2015, what a year. It’s been a year where I spent many an hour retreating old games with shiny new visuals, but also one where I experienced gameplay and graphical fidelity unlike anything I’d seen in the thirty-five years that I’ve been playing video games. Here are some of the highlights of my gaming year.

PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886 broke new ground in interactive storytelling. A visual feast depicting characters and Victorian London with almost photo-real clarity, sadly it didn’t get the acclaim I thought it deserved.

Press coverage for The Order, instead of lauding the interesting story and beautiful visuals, decided to slaughter the game, deriding it for is brevity, excessive quick time events and lengthy cut-scenes. I think they missed the point, myself, but it meant that the game was practically stillborn. Such a shame.

Despite my misgivings based on playing a preview build, Techland’s Dying Light managed to reinvent the open-world zombie game that the developer practically invented with their Dead Island series. Intelligent, interesting and above all pretty frightening, Dying Light immediately took my top spot when it comes to surviving a virtual zombie apocalypse.

EA’s Battlefield Hardline didn’t quite do it for me. Whilst I salute Visceral Studios for trying something different with DICE’s Battlefield series, Hardline was perhaps too much of a departure. In swapping huge battlegrounds for urban cops and robbers, the game lacked the scale and excitement of it’s military-themed predecessors. By all accounts, still a good game, but not a good Battlefield game.

Cities: Skylines on PC was a pleasant surprise. The city building game manages to take everything that was wrong with SimCity (a game that I personally still enjoyed) and create a nigh-on perfect example of the sometimes embittered genre.

Easy to get to grips with, beautiful to look at and relatively bug-free, Cities: Skylines has become my go-to city building game. With the introduction of a day/night cycle later in the year, the game became even more beautiful to look at.

Ori and the Blind Forest provided a charming break from the AAA action-fests that dominated 2015. Taking more than a little inspiration from the visual style of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli animated movies, Ori and the Blind Forest follows the trials of the orphaned guardian spirit, Ori.

It sends players on a magical journey and is full of emotion. At its heart, though, Ori and the Blind Forest is no more than an old-school platformer which with repeated plays felt more and more derivative. A great game if you are looking for something short and sweet.

As a gamer that likes a bit of story with my action, 2K’s multiplayer squad shooter, Evolve didn’t really do it for me. It’s nice idea, being a member of a group of mercenaries charged with hunting and killing a gigantic player-controlled monster, but it lacked that Left 4 Dead feeling of comradery.

I’ve returned to the game many times over the year and enjoyed my time with it, but there are plenty of other games that I’d sooner be playing. To all intents and purposes, Evolve is still a great game, but not necessarily my sort of game.

The classic fighting franchise, Mortal Kombat made it’s new-gen debut in 2015 with Mortal Kombat X. With new-gen visuals, the series gruesome finishing mores were too much for Australian censors which slapped it with an R rating.

With a great story featuring character both old and new, beautiful graphics and some fantastic gameplay, Mortal Kombat X is the best fighting game I’ve played in a long time.

In real life I’d say that two wheels are better than four when it comes to having fun on the road. I’ve never really found a game that has managed to capture the excitement of motorcycling. Milestone S.r.l.’s Ride comes close.

Building on their successful Moto GP franchise, the Italian developers have, with Ride, created a game that celebrates the motorcyclist, their machine and racing on the open road.

Whilst it was released in 2014, Dragon Age: Inquisition dominated my playing schedule throughout 2015 due to the great DLC release during the year that bought the amazing story to its conclusion. The game received seven expansions during 2015, from the beautiful and varied terrain in the Jaws of Hakken to the conclusion of Trespasser. The Black Emporium gave players opportunity to change their character’s face (something that my unfortunate-looking Inquisitor was in dire need of).

The crowd funded / developed Project CARS really upped the ante when it comes to racing games. It the tradition of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport and GRID AutoSport, Project CARS is a driving simulator rather than an arcade racer.

Project CARS copped a lot of flak for being virtually unplayable on a gamepad. With a decent steering wheel and shifter, however, the game is in a league of its own. Add a couple more monitors for a panoramic view of the track and it’s just like being there, sitting in a race car.

