RAD: YouTube Doesn’t Do Justice To The Order: 1886

Ready at Dawn (RAD) is finally about to ship The Order: 1886, the highly anticipated PlayStation 4 exclusive due for release on February 20 worldwide. As it is customary, the development team is now doing many interviews to talk about the game, and just earlier today the latest PlayStation Blogcast featured an audio interview with RAD’s Game Director Dana Jan.

The most immediately striking aspect of the game is the visuals, which has been praised since its first gameplay reveals. Still, the YouTube videos don’t really do justice to The Order: 1886 according to Dana Jan, who also thinks that the uncanny valley is not that far anymore.

The really funny thing is, I think, you watch YouTube videos of the game and they don’t do it justice. I play the game on my desk every day on a TV that’s not the best, and then when you play it on a quality TV - I’m not talking about crazy either - it’s just like, night and day difference. We were just demoing it today on such a TV and it just looks amazing. I got used to watching coverage through media channels and those videos get compressed, but you’re right I mean, the photorealism is something that early on was actually a question. What are we going to strive for, you know? Early on we thought of a hyperreal stylized London, but then as we did more research and we looked into grounding it into reality, we were like, let’s just see how far we can go. Can we like, cross the uncanny valley? I don’t like to say “Yeah, we solved it”, we’re not there yet but I don’t think we’re far off on PlayStation 4, I don’t think it’s going to be a system problem.

I think it’s on us to push a bit further and to figure out a couple more techniques that are going to get us closer to believable humans in games, and I don’t think we’re far off. In our game, we keep talking about the fidelity of the characters being the same in gameplay and cinematics - which in a normal game would be prerendered, in ours, we don’t have any prerendered ones, it’s all in-engine - that right there is a big step in the right direction. If one of our characters gets shot and then you trigger a story moment, you’re going to see the blood on the guy.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, the uncanny valley is the theory that explains why some observers feel revulsion when presented with virtual or physical reproduction of humans that are not quite perfect. This is one of the main reasons that historically led game developers to pursue a stylized aesthetics in their games, in order to avoid this potential issue; however, technology is slowly bridging this gap.

I’ve played The Order: 1886 and it definitely looks fantastic, though it remains to be seen if RAD managed to craft a truly compelling gaming experience overall.