The Order: 1886

There have been so many complaints about The Order 1886 over the past week regarding how good or bad of a game it is, even going so far as to question if it even qualifies as a video game. Most of them are meaningless. We've heard that:





The Order: 1886 took too long to develop for such a short game.

The Order: 1886 is more of an interactive movie than a game.

The Order: 1886's weapons feel ineffective and unsatisfying.

The Order: 1886's climax is reused from an earlier fight.

The Order: 1886's action is monotonous and unoriginal.

The Order: 1886 has more padding than actual game.

The Order: 1886 is only five hours long.

The Order: 1886 has too many QTEs.

The Order: 1886 isn't worth $59.99.

The Order: 1886's setting is boring.

The Order: 1886's writing is bad.

I ended up being disappointed in the game. The last two items on that list are the only reasons why, and also the only reasons that really matter. The game's visual presentation is incredible, and I also have to praise the voice acting. Every single actor does a great job here and often kills it even with the game's boilerplate script. Sound in general is great, and I don't think there's another game with better graphics available. And yet suddenly my least favorite word, "gameplay," has become paramount when criticizing it. The Order doesn't have enough of it, or it has too much of it but it's bad, or somewhere in between. "Gameplay" over graphics has been the mantra of its harshest critics. It's a nice thought, that graphics, controls, characters and story should merge to form the meaningless term "good gameplay" but it's not constructive.

I can completely understand why this game was made the way it was. This is the exact type of game Sony has been trying to perfect for years as an example of "The PlayStation Experience." The Order: 1886 is the type of game they have been striving for since the launch of the PS2.  This is something fans have strongly resonated with in the past, be it with the Uncharted series, The Last of Us, and the God of War games. While the major publishers may seem identical on the surface, Nintendo's company vision has been to make a profit by making games people want to play with each other. Sony's vision has been to sell the concept of "PlayStation" as an entertainment event with content that is either impossible or just unavailable anywhere else. Exclusive technical prowess.

With that in mind, despite its faults and its superficially unoriginal structure, The Order: 1886 is definitely a game from SCEA. More than any publisher, Sony has consistently attempted to merge intense game mechanics with a cinematic presentation. The Order's structure is actually not very different from what we see in The Last of Us, and its level progression, marketing and presentation have many parallels to the release and marketing of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune in particular, with both games even ending with an ill-used QTE.

I think there was some lack of focus with The Order, however, compared to the perfect merger of character, controls and setting of The Last of Us. The structure of the writing isn't there, and that's what kills the entire game for me. It's not just that the dialogue isn't particularly ambitious, it's that the game's pacing is built around the Gears of War 1 style of storytelling where action happens, and then the story is told as you slowly walk forward. The Last of Us gets around this by having useful items to find and combine, so you're actually doing things while conversing. Here's where the "it's just an interactive movie" complaints come in, as The Order does in fact have a few levels that are just cinema scenes with the occasional button press required.

Is this really Ready at Dawn's fault? I'm sure we'll see plenty of postmortem interviews in about six months detailing the game's production in more detail, but for now, I think Sony bought into their own hype. After The Last of Us' success, I think that even with a new developer Sony thought they could duplicate that same level of excitement by sticking to a formula, not fully appreciating the differences between The Last of Us and Uncharted that let them stand on their own.

When it was found out in the fall of 2013 that Emmy winner Kirk Ellis would be co-writing the game, that was the moment I became skeptical:

“The funny thing about it is, he’s not a game guy,” Weerasuriya told Game Informer. “I think everybody would’ve expected us to go with a game scriptwriter, but my only request for a scriptwriter was, I cannot have a game person be there. We can bring the game side of it. I want him to bring something completely fresh, like something we might miss.”  (Game Informer, Oct. 2013)

As creative director for The Order, Ru Weerasuriya of course understands that a game built around the strengths of its story, characters and setting would need some strong writing to bring it together. However, I think it was a well meaning misstep to seek someone from outside of the industry as co-writer. The mainstream game industry has been famously indignant to outside critique. We see the same result in The Order that we see in Eric Nylund's involvement in Gears of War, or Kiyoshi Shigematsu's contribution to Lost Odyssey. An incredible breadth of character and setting is detailed, but we end up experiencing little of it while playing the game itself.

In The Order, we see this come about through the very sharp division between "game" and "movie." The characters are either providing exposition about the setting to us or you are controlling Galahad as he shoots and stabs his way to victory, there is no in between. QTEs have been used to great effect to help bridge this gap in many games, but with The Order it feels like the story and its accompanying movie scenes were built first, with the QTEs thrown in as an afterthought to keep the player involved (to the point where you are receiving instructions on which buttons perform what function even during the game's final battle).

Whether this decision was made because, during development it was realized that the writing wasn't quite as engrossing as Sony/Ready at Dawn thought it would be, or because it was genuinely believed to be a solid example of storytelling in games, The Order has received a lot of flak for it from both gamers as well as the gaming media. Currently sitting on a score of 65 on Metacritic (with an even lower user rating), The Order has been decried as everything wrong with big budget game development today, even though it's born from the exact same template that gave the game industry some of its most cherished games of the past few years.

Only a few reviews, however, really focus on the game's writing and the setting itself. There are quite a few decisions here that I wasn't too happy with, like the final dialogue of the game involving both "We're not so different you and I" AND a ripoff of Roy Batty's dying words from Blade Runner within a few seconds of each other. Almost the entire script feels like this, like somehow Ready at Dawn was not confident in their outstanding visuals, lip synching, sound design and animations to help contribute to the game's story. Part of the game's world building exposition also involves a lot of offhand remarks about what's going on in North America. To the point where it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of test players thought the setting was somehow too European or couldn't identify with the lack of an American character in the game, whatever the reason it comes off as forced and cynical. Ditto to some discussion of Jack the Ripper that goes nowhere other than to say "Yes, this is indeed the late Victorian Era!"

Much of the dialogue similarly feels like padding where we're being told what we can clearly see and hear. Quake got some flack for being the brownest game ever made when it was released, but The Order: 1886 might possibly by the grayest and brownest game ever made. That's not an insult. It's a credit to Ready at Dawn that they were able to mix this pastiche setting of "depressing British stuff" and almost completely sell it just on looks. But one can feel a lack of, if not ambition, then of confidence to see it through. The games' caveat is that werewolves are a thing that Galahad and his fellow knights have to deal with, yet we spend most of the game shooting completely human members of the Victorian worker class.

As with many video games, the story also has a traitor you can see coming a mile away, the Order itself knows more than it lets on to Galahad and his friends, and every other story detail that's become more laughable than dramatic as presented in many big budget games makes a showing here. The characters even have convenient communicators like in every futuristic third person shooter so that the game can be paced and the story presented similarly.

It's the tired writing, and not the average action or enemies, that holds this game back. There's nothing inherently bad about a short, linear action game, nor is there anything wrong with a game that emphasizes it's story and characters above all else, nor is there anything wrong with a game in a steampunk setting. I'd be huge hypocrite if I criticized the game for any of these things (after all, Thief: The Dark Project and Planescape: Torment are two of my favorite games of all time), and I feel like many of those reviewing The Order: 1886's do the game a disservice by criticizing it solely on these things rather than on how the story, controls and setting fail to fit together as a whole.