May 2015 finally saw the release of one of the year’s most anticipated games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This is the game that I still return to when I game in my own time. CD Projekt RED polished up the gameplay that they had been developing over the last two games and dropped players in a gorgeous open-world.

The vast world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt offers player hours and hours of adventure, which the developers augmented with 12 free DLC packs and an expansion called Hearts of Stone.

Warner’s Batman: Arkham Knight managed to polarise the fans. Not a game that I had to review, but one that I purchased myself, on PC. Whilst the console version was, for the most part, celebrated, the PC version was not. PC gamers reported performance issues and missing effects indicated a badly-ported console to PC game.

Running Batman: Arkham Knight on a PC-rig bordering on the un-natural, my 32 gigs and 2xSLI GTX980 machine never really had any problems running the game, much to the ire of my peers. Still the PC version was a massive fail for both Warner Interactive and nVIDIA, whose Gameworks code seems to be a root cause of many of the problems. To this day, Batman: Arkham Knight still doesn’t run as intended on PC.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour kicked of EA Sports’ annual barrage of sports sims. The franchises two-year break allowed the developers to rebuild the game using Battlefield’s Frostbite engine and even including the Battlefield 4-themed Paracel Islands course.

I found the fantasy courses in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour more interesting than the real-life course which is probably because I don’t follow the game on TV. Still, PGA Tour is a good game and a was a great start to the 2015 EA Sports season.

I feel that I’d played every game that’ll ever be made. Most games wear their inspiration on their sleeve to such an extent that they seem like no more than derivative rehashes. Original gaming experiences are few and far between. Sony’s Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture is one of the most original games that I’ve played in a long time.

Derided as being no more than a walking simulator by those that fail to be engaged by the game’s subtle storytelling, Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture is an apocalyptic game with a difference. Set in a deserted English village, the game reveals the tragic events that befall on the people at the end of the world. It’s a very British horror story in the vein of Nigel Kneale’sQuatermass and one that keeps you thinking about it long after you’ve switched it off.

The PlayStation 4 exclusive Until Dawn was a bit of a surprise. Perfectly capturing the teen slasher movie look and feel, the game put the lives of a group of friends trapped in a mountain lodge in the hands of the player. Everyone that I spoke to about the game had a different experience with it. Not the longest game out there, but certainly nigh-on perfectly formed.

2015 saw the release of a game that seemed to have taken forever to arrive. Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain arrived in a storm of controversy that, for a change, had nothing to do with the game’s female lead wearing next to nothing. The launch was overshadowed by the seemingly very public, and rather unprofessional, spat between the game’s publishers, Konami, and the Metal Gear series’ creator, Hideo Kojima.

Regardless of the politics surrounding the game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a superb effort, with the open-world gameplay taking the series’ tried and tested mechanics to a new level.

As accomplished as it is, I thought that Microsoft’s Forza Motosport 6 failed to live up to the excitement of 2014’s Forza Horizons 2.

Still a beautiful game, possibly the best-looking racing game ever, Forza 6 felt held back by the real-life locations that we’ve seen countless times before. The end result is a very accomplished game, but one that still feels a bit sterile.

Destiny: The Taken King proved to be more than just an expansion for Activision’s acclaimed shooter. Destiny’s second year of adventure kicked off by wiping Game of Thrones actor, Peter Dinklage’s much-maligned voice-over work from the game and replacing it with that of Uncharted’s Nolan North.

The inclusion of a revised leveling system, more akin to traditional role-playing games in Destiny: The Taken King as well as new missions, locations and a sinister new foe makes the game feel fresh again.

In a seemingly desperate move to shake their alleged misogynistic reputation, EA’s FIFA 16 includes, for the very first time, a selection of Women’s international teams. I found it to be a rather welcome move, making the 2016 entry more than just a roster update with a few token gameplay changes.

EA Sports’FIFA 16 is also the best looking entry in the series, the developers really starting to embrace the new-gen console’s graphics abilities.

Rock Band 4 re-introduced a new-generation of gamers to the rhythm music game. As I said in my review, Rock Band 4 was likely borne out of necessity over anything else as the die-hard Rock Band fans replaced their PS3s and Xbox 360s with new-gen consoles.

