Toast On Jam: The Order Is A Cautionary Tale In Lazy Game Design

The Order: 1886 is a peculiar glimpse at a game design process so blatantly deficient in the areas that were sacrificed in order to make it the cinematic marvel of modern gaming that it so desperately wants to be. The trouble is that in doing so it only manages to remind us even more that we’re playing a game.

The simple reason for this is that when you go into a game wanting to make it look and feel a certain way, that needs to permeate through every aspect of the game, not just the obvious ones such as visuals (in the case of making a “cinematic” game).

In baking it’s obvious that the ingredients for a baked or refrigerated cheesecake are slightly different but it’s not merely enough to use the appropriate ingredients, to successfully make a refrigerated dessert requires far less attention than a baked one. In other words, it’s much easier to screw up or end up with something that’s acceptable but not what you had in mind.

At this point I’m going to request that you procure a slice of cheesecake in order to fully benefit from this column.

The Order is a lot like that cheesecake. If it was aiming to be a good third-person shooter then that’s a lot easier to pull off than aspiring to be the most cinematic experience gaming has to offer and it seems Ready at Dawn skipped a few steps in the post-preparation process.

The base is made from cookies and 8mm film to be as cinematic as possible.

We didn’t have much love for The Order: 1886 in our review of the game and that’s a sentiment I very much share. It’s not that The Order is a bad game by any definition, in fact it’s perfectly adequate and competent as a shooter and a game. Nay, the problem lies in what the game claims to its primary character trait without realising that this “trait” is as deeply ingrained as hair dye, some makeup and nail polish.

The Order is as much a cinematic and narrative experience as Gears of War.

The notion of making a game more “cinematic” is one that’s becoming increasingly shortsighted and hilarious in its execution due to a fundamental lack of understanding from developers regarding what they are actually trying to achieve.

When an author proclaims that he wants his next novel to be like a masterpiece from Matisse or Dali, they are not implying that it will be a picture book because then the target audience is still in kindergarten. Similarly, biomimicry in engineering is not about reproducing what we see in nature verbatim but rather taking the core concept or function and replicating that.

High visual fidelity, quick-time events and black bars clipping the aspect ratio do not a cinematic experience make.

A cinematic game, as some have tried to realise it, is something of a paradox due to the conflicting nature of passive versus active media but it has produced interesting results with creations such as Heavy Rain. The term “cinematic” is a dangerous term because it is often used to simply describe a deeply engaging game with a strong narrative or characters, plenty of attention to detail, pretty visuals and a high level of polish. That’s all it really is when you strip away the buzz around this word.

Cinematic is merely a keyword to a far more meaningful and less empty description. One of the most “cinematic” games is Uncharted 2 but really it is simply all the things described above. Any “cinematic” quality is inferred by the player who has obviously seen too much Indiana Jones.

So how did The Order get it so horribly wrong?

Quite simply, Ready at Dawn convinced themselves that the path to making a game “cinematic” is to ape film. They took the term far too literally unfortunately.

For all its pretty visuals, clipped aspect ratio and intrigue, none of the characters are really interesting or engaging and neither is the narrative once the game is done teasing its world to you. That may have been forgivable if the game didn’t behave exactly like any other shooter. At no point does it make any attempts to be anything different as far as the general gameplay experience goes and that is where The Order fails. The devil is in the details and The Order is a devout Christian, I’m afraid.

Does that analogy even work?

“Watch out for the black bars on your way down.”

Transitions between cutscenes and gameplay segments are indeed spectacularly seamless, credit where it’s due in that regard. That said, characters move and jerk just like in any other game, they don’t behave with the calculated grace of a stage performer. Similarly, Galahad behaves like a video game character. Leave him alone and he’s dead but do the same in Uncharted or The Last of Us and the characters do human things, there’s an organic feel to these pre-programmed interactions that allow the player to convince themselves of what’s happening on-screen. Why? Because the pixel clusters are doing human things rather than acting like robots who only respond to user input.

The Order has button prompts and shooting galleries just like any other game.

The Order has regenerating health and magical item pickups just like any other game.

The Order behaves just like any other game while desperately begging people to see it as a cutting-edge cinematic experience. It’s a jarring experience because on the surface is this game that uses cheap tricks to look like a film without understanding the core concept of replicating an experience rather than imitating an aesthetic.

The game takes what it thinks is a short cut to being cinematic without stopping to realise that it’s rushing at full tilt towards a dead end.

With VR and that “cinematic” feel being all the rage, developers need to realise that imitation is a fallacy and, while it takes more time and effort, understanding the underpinning principles and fundamentals of anything is the only way to truly replicate anything. Especially an experience.

When taking something from a completely different world or sphere and attempting to apply it elsewhere, it must first be abstracted and broken down in order to be functionally translatable.

Slapping black bars across the top and bottom of a screen and calling the experience cinematic is as disingenuous as browning the top of a cheesecake and calling it baked.

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