Last week, I went behind-closed-doors for a sneak peek at The Order: 1886, one of PlayStation 4’s most anticipated–and most mysterious–exclusives. Indeed, before Ready at Dawn walked me through a roughly 15-minute section of live gameplay, I had little idea what The Order actually was, let alone why anyone should be excited for it (save Ready at Dawn’s impressive pedigree of PlayStation exclusives). I went in thinking, ‘Third-person shooter set in alternate-history Victorian London.’ I left thinking, ‘This could be the reason to own a PS4.’
That’s lofty praise, I realize, but it’s absolutely heartfelt. The Order fits pretty squarely into the action-adventure genre–the spot on a PlayStation owner’s shelves likely occupied by Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Uncharted–but the mysticism afforded by the game felt much like my first encounter with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. PlayStation enthusiasts know that revelatory moment: Naughty Dog’s globe-trotting sequel married gameplay brilliance, cinematic wonder, and incomprehensibly gorgeous visuals in a way we’d simply never seen before. It’s a legendary game (some say, unmatched on PS3), and while it’s too early to say whether The Order’s final polish will meet such a lofty benchmark, it seems to have all three aforementioned pieces of the holy gaming trinity–plus something extra, to make the whole thing feel like the revelation Uncharted 2 was in its time.
That extra, revelatory thing is what writer and creative director Ru Weerasuriya calls "moment-to-moment gameplay," and it’s one of five things you need to know about The Order: 1886. But first:
1. Its photorealistic graphics are unrivaled
Aesthetic preferences aside, it’s impossible to deny just how good The Order: 1886 looks. Last year’s E3 debut certainly caught our attention with lifelike animation and astonishing weather effects, but with more exposure, I was completely in awe at how photorealistic The Order: 1886 looks. I think one screenshot in particular, directly below, demonstrates this visual splendor better than any other:
Cover Lady Igraine’s face and eyes with your hand (the eyes always give it away). From the tight, not perfect, weave of individual hair fibers to the shading inside her ear–one could put the face of any real-life actress on that head and suddenly be staring at a movie still. The depth of field and lighting are impossibly precise. The heroes’ clothing looks pulled from a museum closet. The dusty fog of war has settled over a backdrop so detailed it borders on unnecessary.
Impossible though it may seem, the whole game looks like this. There is 1:1 parity between cutscene and gameplay, from the film grain effect to the almost-imperceptible moles on characters’ faces. To prove it, our demonstrator stopped to rotate the camera for an up-close of Galahad’s face. There it was, in all the hyper-detailed, highly expressive, PlayStation 4-powered glory you see in a cutscene below. All the while: Coats flap in the wind. An orange light on Galahad’s uniform casts glow on the surrounding fabrics. Ornate symbols and artistry suitably decorate the armor of an Arthurian soldier (more on that in a bit).
PlayStation owners are somewhat accustomed to being visually wow’ed. But just as Uncharted 2 elevated graphics in gaming to unseen heights in 2009, The Order: 1886 has, five years later, changed what I deem visually possible in a medium that has firmly obliterated the uncanny valley. And it’s in 1080p.
2. King Arthur legends meet "neo-Victorian London" in The Order’s setting
Alternate-history stories in games are fairly infrequent, but The Order: 1886 nevertheless ups the narrative ante by not only drawing inspiration from Arthurian legends, but incorporating them. The four main characters of The Order–what we know as the Knights of the Round Table–have adopted the names of staples in Arthurian lore. There’s Sir Galahad (Grayson, the player character), Percival (Sebastian Mallory, the wizened descendant of Le’Morte d’Arthur author Thomas Mallory), Lady Igraine (Isabeau, Galahad’s former apprentice and rumored love interest), and a fourth hero–Lafayette–who has yet to earn his adopted name (the smart money’s on ‘Lancelot’).
But these are just names until the backdrop lore becomes apparent: in The Order: 1886’s telling of history, King Arthur formed the Knights of the Round Table to combat a breed of half-man, half-beast creatures. The conflict has waged for centuries, with Galahad and company being the latest in a heritage of Order members dedicated to fighting this threat. The impetus of this conflict dramatically affected what we know as the Industrial Revolution–apparently, it’s easier to invent things like wireless communication and thermite guns with a bestial army breathing down your neck.
We’ve yet to see what narrative themes The Order: 1886 will borrow from the legendary texts it pays homage to, but I’m anxious to see how the romanticism and religious undertones of le Conte du Graal, Le’Morte d’Arthur, and other Arthurian texts are honored and reflected in relationships between characters and events of The Order. This is practically non-existent stuff in video games, so the unpredictable interplay of homages paid and liberties taken should make for fascinating storytelling. At the very least, this reinterpretation of 19th-century London allows for all kinds of interesting gadgets and weapons that use real-world, period-centric materials to do things like channel electricity and ignite molten metal.
More things you need to know about The Order: 1886, overleaf.