Rock Band 4 really doesn’t bring anything new to the table, apart from freestyle solos, which allow you to basically go mad with your instrument and still make a sound that seems like real music. Despite the lack of innovation for this fourth outing, Rock Band 4 is still an excellent game. The fact that you can still use your old instruments and previously purchased music make the game an essential purchase for fans.

I wasn’t particularly happy when I found out that Rise of the Tomb Raider was being release, initially anyway, as an Xbox exclusive. I’d been playing the Tomb Raider reboot on PC, with all its exquisite graphics cranked up to the max. I just could help but think that the Xbox One version’s visuals could be anything other than a disappointment.

Of course, I was wrong. The Rise of the Tomb Raider development team had been working closely with the guys at Microsoft to ensure that the latest adventure of Lara Croft looked nothing short of fabulous on the Xbox One. Whilst lacking a bit in the story department, the inclusion of more tombs to raider was welcome, even if the puzzles are still a lot easier that they were back in the day.

Likely in response to Harmonix and their rebooting of the Rock Band franchise, Activision countered with their Guitar Hero Live. Whereas Rock Band was essentially the same as before, it was all change for Guitar Hero.

With an almost retro feel, Guitar Hero Live uses real-life video from the point of view of the guitar player to put you right into the performance. The Guitar Hero TV experience allows players to stream official music videos and play them on the redesigned Guitar Hero guitar.

Fans of post-apocalyptic role-playing games got everything they could wish for with the release of Fallout 4. Not only does the game offer players a vast world to explore and a superb story, but you can also spend literally hours building things.

In previous games I’ve often wondered why the developers littler the world with useless objects. In Fallout 4 I could break items down to material and create all sorts of things from essential water purification systems to rather extravagant outdoor lighting.

In the build-up for the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, the release of EA Games’ Star Wars Battlefront was perfectly timed. The free DLC, The Battle of Jakku, offered players their first peek at a key new location from the film.

With visuals plucked straight from the movies, Star Wars Battlefront, pressed all the right buttons for me and many of us that had been waiting nearly forty years to step into the movies. Many, however, were a bit upset with the lack of content included in the retail package and the price tag that EA put on the game’s season pass.

When it comes to over-the-top action, the Just Cause series turns it up to eleven. With Just Cause 3 Avalanche Studios took what was best about the other games- blowing shit up, and basically made the game all about that. The result is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but offers players a crazy amount of fun.

You can spend hours in Just Cause 3 just designing mayhem. Be it tying stuff together and watching what happens or putting rocket mines on cows’ butts and having them fly about before exploding in a red mist. Naughty, but nice.

I’m still putting the finishing touches together for my Call of Duty: Black Ops III review. A far cry from last year’s Advance Warfare, Black Ops III has, in my mind, finally pushed the series too far away from its original premise and turned Call of Duty into a sci-fi shooter.

With an enjoyable if incomprehensible single-player campaign and a multiplayer experience that feels borrowed from Titanfall (but without the big robots), Call of Duty: Black Ops III really jumps the shark, giving us a fun, if totally brain-dead entry in to the series.

After last year’s critically panned game, I was surprised to find that the Victorian London-based Assassin’s Creed Syndicate shared most of its gameplay with the very similarly styled Assassin’s Creed Unity. It was interesting to find that whilst one game was derided regarding awkward controls, this new, much-lauded entry seemed to share most of the same mechanics.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate did, however, work right out of the box on both console and PC. Personally I found the brother / sister team of Jacob and Evie Frye not as interesting as previous protagonists (notably Edward Kenway, who they will forever have trouble following) and the setting, Victorian London a bit too familiar and not as exotic as, say, the pirate-ridden Caribbean.

Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege, for me, suffers in a similar way that many found with Star Wars Battlefront. In leaving out the traditional single-player experience, the game just did sit well with me. Here was a full-priced game to all intents and purposes missing half of its content.

