The Order is a third person action adventure with shooting mechanics. It’s very much story-based – it’s a linear story-based game. Naughty Dog are trying to tell a story, a filmic experience.

The Order: 1886 is set in London, one of the greatest cities in the world, because there’s a real diversity there. A lot of European cities have it but specifically London, as there are moments throughout history that have played out there. It has a very interesting history, particularly at the end of the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. Because this game is based in the real world, Ready At Dawn wanted to feed off that and use some of the events, the people and the stuff that existed in that time to accentuate and bring their IP into a world that is believable.

Naughty Dog has revealed more details about The Order: 1886.

London is one of the greatest cities in the world. There’s a real diversity there. A lot of European cities have it but specifically London, as there are moments throughout history that have played out there. It has a very interesting history, particularly at the end of the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. Because this game is based in the real world, we wanted to feed off that and use some of the events, the people and the stuff that existed in that time to accentuate and bring our IP into a world that is believable.

I don’t think we’ll be able to do a 1:1 mapping of London. We tried! We started out by mapping the full city of London. But we’re going to try and stay as true as possible to it. You’ll recognize a lot of things.

There are obviously some things we’re going to put in there that don’t exist, and we’ve moved certain locations a bit, but as you can see from the trailer, when you pass in front of the Thames, Parliament is where it’s supposed to be and London Bridge is where it’s supposed to be. We don’t want people to go “Nah, this doesn’t look right”. You’ll be interacting with real people, real events and real places.

I think what we’re bringing over from our God Of War (PSP) experiece is everything that we’ve learned over the past 10 years. This was always the goal when we started the company. We started with the mind-set that we’re going to build our own IP, but we didn’t want to be the guys who straight out of the gate went “We’re going to do everything all at once.” So we learned little by little – building technology, building expertise, getting the right team together. It really took us a long time to find exactly what we wanted.

We’ve done well on a single platform. We’ve tried to push the boundaries of what could be done. That’s the same mentality we’re bringing to PS4. We’re working on a single platform – we want to push it, we want to get everything out of it, and hopefully that’s exactly what we’re going to do – milk it for all it’s worth.

There are gameplay features we’ll be talking about that will be very, very cool. Right now we’re playing with things – the moment-to-moment gameplay is really not what you might expect. We didn’t want to make it single-tone, where you rely on one single thing in expense of the rest.

The overall feel – that filmic experience… the one thing we brought to this is something people are accustomed too but usually can’t tell. When you watch a movie you don’t question what lens is being used. You don’t question why there is grain on the film or why there’s a certain lighting. Those are things we’ve been accustomed to seeing for 30 years. So when it’s missing we usually go “Wait, something is wrong with this image”.

With this game we replicated a lot of physical attributes. We have true lens distortion. We built physical lenses into our engine so we could get something where people will look it and not be totally disconnected. Games have a tendency sometimes to be too clean and crisp. We thrive in the dirt. We just love the fact that it feels dirty. It’s filmed in a very realistic way.