The Order: 1886 Director Says There's an "Uncanny Haterade" Towards Their Game

Last week, Develop sat down with The Order: 1886 Game Director Dana Jan and Technology Director Garret Foster, where Jan commented on the topic of value in games:

It’s funny, we were talking about this at lunch. It’s really the strange dilemma of video games right now, but I don’t think you can have a discussion of quantity without quality. So our game is extremely focused on the gameplay to the story-telling to pretty much everything. Frequently I’m saying when you play our game you’re going to be on a roller coaster of variety, twists, turns, there’s no filler, you’re never grinding in our game. Each encounter you go to you’re going to go ‘Wow, there’s different weapons this time. Wow, there’s different enemies this time.’ We took the idea of ‘let’s put you on the best possible experience ride that we can and let’s never have you sit there doing the same stuff over and over again.’

Continuing that thought, Jan says they targeted a very good length for The Order: 1886, “but it wasn’t our priority. It’s not something people are going to think is short.” Referencing the 5.5 hour playthrough, he added, “A lot of what we’re hearing about is a case of it either being irresponsibly or inaccurately reported or putting the game on easy and skipping through and speed-running the game.”

Jan then brought up the fact that people seem to be looking for a reason to hate The Order:

We have this uncanny ‘haterade’ for our game no matter what. People are looking for something to throw at our game, some reason to hate it. I’m excited to hear what people who have actually played the game think about it, how do they feel about the quality and the quantity? I think by and large that most people are going to be satisfied.

Also in the interview, Foster revealed that the 5.5 hour run through The Order is actually faster than his quickest time:

That’s a quick time… he beat my best time. Obviously as a programmer you’ve got to get to areas quickly to diagnose the area. So the last build of the game I speed ran through and I wasn’t even close to that time – I needed to play through the game from beginning to end before we sent it to manufacturing, right!?

For the future of The Order, we know Ready at Dawn has “other games in mind, other things that could be done” and “it takes too much work for this to be for a single title.” For now though, Jan says, “We’re just focused on this game coming out, but if it’s received well it will certainly be a talking point for us to see where it goes in the future.”