The Order 1886 and the smear campaign of hate

[gf78]

The amount of hatred and the pitifully low scores by "professional reviewers" has reached an all-time low as The Order 1886 gets torn to shreds by a huge portion of reviewers and fanboys from the Xbox camp writing bogus 0/1 scores on Metacritic. You know what I did?  I ignored all of this, picked my game up and have been playing most of the day since about 11:00 AM. Long enough to get through a good portion of it and form a pretty solid opinion for myself. Here's my personal experience.

Quick-time events:  I don't know when QTE's became the devil, but the notion this game is loaded with them is preposterous. I guess a prompt to push "X" or hold "triangle" is a hell-worthy sin now. There are no battles like God of War where you have to press buttons in a certain order. You are given a little prompt for things like picking up ammo, opening a gate, etc. it really reminds me of the prompts the Uncharted games present to you.

Cutscenes:  If you play any recent Final Fantasy or any Metal Gear Solid game, those games are loaded with cutscenes. The Order has quite a few, but most of them are brief between moments of action. Most of them are small. Such as, after a firefight, the characters may interact with each other. Unlike just about every game I've played with similar scenes, the Order's are virtually seamless. There is no black screen afterward before you can play again. The camera simply pans around behind you and you take control again.

Gameplay:  anyone familiar with snap-to-cover gameplay mechanics will feel right at home. The controls are simple and intuitive. Weapons are mapped to the D-pad.  I have over six hours into the game so far.

Graphics & Sound:  this is one of the most immersive, atmospheric games I have ever seen. It's a visual and audio delight and one of the best looking games I've laid my eyeballs on.

Look, no game is perfect and these "reviewers" that dole 9's and 10's out to Modern Warfare 57 and games that launch broken like Assassin's Creed Unity and have been giving this game 2/10 or 4/10 should absolutely be ashamed of themselves. Ready at Dawn set out with their vision to make a cinematic, single player adventure and that is exactly what they have done. They never said there would be multiplayer or that they were going to redefine the genre.

Why is this game being docked for lack of innovation when no game today has brought something new to the table?  Did these guys even play past the obligatory hand-holding intro chapter?  These guys bashing the story, did they even play long enough to see the real threat begin to emerge? 

I can't think of many games that are a 10.  But I can tell you that from the moment I started playing with the initial hook that made me think "WTF IS HAPPENING?!" That I have thoroughly enjoyed the story, controls, characters, pacing, gameplay, sound and yes-the graphics with no regrets that I spent $80 on the collectors edition. And when I'm done playing, I will play through it again.

I'm not going to tell anyone to buy this game or not to. I'm just telling you that for me, this game is giving me as much enjoyment as a God of War, Uncharted, Last of Us or inFAMOUS game. I hope that Ready at Dawn sells enough copies for Sony to give the go-ahead for a sequel. I love this games premise and would gladly drop 60+ bones on a sequel.

Well done RaD.  Fuck the haters and thanks for this amazing game.

[soera]

I keep looking at this game and wondering if I would like it. I may have to give it a go after all.

[kamikazekeeg]

All I'm hearing from everyone is that it's good looking next gen game with average shooter gameplay, an alright story and characters, and it's incredibly short with little replay value and that the final boss is a QTE fight.  Now I don't think all QTE's are the devil, they have their place and I'm fine with them, they can work in games like God of War, but more commonly recently we are seeing the final fights come down to nothing more than this and they make for the worst, most anti-climatic fights.  Shadow of Mordor did it, taking an already weak ending and making it worse, and this was after the previous boss fight also being QTE and boring.  Dying Light did it, but at least they tried to make it action packed, though it again wasn't any fun, and I could've easily made a much more creative boss fight.  The Order apparently does it also, but seems to be far worse at it because it's also a re-used fight from earlier in the game.

It's totally fine if you can enjoy it, but the general consensus among most folks think it's a pretty underwhelming title, made all the worse by the lack of system selling games the PS4 needs.  Still not deserving of anything below like a 5 though if people are scoring it.  Even if a game is utterly devoid of originality and being fresh, the game is apparently incredibly polished and doesn't deserve anything less than an average rating.

It's probably not something I'll ever play anyways as it never really looked like a very good game to begin with.  Never got the hype.  It just looked like an average shooter with a mildly interesting setting.  Heck, the more I saw the game, the less interested I became.  Not once did I see them show off a moment that got me excited lol  Only thing I've seen on the PS4 to get me hyped was Bloodborne and I'll probably get Infamous 3, though I never beat Infamous 2.

[badATchaos]

Let me know in 8 months when it gets a PC port.

Edit: Nevermind. didn't realize it was published by Sony. Now I'm sad.

[kamikazekeeg]

Let me know in 8 months when it gets a PC port.

Edit: Nevermind. didn't realize it was published by Sony. Now I'm sad.

Now if it was an Xbone "Exclusive", this would be completely true lol  Uggh, that just reminds me that Rise of the Tomb Raider is a timed exclusive and I have to wait for them to get through that.  Perhaps that'll mean an extra good quality PC port since it'll have a lot of extra development time lol

[betelgeuse]

It kind of feels like your playing one of the Tell Tale games at the beginning.

I'm not a big fan of quick time events either, but this is the first one I played that doesn't penalize you for clicking the wrong button. I'm mostly on Xbox so whenever it said to push "x", I kept hitting the square. It didn't seem to matter, I would just hit the "x" after hitting square.

The cover system isn't the greatest from what I've played so far. It seems almost impossible to miss a head shot and I never came close to running out of ammo. I also noticed if you don't feel like shooting the enemies, you can just run up to them and push "triangle" to execute them (LOL Kane & Lynch style!!!).

