Ready at Dawn’s upcoming historical adventure The Order: 1886 is certainly set to push the PlayStation 4 to its limits, but company co-founder Ru Weerasuriya doesn’t believe that higher polygon counts and image resolutions will be the highlight of the next generation. Instead, the studio head reckons that it’s more “filmic” effects such as chromatic aberration and lens distortion that will underline the advancements of the coming console cycle.
“We concentrate on the important part of what makes something feel like a movie,” the budding photographer explained in an interview with Eurogamer.net. “It's not about making a game that just has a string of things that happen, like a movie. But, how can we inject some of the things you've seen in films?”
He added: “It's really about how the craft of making a movie is different from the craft of making a game. We are different as industries, but we have so much commonality. One gap that we haven't bridged yet is that we create engines, cameras, and lighting. All of those things are done for the purpose of a game, in a very game-centric way. We decided, okay, let's make the gameplay, but let's take the techniques that we've seen in movies.”
One of the things that the studio’s doing to replicate the big screen is emulate lenses. “How do lenses work? We felt that we could build gameplay and at the same time build lenses that were real,” he continued. “In the engine, the lenses that we shoot with I actually emulated from real lenses that I've used to shoot photography. The guy who directs the game with me has done the same. He does cinematography. I do photography in my free time.”
The company is also using effects such as fog to create atmosphere. “That’s filmic,” the developer noted. “Graphically it's not a question of making things look better because it's a new generation. It's not in how many polygons or how much better the fidelity is. It's those little techniques like chromatic aberration, like lens distortion.”
Unfortunately, the studio’s still not saying much about the gameplay. The developer’s promised a story-driven adventure that will take place in an alternate interpretation of Victorian London, but that’s all that we really know. One thing that Weerasuriya is willing to share is that the whole experience is inspired by the feeling that he felt upon finishing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
"It was one of the first times in my life when I felt, ‘Wow, you know what? That was an amazing ride,’” he admitted. “There was no single moment when I was like, ‘That was just cool and that's the thing that I love.’ The feeling at the end was, ‘I just want more of this. This is what I want to do. This is what gaming is for me.' That's what drove us to do this."
Now we just need a strong gust of wind to clear away the fog and give us a proper look at The Order: 1886 in action.