Don’t get me wrong, the multiplayer experience in Rainbow Six: Siege is very well honed, but with only a handful of maps, I’d hardly have called it complete. Add the real need for online co-operation into the mix and you’ve got a game that can really only be played within your circle of friends.

It was the year of the remaster and resurrecting games that were originally released in previous years I’ve deliberately left them out of the list above. I took a look at Saints Row IV: Re-Elected, DMC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition, Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection, Journey, God of War III Remastered, Rare Replay and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. With the exception of Journey and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, none of the others really did it for me. Rare Replay was an interesting trip down memory lane, but there was no way I was playing a thirty-five-year-old game for hours. Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection was good, but these where game that were still fresh in my mind and, quite frankly, looked just as good on the last-gen consoles.

2015 has been an epic gaming year, with the release of many games that we had been waiting quite some time for. There was very little to be disappointed with, either, with most games living up to the hype, the notable exceptions being Star Wars Battlefront (which could never have lived up to that sort of hype) and the disappointing PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight.

I’m going to close this feature with a list of my top games for 2015:

Best Story –Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture

Best Graphics – Star Wars Battlefront

Best Shooter/Combat Game – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Best RPG – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Best Sports Game – FIFA 16

Best Music Game – Guitar Hero Live

Best Racing Game – Project CARS

Best Action Game – Just Cause 3

Best Sci-Fi Game – Fallout 4

Best DLC – Dragon Age Inquisition: The Jaws of Hakkon

Best Remaster – Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

Game of the Year – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Here’s to a great 2016!

The post 2015 – A Gaming Year in Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

The Order: 1886 sees you take on the role of a chap called Galahad, who is a part of a select Order tasked with taking out Lycan hybrids and ensuring both the protection and survival of humankind.

Currently the best eye candy you can see within a PS4 game, and it could be yours, along with an Official The Order: 1886 Golden Trinket Box and a The Order: 1886 Moustache Comb (for that handle bar mustache you have always been meaning to grow).

To Enter to Win this Prize Pack you will need to answer the following Question:

The Order: 1886 is played out within a reimagined city. What city is it?

A: Paris

B: Wellington

C: London

If you are not too sure, head over to our REVIEW of The Order: 1886 to see if you can find the answer there.

You can give us your answer by placing a Comment below, hitting us up on Facebook, Tweet to us, or Email Us.

Winner(s) will be randomly selected from those that Comment below / Facebook Comment / Email the correct answer to the above question. Winner will receive a New Copy of The Order: 1886 on PlayStation 4, a The Order: 1886 themed Golden Trinket Box and a The Order: 1886 Mustache Comb . Competition ends the 15th of March 2015. The Order: 1886 is Rated R16 in New Zealand.

The post Win The Order: 1886 – Competition appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Over the last two years the publisher has been drip-feeding scant details about their cinematic third-person shooter set in a steampunk reimagining of Victorian London.

In the run up to the game’s launch Sony’s hype machine was working on overdrive. So much so that when word of a five hour campaign length, excessive quick-time-events and a couple of hours of cut scenes broke, the internet went wild and skinned the game alive.

The Order: 1886 became less about an intriguing alternative take on colonial Britain at the turn of the century and more about bite-sized gameplay and button mashing.

And it’s a shame because, whilst it does have its faults, overall The Order: 1886 is a rather special affair.

I’m not going to dwell too much on the pre-launch hysteria about the game’s length, the quick-time-events and the rest. You can read about all that elsewhere. I want to look at The Order: 1886 for what it is; a cinematic interactive experience, if that means a game to you, call it that, if it doesn’t then call it something else.

Set in a steampunk version of Victorian England, players take on the role of Sir Galahad, one of the Queen’s Order of Knights. He is joined by his fellow Knights: Sir Percival, Lady Igraine and the knight-in-training, The Marquis de Lafayette. The Order follows a tradition going back to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table from whom they take their aliases.

By drinking Blackwater, fluid from the chalice known in legend as the Holy Grail, the knights of The Order can extend their lives for centuries and heal their wounds. They are not, however, immortal. They can be killed and when they die another knight takes on their alias.

It’s an interesting idea, indeed. Throw in Lycanthropes, the threat of rebellion and the plan of the nefarious United India Company and nothing is quite what it seems.

