Creating the world of The Order: 1886, one dented bucket at a time

Creating a third person shooter set in a post-industrial London requires a certain amount of finesse. Not necessarily in terms you usually take for granted – like gameplay behavior or shooting mechanics – but in the world itself. In a tech demo demonstrated at Gamescom by Ru Weerasuriya, CEO of Ready at Dawn and writer of The Order: 1886, we saw some of the work that has gone into creating an alternative London.

The idea of The Order 1886 came all the way back in 2006, and now in 2013 we are only about a year away from seeing the result. He told us that the shift from working on PSP and skipping PS3 on their way to PS4 came with both benefits and drawbacks. The positive being that any bad habits they might have adapted with the old console wouldn’t reflect in the work on the new. But having no prior experience with a console posed a higher learning curve when they fight started with the PS4.

 

A field trip in London as a part of the research for The Order yielded over 3000 pictures spanning anything from buildings, ornaments and gargoyls to close-ups of dirt, cobble stone and rubble. Actors were hired to wear authentic clothing from the era. A key element in creating this version of London was in the details, and very little was left to coincidence. Over 20 devs and artists contributed in gathering the research material. To further enhance the experience and to build upon an already extremely detailed foundation, RAD Engine 4.0 was created. And with it came the next-gen physics module named ABEL. It is not based on body collision and some of its key components is the lack of topological restrictions, and a very accurate friction model.

 

Our demonstration consisted of two confined worlds with a protagonist and a weapon constructed to blow stuff up. Most things in this world can be blown to bits, but each piece of whatever it is you break keeps its separate properties. This means that they don’t simply vanish from the world as things usually do, but that they stay and can be further manipulated by your actions. In a prime example they shot the limbs off a teddy bear. Its arms, legs and body adapted their own set of rules and would have reacted appropriately if the shooting continued. Materials like metal are also bound to their real world physics, and this means shooting a bucket will not only move it, but will also create dents in it. You can keep firing until it’s an unrecognizable ball of nothing. If the object has things like a handle, this can be shot off and will like everything else adapt its own rules for that particular object. Another example came in the form of a more abstract phenomenon like wind. Wind itself will realistically manipulate and move objects in the game world. So if you have three flags hanging from a building, each of these will move independently because their movement is governed by the wind and not their own set of animation rules.

 

These things might seem unimportant for a gamer who’s focused on pointing a reticule at something and pulling the trigger, but even the immersion you feel while doing so might come from other things than the action itself. For example a living, breathing world around you that’s easily taken for granted. A world that reacts to your actions in ways you would expect, and therefor will never accidentally pull you out of the moment you are in. I’m happy to see Ready at Dawn make such an effort to not only take advantage of a next-gen platform in terms of physics, but also realizing the importance of believable world.