Ready At Dawn’s Co-Founder Talks About What Happened With The Order: 1886 Never Getting A Sequel
Ready At Dawn is a team that many PlayStation fans would recognize, for its work on Daxter, both God of War games that were made for the PSP, and then on the PS4, its late 19th century third-person, cinematic shooter, The Order: 1886.
While the studio worked with PlayStation quite a bit, it was Meta who would end up acquiring the team in 2020, and then shutting them down four years later in 2024.
Though the studio’s God of War titles and Daxter are all much loved, The Order: 1886 cut its way into the hearts of many a PlayStation fan who gave it a shot. It wasn’t a perfect game, but there are those who loved it, and would have loved to see it given a second chance.
In a recent interview, the studio’s co-founder Andrea Pessino finally spoke about why that never happened. Some of the things that went wrong with the first game’s development, how that contributed to its reception, and then where the chips fell about why a sequel wasn’t in the cards.
Speaking to MinnMax, Pessino said “I don’t think it was the sales, I think it was the critical reception, that’s the thing. Sony is a very proud group and rightfully so, and the critical reception, it it had even been just in the 70s, we would have had the sequel, I’m convinced. Just a few points more and it would have been ok.”
A quick trip to Metacritic shows that The Order: 1886 currently sits at a 63, which is an average score based on 94 critic reviews. It’s the seven points between that score and 70, that Pessino thinks stepped in front of a sequel. At the time of its release, PSU gave The Order: 1886 a 7.5, though the range of scores included also contains a 2/10 score. One 9.5, but no 10’s.
Would a 10 have made the difference, pushing the game to 70, where it might’ve gotten a sequel? Who knows. Though the development struggles Pessino points to do help to explain such a breadth of scores.
“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, so we were like, cut, cut, cut.”
It’s impossible to know how much better The Order: 1886 would have been if it had that extra year, though for all the bad reviews it got, many critics responded to what it was doing well. Many of the reviews suggest that Pessino’s thesis is correct, it just needed a little more time to bake the whole thing through.
The most unfortunate part of all this is that Ready At Dawn is no longer around to get that second chance, if for some reason Herman Hulst suddenly became extremely keen on making a sequel to The Order: 1886.
Source – [MinnMax]