The game’s plot is sound, but seems to only be a small part of a bigger story.

By the end of the game, even though I enjoyed the tale, I felt it was left hanging a bit too much. For much of the game I had the feeling that the, developer, Ready at Dawn, had bitten off rather more than they could chew.

The Order: 1886, walks a very fine line between being a third-person shooter in the traditional sense and being a very high quality interactive CGI movie. As such it’s an amazing visual feast and, quite simply, the best-looking game I’ve ever played. I’m sure we will see better, but right now this is the best you are going to get.

Victorian London has never been portrayed it such incredible detail. The action takes players from the dank alleyways of Whitechapel to the eerie Westminster catacombs. There’s also plenty of London’s iconic tube system to explore. There’s even a sequence on-board a huge fancifully designed airship, The Agamemnon, that wouldn’t look out of place in a Final Fantasy game.

The characters, as well, are beautifully realised and without a doubt on par with a modern CGI movie, except, incredibly, the PS4 is rendering them in real time.

The game’s attention to detail isn’t just reserved for the spectacle. Tiny details like the different sheen of the ink on documents that you pick up and the dirt on the “camera” lens suggest that this has been a labour of love for the development team.

The graphics absolutely are jaw-dropping. But, these amazing visuals come at a cost, a cost that could arguably be in keeping with the game’s overall cinematic aspirations.

The game runs with an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, similar to a Blu-Ray movie,this means that when playing the game on your HDTV there are black bars at the top and bottom. It’s common for Blu-Ray movies, but not for games, and takes a bit of getting used to. It’s still in “full” HD, it’s just the visible picture between the bars is only 1920×800 and not 1080.

The framerate is a chugging thirty frames per second, close to the 24fps we have no problem with when watching a movie, but a far cry from that video gaming sweet spot of 60fps.

Until you get used to it, the action in The Order feels very juddery compared to, say, the rip roaring frame rate of the PS4’s, almost as beautiful game, The Last of Us Remastered.

The game is, for the most part, an over-the-shoulder third-person cover-based shooter. There’s a bit of stealth and some climbing but nothing in a way of real puzzles or anything like that. It’s also a pretty linear affair, with the rather obvious path set out ahead of you.

The developers have really used their imagination to produce a range of fantastic weapons that seem oddly believable for the time.

In the game, the brilliant real-life Serbian genius, Nikola Tesla is on hand as The Order’s Q-like gadget-man, supplying all sorts of interesting stuff. An assortment of pistols, rifles, shotguns and proto-machine-guns are joined by more exotic items such as the incendiary M86 Thermite Rifle and the lightening in a bottle that is the TS-21 Arc Induction Lance.

The action is interspersed with plenty of cut-scenes. Some players may find the way that the game takes control away from them a bit annoying, but this isn’t Call of Duty.

The Order is first and foremost telling a story, and it’s a good story. To give a bit of interaction back to the player, the game uses quick-time-events. These Simon-says button mashing sequences are the scourge of modern gaming and a design fad that I thought we had seen the back of.

Admittedly, the QTEs in The Order are more in context than most, but the resultant insta-death due to a poorly-timed button-press can still be annoying.

Still, overall, I found the gameplay fun even though I think some other games have done it better.

As I played the game I started drawing some parallels with Crytek’s Xbox One launch title, Ryse: Son of Rome.

Both games are visually impressive. Both games are more about the story than necessarily about the gameplay. Whilst The Order has a better premise, it’s is Ryse, though, that seems to come out on top in putting its narrative setting to better use.

Even though both games slightly overuse QTEs, The Order offers marginally better gameplay, whilst Ryse may provide slightly better replay value.

Both Ryse and The Order make for excellent launch day graphical showcases, though, unfortunately The Order: 1886 has arrived over a year too late.

The Order:1886 is the definition of flawed genius. A fantastic setting and glorious graphics are almost enough to get it by. Unfortunately, the solid but uninspired gameplay isn’t quite enough to propel the game into excellence.

Whilst the story is good and the gameplay polished, it does lack a bit of substance, sometimes feeling like an extended tutorial that doesn’t quite take off.