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3. The Order isn’t necessarily the good guys
Narratively speaking, what struck me most about Ready at Dawn’s press demo was the objective of Galahad and comrades. All four are being sent to infiltrate Whitechapel, a historical district of London once infamous, in our history, for its rampant prostitution. In The Order: 1886, there’s a little less of that and more political upheaval, as resistance fighters–the poor, starved, and downtrodden–have made its dingy streets and dark alleyways a makeshift base of operations. Dilapidated shingles and overgrown vines cover dwellings of the underprivileged. As members of The Order, you’re tasked not only with ridding the world of its half-breed aggressors, but also with maintaining stability by protecting society’s wealthy upper class and government from the 99 per cent eager to rise up and change the system.
It all feels very ‘French Revolution’ to me, and while Ready at Dawn declined to elaborate on The Order’s motivations or the political conflict itself, I was left with the impression that members of The Order are more keen on following commands from above than paying attention to the ethics of a situation. It’s a safe bet that orders and morals will come into conflict before long, as I’m already finding it difficult to accept the mission to exterminate resistance fighters without due cause. Nevertheless, that’s exactly Galahad, Igraine, Percival, and Lafayette find themselves doing, and it remains to be seen what threatens the group more: the half-breed monsters, the resistance, or the soldiers’ own feelings about the job.
4. The Order and Uncharted have a lot in common…
The Order: 1886 takes strides to bridge gameplay with cinematics in new and interesting ways, but the foundation reminds me of Uncharted. For starters, much of combat is carried out via third-person gunplay where taking cover is an essential element. The Order even takes cues from The Last of Us, with Galahad and co. faced forward in a realistic fashion when crouched behind a wall or object. But there’s also a great deal of traversal; in this demo, Galahad and Lafayette climbed over and under obstacles and leaped between buildings in somewhat scripted fashion. Meanwhile, quiet moments of exploration and conversation offer constant storytelling, Naughty Dog-style. In fact, it’s fair to say that, in this particular demo, infrequent combat moments punctuated an otherwise contemplative atmosphere, not the other way around.
5. … but cutscenes are seamless, and gameplay almost never stops
Here’s where I delve into Weerasuriya’s claims of emergent gameplay and explain what it all means. As the demo opens, Galahad (your character) and Lafayette are looking out over Whitechapel, a district thought to house operations and members of the resistance. There’s air support waiting to give our intrepid antiheroes a hand, and as the two discuss their battle plans, Galahad takes out a monocular and peers out over the city. Without a single missed beat, the camera transitions to peering through the looking glass–suddenly, and without a tutorial message, control of the monocular is handed to the player. Galahad and Lafayette continue talking as the demonstrator spies out locations, and when it’s time to call that air support, a series of touchpad holds and presses creates a Morse code message to the zeppelins above the city.
Later, Galahad and Lafayette are fighting through the dingy, apocalyptic streets of Whitechapel, quelling the rebel forces. Seeing an enemy soldier below, Galahad leaps down for a melee bout that throws quick-time conventions to the wind. After several thrown punches and dodges, Galahad gets his adversary to the ground–suddenly, and without warning, the screen’s color drains and you’re given camera control. It could be a knife, or a brick-either way, you urgently need to decide what to look at and grab. While this particular melee encounter was fairly scripted, the emergent conventions of close-quarters combat make use of environmental weapons, otherwise superfluous objects scattered on shelves or the ground, to dispatch opponents in creative ways.
And yes, you can fail these melee encounters and other button prompts. That doesn’t just mean instant death; failure to grab a nearby weapon in time may lead to a different branching moment with its own outcomes of success and failure.
The final highlight of seamless cinematic gameplay came when Galahad and Lafayette rendezvoused with Malloy (or, Percival) in a basement-turned-rebel-stockpile of illegal weapons. Galahad finds a thermite weapon in a crate mid-cutscene and examines it. The camera transitions (again, without interruption to the cutscene’s rhythm) to an over-Galahad’s-shoulder view, and the player is able to rotate and inspect the foreign, yet aesthetically familiar, gun at will. A few seconds later, the cutscene continues as if control was never subtly handed to the player. No game I’ve seen has done so with such self-confidence and frequency.
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With gameplay innovations laser-focused on making a linear story seem to unfold around the player’s actions, The Order: 1886 is doing something new in a modern genre pioneered by the "newness" of titles, like Uncharted 2, that came before. Jaw-dropping visuals aside, the best thing I can say about The Order: 1886 is that seeing it for the first time felt like seeing Uncharted 2 for the first time. And just like Uncharted 2, The Order: 1886 may come to define the early years of a console experience for me. Like I said: This could be the reason to own a PS4.
For more on The Order: 1886, stay glued to PSU for heaps of coverage. In the meantime, sound off in the comments below with your impressions after watching the game’s latest trailer and checking out a whole bunch of new screenshots.