Finished my playthrough during the weekend, what should I say? It was bloody brilliant from start to finish, once the story keeps rolling, there is no turning back, I couldn't stop playing till the end. I can understand a game like this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I sincerely hope RAD is getting the chance to tell the story till the proper end.
It will only allow you to wear certain dlc costumes when it's contextually possible. So for example, Galahad can't wear the red knight outfit if he's wearing something other than the knight uniform in that section. It's dumb but that's how RAD explained it.
It kinda shows me that most reviewers heavily place more priorities in certain aspect's of a game's craft and mostly disregards atmosphere, mood, and art as something of significant worth. I think the world building, tech, and artistry is beyond amazing; and the gameplay is solid. Unfortunately I think that everything else surrounding the game is fairly poor like pacing, hand-holding, taking control away from the player, etc, but I finished The Order enjoying the overall experience.
- Black bars are annoying no matter what devs tried to do here. I hope that doesn't become a trend.
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- Gunplay is mostly good but some guns don't feel very good. Shotgun and rifle sound very good though.
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Other than that, i agree that it takes control out of the player too often. There's not enough stuff to discover, not enough exploration, no score system like old school SEGA arcade shooters to bring you back. It's very linear but that's ok with me.
While I could never shake the feeling that the game was not designed around black bars for The Evil Within (and made me kinda worried about The Order), I actually hardly noticed it in 1886 because the framing felt deliberate and well done.
I thought the guns were hit and miss. Some guns feel incredibly good and punchy, while others feel like pea shooters, namely the automatic weapons. The carbine, shotgun, revolvers, and dueling pistols felt really good.
The control 1886 takes away from the player constantly took me out of the game. In TLOU, another 'cinematic' game, cutscenes were used rather sparingly in its 15+ hour campaign, and when one began you knew it was going to be important and significant; In The Order, they constantly throw in cutscenes that could have been done in gameplay and add nothing significant, which just confused me.
Instead of feeling like I was making my way through the locations, I felt like the cutscenes were taking control of my experience, chauffeuring me from one location to another going "Okay, you spent enough time in this room, let's take you to the next one!"
It wasn't until I played through 1886 that I realized how much I value the pure time I spend controlling a character and how much it adds to my immersion, much more than seeing impeccably shot cutscenes.
Out of all the things I can say about this game the most outstandingly positive thing I can say is it has hands down the best clothe bounce while walking animations I've ever seen in a game.
I'm only on chapter 5 but I 'm enjoying so far except for the first werewolf encounter(Just seemed too simple). Also, THAT GD THERMITE RIFLE! Surely someone has thought of it before right? It's almost Iconic. I expect to see it in the next game as well.
I can see where the criticism come from, if you don't like cutscenes, or walking segments, then yeah the game would be a problem for you. I don't really mind those things so it wasn't a huge issue for me.
Good game with some problems, hopefully they can learn from their mistakes if sony green light a sequel.
Finished my playthrough during the weekend, what should I say? It was bloody brilliant from start to finish, once the story keeps rolling, there is no turning back, I couldn't stop playing till the end. I can understand a game like this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I sincerely hope RAD is getting the chance to tell the story till the proper end.
I agree completely. I loved it besides being pissed about a couple moments of QTE rage but I got over it as soon as it was finished and was swept up again. The stealth was much improved the second time, luckily the first time was pretty over fast. The graphics and art direction are brilliant and I gotta say I had a great Bioshock infinite vibe during the game which was a good thing. The story was interesting imo and it was tense. the fire fights were fun and intense and I felt great after that last battle.
I feel like I know exactly why some of the reviewers went for the throat....the ending. even though I was yelling at the screen I got over it and I understood why. besides having no reason to play it again besides upping the difficultly and just enjoying it again. The fact that I finished it the same day I got it is not cool either. I would give it a 7.5. and I hope they make a sequel.
Finished the game yesterday; it took me maybe 12-14 hours on Easy (I'm awful at shooters) and I got all the photographs but didn't complete the other collectibles. Died well over 100 times; maybe 200, with most of them being in the combat-heavy sections but a few came through QTE fails and seventeen of them (I counted) came in the stealth-in-the-garden chapter when the guard with the key I was looking for just uncannily happened to be the last one killed, no matter which one it was.
