Ready At Dawn co-founder Ru Weerasuriya has confirmed to German games website Play3 today that it will not have a multiplayer mode. The Playstation 4 exclusive is a third person single player action game, first revealed during last year's E3 with a teaser trailer that showed our heroes battling creatures in foggy London. But we will never go online with them.
For some reason gamers seem shocked by this revelation. Shocked! I for one am happy to see a developer being able to just focus on making the best single-player experience they can. Far too many titles get multiplayer modes shoved into them for no reason- or rather, for all the wrong reasons. Publishers know that gamers are more likely to hang onto games that have a multiplayer element and not immediately sell them back to Gamestop, where they will be resold and undercut potential sales. They also know of what a massive cash cow selling DLC for multiplayer is, even for little things like variant skins/costumes, so they stick other development teams in place solely to create multiplayer mode, which may have little to nothing to do with the actual game.
Perhaps the best word on the subject comes from Spec Ops: The Line lead designer Cory Davis, who slammed his own game's multiplayer mode as "a waste of money" and a financially motivated checkbox for 2K Games. Not to mention the triviality it made of the single-player game's serious ruminations on the morality of war. But for some reason it's still seen as suicide to not include multiplayer and this is big news. It's a shame.
As far as The Order: 1886, it looks like a unique title, or at least, like one we haven't seen done well just yet. It's set in London in 1886 but in an alternate steampunk version of the world, full of airships and new twists on Victorian technology. They even have a subway system in this timeline and while the skyline will seem familiar, electric lights pop up at night and dirgibles roam the skies scanning for trouble. This technology has allowed the humans to combat half-breeds, humans that have taken on animal-like traits. There's a whole storyline involving King Arthur and the Knights of the Round (seriously) and you'll have to use all the fancy new technology to fight off the creature of the world, as well as possibly dealing with the class warfare that's taking place in the city.
The game engine certainly looks fantastic from the first trailer (see below) and it should, being that it's a PS4 exclusive, but gamers have already stated to question whether it will ever migrate. "We currently work exclusively on the PS4 version," Weerasuriya told Play3 when asked about a PS3 port. "Games are always designed for cross-platforms, But clearly, if there is a possibility to take over the physics system to other platforms, we would use this."
The Order: 1886 is set for release sometime in the fourth quarter of 2014. Stay tuned for more on the game as we hear it.
