Ready At Dawn: The Delay Is Good News

As we reported earlier, today PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886 has been officially delayed into 2015, after the press embargo from a hands-on event expired. While most gamers will easily be disappointed by this, Ready At Dawn‘s CEO and Creative Director Ru Weerasuriya clarified in a video interview with The Escapist that to the studio, this is actually good news.

Well, it’s interesting because we see it as good news, but of course I can understand [people taking it as bad news]. The reason why we did that, we promised an experience to players with this new IP. We want to do something different and as an exclusive on PlayStation 4 we wanted not only to do something right for the IP, but also for the PlayStation itself. All of this pushed us to really evaluate how this is going to be put together.

I hope by seeing this and seeing what we’ve done until now, people will understand what we’re trying to deliver and, you know, when we looked at it we did ourselves a favor - it’s not a big push, but we want to target an early 2015 release to make sure that the experience is complete when we deliver it to the players.

Truthfully, this is understandable. Ready At Dawn is betting heavily on The Order: 1886, which is their first major console game after being known mostly for God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta, two well received handheld games released on the PlayStation Portable. Moreover, there’s already a lot of hype surrounding this title and in the immortal words of Shigeru Miyamoto, a delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever.

There are exceptions, of course, such as Duke Nukem Forever. But most games benefit from the extra polish of even a few months, and it is obviously a blessing for developers when a publisher allows such a luxury, instead of rushing the product to the market.