitely part of it. It took a while to figure it out, but we did; the characters look pretty sweet.”
Jan added that, Assassin’s Creed-style, famous historical figures will make appearances in The Order: 1886.
“It’s part of the brilliance of doing an alternate history game. — we can leverage characters who’ve existed in history,” he said. “We have characters like Nichola Tesla. We have Marquis de Lafayette, who’s based off the famous French general who fought in the American Revolutionary War. There’s others in there – we don’t want to spoil it all and leave something for gamers to find – but there’s definitely history at the forefront.”
Our interview with Ready at Dawn continues this afternoon.
The Order: 1886 will be available on PS4 from this Friday, 20 February.
This article may contain affiliate links, meaning we could earn a small commission if you click-through and make a purchase. Stevivor is an independent outlet and our journalism is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.