Some thoughts in somewhat-random, scattershot order:
Played on a full HD 21" screen. Those fonts are tiny, though the well-enunciated voice acting helped. I wouldn't have wanted to depend on such small fonts for reading. This only seems to be getting worse with this new generation. Black bars are no problem, though I wish they could have used that space for the UI and subtitles.
I admit that I'm terrible at shooters. I just can't find a camera/reticule/movement orientation that works for me: in third person, moving the camera, I prefer an inverted stick because it reflects how a camera behind someone's head would move, but when moving a reticule when shooting people, it's the exact opposite, and this game insists on using the same orientation for both. I left it as inverted and the camera felt perfect but I never did get used to aiming my gun. I think I would have preferred first-person with non-inverted controls.
But while I may hate shooters, I love atmosphere. And this game just oozes atmosphere. Wow, these are some great environments. And look at all these great little touches -- the Ouroboros on the Blackwater vial! If only this hadn't been so "cinematic" -- we could have been exploring the Order's headquarters and learning about the world; we could have had more NPCs to talk to; non-enemies to meet and learn from. This would have been an amazing RPG or open-world game.
Despite the on-rails environments, I got lost a few times. In Chapter 3, Lafayette talks about going "through the building", and I had no idea where to go; the It took three or four restarts before I finally found the breakable wooden slat that hides the path we were looking for. I liked the lack of a map and uiding arrows in general, but here some help would have been appreciated, because I had to re-do the previous shooting sequence three times.
I'm not a big fan of killing dozens of semi-innocent men (which shooters invariably make you do) and of seeing beautiful environments destroyed and damaged (hard to avoid with shooters, and this game is no exception). The environmental destruction managed to be depressing (beautiful buildings laid to waste; glass cases put there seemingly for the express purpose of being shot by you) and illogical (walls riddled with bullet holes will "heal" themselves, as will Galahad's bloody shirt). There's nothing fun about a shootout in a lavishly-furnished mansion full of priceless artwork.
You will murder men with a shocking brutality -- despite being a Knight of the Round who has (supposedly) pledged to behave in the exact opposite way. Watching Galahad viciously slash the throats of airship crew and city guards who were only doing their jobs disgusted me. I thought we would be fighting monsters, but we kill a handful of those compared to hundreds of humans. And when we are killing monsters, they're all moving and attacking in exactly the same way.
Even after Galahad breaks with the Order (not a spoiler; it's in the Prologue), he then mowns down Order members with the same bloodlust with which he slaughtered Company men and rebels earlier. I kept waiting for a plot twist that would make it clear that the Order were heartless murderers and entirely unrelated to King Arthur, but one never came.
Some great characters. Loved Lafayette (how is he still looking so young at age 130 or so? He wasn't a Grail-sipping Knight until after the game started); Devi and Lakshmi were refreshingly different (not too often you see Indian woman as protagonists, and while their non-Indian-sounding British accents are consistent with their upper-class background, I still would have liked Indian accents for flavor). Tesla was under-used, as were the cameos from Charles Darwin and Sherlock Holmes, who was only alluded to.
On QTEs: why!? They take you right out of the beautiful seamless cinema-like atmosphere and provide you with nothing more than a few dozen more deaths.
There was one where they wanted you to move the right stick, but they put the QTE icon on the far left side of the screen.
I failed it twice before noticing that it was the right stick they wanted you to move, not the left stick. I felt like I had been dealt a hand using one of those trick decks that have red spades and clubs, and black hearts and diamonds.
They have their place, but not in a seamless-cutscene-transition game like this one.
Pacing was questionable. I liked the integration of short, non-combat chapters with the shootout chapters, but the game ended when it felt like it should have been only two-thirds over. I do hope that RAD didn't cut stuff so that they could put it in the sequel.
To get back on a positive note, the music is excellent and the setting is amazing; this game would have been better in almost any genre except shooter. I got an Assassin's Creed 1 vibe from this game: a flawed game (which people will compare to a "tech demo" but will still be loved by others) with a great premise based on some fun historical stuff, and a whole lot of potential that could result in a masterpiece of a sequel. Let's hope that The Order: 1887 is the quantum leap that we got from AC2.
You don't. Same with other media that use it, if you're engrossed enough you don't notice. I only noticed a few times where it was "Oh yeah, I forgot about the bars." A non-issue blown right out of proportion.
Redbox has this in-stock now. If you didn't want to spend $60 for this, why not spend $2? The closest one near me is 15 minutes away but I don't really feel like driving a 30-minute round-trip to pick it up because I'm feeling too lazy.
