The Order: 1886

The hype and expectations surrounding Ready At Dawn's The Order: 1886 is at it's peak level. It has been officially confirmed that the game is using most expensive and demanding tech like 4XMSAA, never seen before in any game. 

 

Today via official Playstation Blog, Sony revealed tons of new details regarding The Order: 1886 melee, combat, gadgets, unique usage of DualShock 4 controller and more.

 

Never Seen Before Melee Combat:

Gunplay will obviously form a key component of The Order 1886's gameplay, but close-combat melee encounters are every bit as integral to the experience. Developer Ready At Dawn is taking a fresh approach here, incorporating split second decision paths allowing fights to play out in a number of different ways. In the clip above Galahad goes for a knife, but it's not the only way to tackle the situation…

"For melee, we're leveraging some of the things we've learned in the past, even from the platformer days. We want to supplement ranged combat with something that players don't expect. You'll see more melee modes that will give you some complex options" hints Creative Director Ru Weerasuriya.

 

High-Concept Weaponry

    

While the weaponry at your disposal in The Order 1886 might seem out-of-this-world, every single design in the game is based on bona fide Victorian technology.

 

The more you get to see of the weapons, you'll realise that they're actually not that outlandish or futuristic. They feel grounded, Ru says: "We don't twist the actual technology itself – what we twist is its use."

 

Cover Combat:

At its core The Order: 1886 is a third person action game, complete with cover shooting mechanics. While you might think you've seen these before, Ready At Dawn is putting its own twist on convention.

 

"Yes, there is cover as you might have seen in other games, but we've added traversal modes" says Ru. "You'll go seamlessly from 'full cover' into 'soft cover' as you move away from an object. Imagine you're in cover, you're shooting at something and you want to pop out. You don't just stick your head up, right? You'd still stay low. So we've tried to build a bit more reality into the cover system."

 

Gadgets:

Alongside an arsenal of weaponry that offers a huge array of combat options, you'll also have a number of gadgets at your disposal. Here, Galahad is surveying Victorian London with a monocular in search of a fire fight.

 

"The Monocular was built for multipurpose use." explains Ru. "We haven't talked about all the different modes of gameplay in which it will be implemented, but what we showed in the latest demo is it being used as a looking glass, and to send Morse code. You can flash a signal to the airship to give your location."

 

"We have a lot of other devices like this that we're trying to implement. Of course, there are always more ideas than we can fit into the game, so it's a question of which ones will stick…"

 

Usage of Dualshock 4 in Unexpected ways

As mentioned above, one sequence sees you using the DualShock 4's touch pad to tap out a Morse code message to a nearby airship. Will there be other creative uses of the new controller?

 

"We've worked with the controller to test all the different things we could do with it." says Ru. "The issue is that the more complex and involved controller inputs get, the more it removes you from the immersive core experience. We don't want to use it too much; we're only using it for actions that feel natural. Tapping out Morse code just worked so well."

The Order: 1886 is scheduled to launch at somepoint in 2014, exact release date is still awaited.

 

naujienos is GDC 2014, nauji screenai ir info apie engine 

The latest version of the in-house engine used by Ready at Dawn is compatible with DirectX 11 and PS4, but it’s heavily geared towards PS4, and it includes physically based rendering from the start. it also involves fine-grained task scheduling, Low-overhead, multithreaded command buffer generation and relies on the “PS4 Secret Sauce™” (no, I’m not inventing this one).

Memory is allocated in the following way (MiB doesn’t stand for Men in Black but for Mebibyte, which is pretty much an equivalent of a Megabyte used in technical literature):

• 2 GB textures budget
• 128 MiB sound budget
• 700 MiB level geometry
• 600 MiB character textures
• 250 MiB global textures (FX, UI, light maps, etc..) – Even characters have lightmap data
• 700 MiB animation

We also learn that Environmental art is mapped at 512 pixels per unit and standard environment tiling textures are 1024×1024 pixels.