Co-founder of Ready at Dawn, the studio behind the PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886, revealed the title didn’t receive a sequel due to underwhelming reception.
Yesterday, Minnmax uploaded a video to their YouTube channel (found by VGC) featuring an interview with Ready at Dawn co-founder Andrea Pessino, who revealed some details surrounding a planned sequel for The Order: 1886. Ready at Dawn made advancements in the single-player space, particularly spin-off titles for PlayStation Studio titles. These include God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Chains of Olympus, and even the Jak & Daxter PSP title, Daxter. Pessino explains The Order: 1886 would have received a sequel if the studio had its way.
In the interview, Pessino mentioned he believed The Order: 1886 didn’t receive a sequel due to poor critical reception. Pessino states, “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” regarding 1886‘s reviews. CGMagazine’s review of The Order: 1886 says “Ready At Dawn seemed more caught up in what the player would feel like after the experience was done, rather than worry about the quality of the experience itself. The result seems to be a design ethic of “good enough” rather than great.”
Due to not owning the franchise’s rights, Pessino kept most of the details regarding the planned sequel under wraps, but he did say, “It would have been an incredible sequel, I can tell you that for a fact,” continuing with “We pitched the sequel to Sony regardless of [the critical reception] and, in a way, it’s better that they passed because if we thought we were going to be screwed before, man, with the sequel, we would have signed our life away.” He cited a ‘difficult relationship’ with Sony while working on 1886, with many cut features not making it into the launch version.
Pessino explained, “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,” saying if the development team had “one more year,” The Order: 1886 would have been a far more fleshed out experience. Unfortunately, those plans would never come to fruition as Ready at Dawn was shuttered by its parent company, Meta, in 2024 (after being purchased in 2020), which leaves the original title with an unexplored cliffhanger.