I agree completely. I loved it besides being pissed about a couple moments of QTE rage but I got over it as soon as it was finished and was swept up again. The stealth was much improved the second time, luckily the first time was pretty over fast. The graphics and art direction are brilliant and I gotta say I had a great Bioshock infinite vibe during the game which was a good thing. The story was interesting imo and it was tense. the fire fights were fun and intense and I felt great after that last battle.
I feel like I know exactly why some of the reviewers went for the throat....the ending. even though I was yelling at the screen I got over it and I understood why. besides having no reason to play it again besides upping the difficultly and just enjoying it again. The fact that I finished it the same day I got it is not cool either. I would give it a 7.5. and I hope they make a sequel.
I really didn't like either of the stealth sections. The first one was very short so I didn't mind as much, but the long one in the latter half of the game was reaching a balance between completely mundane and frustrating lol
,"find the guard who has the key in this garden maze!"
. Reminded me of the opening stealth level in Uncharted 2, only you're way less mobile. The whole timed button press for stealth attacks feels so contrived too. That and the QTE dodge and combat sections are my chief complaints regarding the gameplay. Oh, and the sticky cover which now feels ancient compared to contextual cover, but that didn't bother me too much.
Redbox has this in-stock now. If you didn't want to spend $60 for this, why not spend $2? The closest one near me is 15 minutes away but I don't really feel like driving a 30-minute round-trip to pick it up because I'm feeling too lazy.
I played through it twice in the two days following release, probably spent ~11 hours on it total to get the platinum. I enjoyed it, but decided to trade it in before the value plummets. My attempt at a review::
Presentation:
The game is beautiful, you could spend forever trying to find a poorly rendered object or lazy texture and find nothing. Loading is extremely fast, and the transitions from cutscenes to gameplay are seemless. My experience throughout was entirely bug/glitch free, even visual bugs such as clipping or aliasing were almost completely absent. You have to give credit to RAD's quality assurance team because the overall package is pristine.
10/10
Story:
The setting and atmosphere are extremely well realized, and the story is largely compelling. The concept is it's greatest asset - King Arthur's knights of the round fighting werewolves in steampunk Victorian-era London - and the writing and direction convey the premise such that very little comes off ham-handed. However, the story does falter around the point when you catch up to the prologue. The first act (
up until the death of a friend
), and the second act (
up until the reveal of the true villain
) follow a nice arc, but the third act feels rushed and resolves almost nothing. There are story threads left hanging everywhere and you end up feeling like it was all nothing but a primer for sequel.
7/10
Gameplay:
I believe a big part of the reason the production values and quality control are so immaculate is because of how streamlined the game is. There is very little agency given to the player at any time. The core gameplay loop is: watch cutcene -> walk through expository environment -> watch cutscene (with potential for QTE prompt) -> cover shooter/forced stealth section -> repeat. The only agency given to the player is in how you approach the gunplay and stealth sections and even then there is not much a player can do to manipulate an encounter. There are limited options for taking different paths or changing up the flow of combat. In many cases there is only one optimal cover position and you can't even move to cover that is occupied by one of your squadmates.
The gunplay is simple but fun and impactful, and with the exception of a few missing mechanics for traversing cover this aspect of the gameplay handles very well. Enemy hit reactions are very well done, with the animations, particle effects, and gibbing all coming together to give it a satisfyingly brutal feel, especially when using the "three crown" coach gun... That said, some action segments feel under-baked, particularly the sections when Galahad is carrying a lantern and, most disappointingly, lycan encounters.
5/10
Overall:
In the cinematic leading into the final encounter
Galahad is given a cool looking new gun that you just know will be fun to use and play a big part in the final battle, but moments later in the same cinematic it's disarmed before you even get a chance to play with it.
The final encounter then boils down to a rehashed QTE sequence from earlier in the game. That sort of sums up my feeling about the whole game - engaging promise and potential but slightly disappointing execution. What's here is entertaining, but it feels so pared back and restricted.
Chalk some of these cut corners up to developer inexperience in the AAA space, but they won't have that excuse for the much-hinged-upon sequel. The Order 1887 needs to be bigger, better, and more interactive in every way, it needs to fulfill the promise and potential set up by 1886. Oddly enough to me, whether The Order 1886 is a considered a success or failure depends on how well a sequel fulfills that promise.