It’s a shame, as it is still an astounding effort by Ready at Dawn; a developer that should be lauded for trying something different and pushing the medium in this way.

The Order ticks more boxes than most games around at the moment.

Whilst doesn’t quite live up to the hype, it’s still a good effort. As a piece of interactive entertainment, the developers have almost nailed it with a great premise, good story and some very accessible gameplay.

Whilst I can understand that it might not be for everyone, despite its flaws I really enjoyed it. In any case, I’m sure that the inevitable sequel will seek to iron out some of its predecessor’s wrinkles.

The Order: 1886 is out now on PlayStation 4 and I’d recommend it to players that enjoy stunning graphics and a good yarn in their games.

The post The Order: 1886 – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

To celebrate the launch of The Order: 1886, PlayStation has teamed up with Uber, the popular technology company, and will pick up people with a horse-drawn carriage, themed straight out of the game.

The Order: 1886 carriage will be set up with a TV and PS4, treating passengers to an exclusive experience of the filmic and immersive game during their ride around the Ponsonby area.

Krister Robinson, Marketing Manager for Sony Computer Entertainment New Zealand, says that the horse-drawn carriage making appearances along busy Ponsonby Rd is a great way to bring the game to life.

“This game is the perfect marriage of past, myth and modern technology. Everything in the game, from the characters, the enemy, the weapons, the setting and the technology has been crafted to bring this to life. We’re looking forward to offering some passengers a one-off travel experience that brings history – The Order: 1886 carriage – and today’s technology – Uber – together,” says Robinson.

To take advantage of this one of a kind opportunity, interested travelers need to download the Uber app, and enter the promotion code 1886UBER before or on Wednesday 25th of February.

For a chance to ride, guests should locate themselves at 5 Rose Road in Ponsonby and request their ride between 7:00pm – 8:30pm.

The highly anticipated The Order: 1886 is a major title for PlayStation in 2015.  The third person action-adventure game sees players assuming the role of Galahad, one of the most experienced Knights of the Order, to discover history’s darkest secret. Rewrite the past in this unique vision of Victorian London where advanced weaponry is used to battle a powerful and ancient foe.

The Order: 1886 is exclusive to the PS4.

The post Uber is Giving Special Rides for The Order: 1886 Fans – News appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

The following day we had some one on one time with the developers at PlayStation HQ, in Auckland, New Zealand.

Sitting down in the media room, I began a chat with Garret Foster, the Technology Director at Ready at Dawn.

Garrett Foster: Technology Director – The Order 1886

Shane: Hey Garret, welcome to New Zealand! Let’s start with a brief overview of your role and how this fits into the development of The Order: 1886.

Garret: Yeah sure, so I’m the Technology Director at Ready at Dawn, what that means is that I oversee all of the different technology groups. So it’s kinda an elusive thing to alot of people, and a bit hard to explain, but what we do is make sure that all of the people who are creative types have the necessary tools in order to do their jobs.

So that’s the more tech side, and then there’s the gameplay side, where we have gameplay engineers who work and they are kind of half designer and half engineer and they work with the design team to build all of the game mechanics.

It covers both of those efforts.

Shane: Ready at Dawn has produced the portable versions (PSP), and The Order: 1886 has apparently been in development since 2011, so, was there a Kratos influence, or did the studio aim for something totally different than what they had been doing previously?

Garret: Whenever you’re doing something, whether it’s artistic you are building off past experiences in some form and it’s impossible to ignore that past experience. So, there’s God of War in there, but also Daxter too, that’s an older throw back to everything that we used to do.

There might not be tangible, direct copies of things there but you are influenced by everything so it’s impossible to not have that carryover.

For us, you know, I think it was the story telling elements, that we tried to push into Ghost of Sparta [but] with The Oder, we really took it to a new level. Really defining in the characters, make it a little more complicated, because nothing is really black and white. Nothing is really good and bad ever, there’s a;ways a grey area, there’s motives for why people are bad and there’s motives for why people are good, so it was [for us] trying to understand the human element of it all.

