Ready At Dawn co-founder discusses failed The Order: 1886 sequel pitch

Ready At Dawn co-founder Andrea Pessino has opened up about the now-shuttered studio’s failed attempt to develop a sequel to The Order: 1886.

Released in 2015 exclusively for PS4, the game proved to be a critical misfire for the once lauded studio, which had previously collaborated with Sony on a number of well-received titles.

They included PSP games Daxter, God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta, plus God of War: Origins Collection for PS3, which garnered scores on review aggregation site Metacritic ranging from 84-91.

The Order: 1886 received a 63 score on Metacritic, despite scoring “way higher” in mock reviews, Pessino told MinnMax, and this is why he believes Sony passed on a sequel.

“I don’t think it was the sales, I think it was the critical reception, that’s the thing,” he said. “Sony is a very proud group and rightfully so, and the critical reception, if 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.”

With The Order reportedly receiving mid-70s scores in mock reviews, it’s claimed that Sony had decided on a release date and it was non-negotiable, so Ready at Dawn did it’s best to get the game in shape with the time it was afforded.

“One of the problems is that so much was cut,” Pessino said. “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,” he added. “We needed at least one more year, we didn’t get it, so we were like, cut, cut, cut.”

Pessino said 2018 would have been a “very realistic” launch window for the sequel, which would have featured multiplayer. And while he didn’t confirm what year the game would have taken place in, he said the fan theory that it was going to be set in 1986 was wrong.

Ready at Dawn, which also developed the Wii version of Okami and the multiplayer brawler Deformers, later switched its attention to making VR games, including Lone Echo and Echo Arena, before being acquired by Meta in 2020. The studio was closed by the Oculus maker last year.