This game seems to be a mash up of everything. I got the feel of Assassins Creed, Wolf Among Us and Quantum Theory so far. I'm not too far into the game, but the reviews I've seen say It's under 8 hours anyway. Still wondering why I needed to go to the top floor of the building in chapter 1 if he was just gonna jump over the railing down to the street level.

Sad to say, I was expecting more as well...

[disgaeniac]

short answer = REVIEWS:

read words + ignore #'s   

[argyle]

There's a certain level of venom that comes from AAA-releases these days, especially when they're exclusive. If I pickup a niche title people are genuinely interested to hear what I think about it, and whether I like it or not the concern is more for my time & enjoyment than the game.  For example, when I pickup htoL #NiQ: The Firefly Diary next week, if for some reason I don't like it & explain why the general sentiment will probably be "oh, that's too bad, that game looked really interesting too!" 

With releases like The Order, however, many people had already made up their minds on it before it released & are just looking for negatives to help justify their opinions.  It makes no sense, they're both games and they both serve the same purpose - entertainment. Even if someone says they're enjoying the game, some people will just look for reasons to tell him that he either shouldn't be or probably isn't really.  It's crazy.

TLDR; I have The Order too but I'm ignoring reviews & just playing the game, like I would any other game. It's just better that way.

[burningdoom]

"When did QTEs become the devil?"

When weren't they? I hated them the moment I encountered them for the first time in Shenmue.

[redblaze57]

HAVING NOT PLAYED THE GAME!!! at least from what I've seen I gotta agree with some of the critics on certain things. I'very only checked out GameSpot's and IGN'S reviews which were average/slightly above average. One thing that I heard and I know will annoy the hell out of me is the letterbox format obscuring the view in certain sections. While I don't think of QTE'S "as the Devil" I think an excessive amount can bring you out of the experience. positives for me are that the shooting parts look soild, the QTE's where you are fighting the werewolves actually look badass and more soild than that the knife fight in RE4, and the weapons look interesting. My conclusion for me is that it's  what the main series resident evil has been trying to be, definitely not a killer app but a solid pro towards the PS4, and I will probably pick it up when it's around $30-$40.

[insektmute]

I wouldn't get too worked up it. Review scores, Metacritic, the whole "fanboy" thing (really, dude?)... it's just a waste of time and energy.

The best you can do is vote with your wallet. It may not save games you love from the abyss, but as long as you're enjoying yourself and can find like-minded people who share your enthusiasm, that's really the only thing that matters.

Gaming as a whole would be a lot better off if people would stop worrying about what everyone else thinks.

[disgaeniac]

I wouldn't get too worked up it. Review scores, Metacritic, the whole "fanboy" thing (really, dude?)... it's just a waste of time and energy.

The best you can do is vote with your wallet. It may not save games you love from the abyss, but as long as you're enjoying yourself and can find like-minded people who share your enthusiasm, that's really the only thing that matters.

Gaming as a whole would be a lot better off if people would stop worrying about what everyone else thinks.

Amen, brother Erik!

[bikingjahuty]

Anytime a game gets an enormous amount of hype and fails to be one of the best games in recent memory it gets bashed up and down.


This whole thing reminds me of when Liar game out on the PS3. It was a shitshow lol

[kamikazekeeg]

Gaming as a whole would be a lot better off if people would stop worrying about what everyone else thinks.

It's less about that for many and more about whether there's good value.  Getting a 6 or 7 hour game with little replay value and no extras for 60 bucks is pretty poor in my opinion, unless that game is just crazy amazing.  Like I love Metal Gear Rising, I bought it on PC much later on with all the DLC on a sale, but had I bought that new for full price, I'd probably would've been pretty annoyed that game is only about the same length as The order, but at least that has lots of extra stuff to unlock and the VR missions.  It's also a completely ridiculous and fun game, so it has higher standing for it.

With this in mind, I use reviews for the games I might be a tad unsure about.  A basic gauge on things, though I don't look too in depth.  If I know I'm gonna like a game, I don't check the reviews and just get it, cause I've gotten good enough to know whether something is probably worth it.  The Order was a review game to me, something I wasn't particularly excited about and I'd wait to see what kind of consensus it had on it, with the consensus being, it's a rental game or buy it when it's cheap.  Most likely on a sale.

[gf78]

There are no pre-choreographed fights that are composed of purely timed button presses. When fighting the huge lycan, the game will present a symbol of the right stick indicating which direction to push to dodge an incoming attack. Your free to attack at will. It's not like God of War where the battle is a series of timed presses and missing a press resets that part of the fight. I have completed the game and attest to this.

I guess my point is that this game has been hounded from day one of its first showing by the gaming media and singled out. Is it the greatest game ever?  Nope. Does it deserve to get points knocked off some arbitrary number because it doesn't have a multiplayer mode?  I guess we should dock a point because there is no racing section? 

With the standards applied to this game, Ryse should be a 0 or 0.5/10 because of the prevalence of QTE's. Mario anything shoul be a 1/10 because they are all the same, don't innovate and are star and coin fetch quests. Gran Turismo and Forza should be 1/10 because there are no stealth sections and the controls aren't innovative enough. And Halo Master Chief collection should be 0.5/10 because it launched with completely broken multiplayer.

You can't say you shouldn't worry about what others think. This crucification the Order is receiving will undoubtedly assure no sequel gets made and that's a real shame. How can I ignore that fact?  How can anyone who loved a game that the press destroyed and it never received a sequel or the developer went under ignore that? 

I don't care who you are or what your opinion of a game is, but to score a game that isn't a broken, buggy mess a 1 or 2/10 like it's trash is nothing but pure hate and shows an agenda. Sorry if you guys don't see it that way.