Alot of that came from God of War too but it’s not necessarily a direct rip off but you can kinda see the seeds of it there and [we] obviously took it to a different level. When we play this game it doesn’t feel like God of War but it was also impossible not to be influenced by it.

Shane: Had The Order: 1886 always been slated for PS4 / ‘Next Gen’?

Garret: Yes, it was always a PS4 title. We started development before we knew what the PS4 was. So that was kind of a challenge developing the engine for the game, we had an idea of what it was going to be like, we had an ear to the ground but Sony’s pretty tight lipped when it comes to things that are still in development, so it’s not like we were privy to any information or anything.

You can take a look at technology trends and see where things are headed. And you do your best to see over the next 10 years this is where hardware is going and so we just kind of aligned ourselves with that. For us on the tech side, we are always working on the long game, like, 10 years out [from now] and try and plan, like, where’s the engine going to go over the next 10 years. Things are so big and complicated now that you just cannot not do that.

Luckily we were pretty much spot on, just a little shy, there were some things that were a little different here and there [on the PS4 hardware] but it was pretty much what we predicted so that was good.

We got lucky.

Shane: The Order: 1886 is the story of man vs. Half breeds and centuries of war between the two factions, set within the Victorian industrial revolution era. Where did the inspiration come from for the story?

Garret: I wasn’t involved in the story creation but how I understand is that we knew we wanted something in Victorian London and we knew that we didn’t want it to be real, but plausibly real and so that’s what we are kinda calling it ‘Neo-Victorian’, like if at some point because of the war with the half breeds, technology advances at an exponential rate during the wars so it causes a split, and what would happen, if that split occurred.

And so there was this catalyst of a human divergence, what would the war be like and what would humanity do to ensure that they can fight against that and protect themselves. There was also, during this point that we wanted it within the Industrial Revolution, where everything was booming at the same time. So you had this really interesting mix of social problems, cities were starting to become a staple, you have a technology influx and a whole sense of enlightenment there.

It was a really interesting time period that was kind of the catalyst for that and we knew that everything could grow from out of that.

Shane: The Order: 1886 is built on the ‘RAD Engine’. An internally developed game engine from studio Ready at Dawn. What was the reason for using a home grown game engine for the game as opposed to an out of the box one?

Garret: For us, when you use something from out of the box… well, we already had an engine to begin with, so we were used to working a certain way. So that was the biggest motivator to keep developing our own technology. There was also alot of things that we saw that no one else was able to do or has done before, so like our lighting and material model no one else does that right now.

How we construct the materials, with a relatively small team, you know we are not a thousand person team like you see with other publishers, we are just over hundred people at Ready at Dawn and so we have to pick and choose our battles.

Where we can help out, say, the Art team with technology, we do and so we could have taken something from out of the box and crafted it, but for us we had an engine, we had a way that we liked to work so we said, lets develop off that and keep going.

It’s not like the other engines are bad, or anything like that, it just suited us at the time and still suits us now.

Shane: I realise it is early days, the game does not release until the 20th of this month, however is this the first chapter in a series? Can we expect more – and, what do you want PS gamers to take from The Order: 1886?

Garret: I hope it is. I don’t have an answer to that, but I do hope it is because I really really enjoyed this game. You know, you’re working on a game and sometimes you get lost, like the expression ‘seeing the forest in the trees’ and so for us we were always so close to it, our faces so close to our computer screens, it wasn’t until I finally got a step back from it and saw it all I was so happy with what we were able to achieve.

So pumped by it. Really happy how the story came together and it’s such a rich Universe that it would almost be a shame to not do something else with it.

There’s nothing really planned right now, but I would love to work on it further.

For me personally, I got into making video games because I loved video games. As a programmer I could’ve gone in a number of different directions, I could’ve gone into banking software and had a very good life and gamed all the same and all of that. But for me, I love video games, so I just hope that everyone can just sit down and get lost in a world and have fun, lose themselves for the duration of the story and enjoy the game. Just take it for what it is; a great story driven video game.

If I was to hear from someone, that they sat down they played the game, they forgot what time it is, I lost myself, then we did our job.

Shane: Bonus question! What was your favourite toy as a kid?