The Order feels like more of an experience than a game, and the replay value suffers greatly for it. Once you've experienced it there's very little reason to revisit it, and unskippable cutscenes make it a chore to jump back in. I would recommend it to anybody as a rental but the value proposition at $60 is pretty weak.
It will only allow you to wear certain dlc costumes when it's contextually possible. So for example, Galahad can't wear the red knight outfit if he's wearing something other than the knight uniform in that section. It's dumb but that's how RAD explained it.
Yeah, I was thinking that was the case but this has happened while I'm wearing the default knight outfit. I'm guessing you have to start a whole new game and can't pick through the chapters after completing the game.
Also, was
the shootout sequence before you get to Lucan at the end annoying for some of you? It took me more than several times to get lucky with the shotgunners and grenade launcher dudes. (this is the shootout after the armory corridor)
Granted I had it on hard, but the difficulty of that sequence didn't fit in with the rest of the game.
I had no problems with the black bars...until I was in low cover and couldn't see the Sniper up on the balcony. I had to stand straight up or take some weird angle elsewhere. It was the only time the bars were annoying.
I had no problems with the black bars...until I was in low cover and couldn't see the Sniper up on the balcony. I had to stand straight up or take some weird angle elsewhere. It was the only time the bars were annoying.
I have a very good Sony tv and black bars annoy me, The Evil Within is the worst as in the devs didn't gave me a good field of view compared to the size reduction + the bad controls.
The thing with black bars is that it reduces the field of view, especially when in intense action sequences and when i need to look at things, when in action. The Order is great and black bars are not that bad but if i had the choice, i would always play without them. They feel intrusive to me.
Beyond this, I feel each enemy encounter is framed quite well; every time I'm taking a gun out to shoot enemies, I feel like its appropriately paced and fits the context of the situation. Although the encounter design isnt the best, I've started to appreciate the encounter frequency.
I feel that is one of the major things they aimed to achieve with this game... encounters serve the story, story does not serve to create encounters.
Most games have shit stories because they need to give you reason to move from one enemy encounter to the next with little breath in between... this game sets the pace by the story first, and encounter frequently at much lower priority...
I haven't played it yet, but this seems obvious to me.
The one problem I had with the story, was that some things were very predictable, like
Alistair Lucan being a lycan (c'mon now). There was something in his demeanor that gave him away right from the start. The same goes for the Chancellor having a secret to hide.
It was similar with Bioshock Infinite, where I guessed the twist
of Booker being Comstock long before it was revealed.
I wish story-driven games had less predictable plots, like SH2 and TLOU had, but I guess they're exceptions to the norm.
The lack of character reflections continue to puzzle me.
I thought it was because Galahad and the Order were vampires, or related to them in some manner, but after playing the game through that didn't seem to be the case, unless I missed something.
The lack of character reflections continue to puzzle me.
I thought it was because Galahad and the Order were vampires, or related to them in some manner, but after playing the game through that didn't seem to be the case, unless I missed something.
Fucking awesome. I have to wonder now, with all the discussion that they had to cut content due to time: Could these have been places for the story to go to?
I feel that is one of the major things they aimed to achieve with this game... encounters serve the story, story does not serve to create encounters.
Most games have shit stories because they need to give you reason to move from one enemy encounter to the next with little breath in between... this game sets the pace by the story first, and encounter frequently at much lower priority...
I haven't played it yet, but this seems obvious to me.
You can have good encounters and a good story. The Order shouldn't be excused for its poor encounter design because it was story focused. Other games manage both perfectly fine.
The one problem I had with the story, was that some things were very predictable, like
Alistair Lucan being a lycan (c'mon now). There was something in his demeanor that gave him away right from the start. The same goes for the Chancellor having a secret to hide.
It was similar with Bioshock Infinite, where I guessed the twist
of Booker being Comstock long before it was revealed.
I wish story-driven games had less predictable plots, like SH2 and TLOU had, but I guess they're exceptions to the norm.
The lack of character reflections continue to puzzle me.
I thought it was because Galahad and the Order were vampires, or related to them in some manner, but after playing the game through that didn't seem to be the case, unless I missed something.
I played the beginning of the game up until the beginning of Chapter 11 last night. I'm really, really enjoying myself. QTEs are annoying, but I don't think the pacing is nearly as bad as some impressions made it out to be (pacing could go haywire in the last few chapters though).
I really hope that RAD gets another shot. If this is their first shot at a console game then I can't imagine what they could do with a sequel.
