The co-founder of Ready at Dawn talks about what it would have been like if the studio had been able to make a sequel to a game that was visually great, but equally poor in content.

Ready at Dawn was released in 2015 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive. The studio has previously worked with Sony on several games (including Daxter for PSP, God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta, as well as the PS3 God of War: Origins Collection), and those games have received pretty good reviews on Metacritic, with an average score between 84 and 91 on Metacritic.

However, The Order: 1886 came nowhere near that, as even though the fake reviews gave Ready At Dawn a higher score (70-75), the average score on Metacritic was only 63. Andrea Pessino, co-founder of Ready at Dawn, talked in an interview with MinnMax about how Sony gave the game a tight deadline and had to cut a lot of things. If they had been given a chance, they could have made a sequel in 2018 that would have included multiplayer. It would not have been set in 1986: he says these theories are wrong.

“I don’t think it was the sales, I think it was the critical reception, that’s the thing. Sony is a very proud company, and rightly so, and the critical reception, if it had even been in the ’70s, we would have had the sequel, I’m convinced. Just a few more points and it would have been OK. One of the problems is that so much was cut. A lot of the more subtle narrative parts were lost because so much was cut away and things that were supposed to be interactive became a movie. We needed another year, that’s the reality. We needed at least another year, we didn’t get it, so we were like, cut, cut, cut,” Pessino said.

Ready at Dawn moved on to VR games: it was acquired by Meta in 2020 and shut down last year.

Source: VGC