Garrett: Favourite toy… oh my goodness. I had a little Transformer but it wasn’t actually a Transformer, it was a knock off Transformer that turned into a jet. And I was so obsessed with jets as a kid because of Top Gun (movie). And so, I don’t remember the name of it, I tried to look it up recently…

Shane: I actually had something similar, I think they were called ‘Machine Men’ a rip off of Transformers. They released at around the same time.

Garret: Yeah possibly. They were totally a knock off and totally my parents style; ‘yeah that’s cheaper’ we will get one of those. But for me it was the greatest thing. It’s a robot and then it’s a freaking jet, it can fly it can do everything! I’ve always been a huge fan of like, mechs and robots.

Shane: Well, thank you Garret for talking to us here at Shane the Gamer. Really appreciate it.

The Order: 1886, developed by Ready at Dawn Studio, is there first major console release and is out on 20th of February, 2015 in Australia and New Zealand.

The post Interview with Garret Foster: The Order 1886 – Feature appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Firstly, it must be said that the presentation is incredibly striking.

There is certainly a distinct feel of polish and meticulous detail attributed to the visuals. Textures are sharp and surfaces react in a realistic way to light, creating a very moody and atmospheric sense.

The visual epicness has received a ‘cinematic’ treatment by way of a subtle film grain and, more noticeably, narrower aspect ratio resulting in letterbox format black bars top and bottom.

This never distracted from the gameplay though, which had a few issues of its own to contend with. More on that later.

The preview demo kicks off at Chapter 5, (sorry; Chapter V), entitled “Agamemnon” which just so happens to be the name of the zeppelin in which the demo is set within.

You take control of one of the knights of the Order “Galahad” and are required to rappel down the side of the zeppelin to breach.

It’s right here the first issue is revealed. It’s not apparently obvious that the player has control once the cutscene ends (a testament to the impeccable visuals) but also an arbitrary and banal exercise which could’ve easily been handled in an extended cutscene.

You can almost hear a Ready at Dawn PR spokesperson whispering from the cosmos, “See, these are in game graphics” like we were all skeptics…

This aside, the first real section of the playable demo is stealth focused and has Galahad skulking through the belly of the beast plucking off unsuspecting guards one by one. All very “paint by numbers”, but still enjoyable.

I’m sure many will draw ire from the “fail-QTE-insta-death” upon being spotted, but for me, I was happy being encouraged to take a more cautious approach.

It is however a bit jarring to be so close to an enemy, second nature dictating a melee stealth kill, only to fail the button prompt and subsequently receive a bullet to the temple at point blank…

There is a QTE (Quick Time Event) brawl that occurs a little later, again which I didn’t mind as long as it doesn’t constitute the lions-share of the game and is handled only at appropriate moments (such as frenzied close quarters combat).

A couple of lock-picking and electrics-shorting mini games find their way in also. Not terribly exciting, but certainly not unwelcome.

Second major issue has the player attempt to identify and mark ‘fake guards’ through the scope of a rifle by recognising those without the proper uniform insignia.

All fine and good, however the game holds the players hand like an infant throughout this entire sequence,  telling you exactly when and where to “hit the button” and then only allowing you to shoot at a very specific moment, removing any judgment the player might otherwise be required to make. It creates a minimal effort, minimal payoff situation which is detrimental to gameplay enjoyment.

The rest of this demo is effectively an action cover based shootout, mostly through corridors but is actually quite enjoyable.

The AI is smart enough to be challenging, and there is enough feedback and resistance in the controls to feel brutal and threatening. Gameplay definitely picked up at this point.

Yes, nothing particularly revolutionary gameplay wise (akin to any number of cover-based shooters) but the slick visuals provide added definition to an already well-trodden landscape.

It will be interesting to see how all of this incorporates the supernatural elements demonstrated elsewhere and how that effects the pacing and dynamism of gameplay but that’s for another time.

The official verdict is still out, as this was one chapter within the throws of an entire and impending story driven action title, but what is certain is that The Order 1886 is set to be the new visual benchmark for the PlayStation 4 and will no doubt generate some excitement amongst gamers as to what to expect from future titles.

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