In an ecosystem of multiplatform games, Ready at Dawn Studios' The Order: 1886 is headed exclusively to the PlayStation 4 because the developer wanted "to target a platform that we could make the most of," creative director Ru Weerasuriya told GamesIndustry International.
The developer already had a longstanding relationship with Sony, having developed the PSP God of War games Chains of Olympus (2008) and Ghost of Sparta (2010) as well as the God of War: Origins Collection (2011), when it began discussing a next-gen collaboration.
"They listened to us and we had a great discussion about how big it was going to be"
"We saw the initial talks about PS4 and what it was going to be and we've had a relationship with Sony for 10 years, so we felt it was the right time to not only move but to move to a single platform again where we could bring our expertise to something that could make us realize the game we wanted," Weerasuriya said. "Once we knew that internally, we approached Sony and said this is what we have and here's where we want to go, and they listened to us and we had a great discussion about how big it was going to be, and it turned out to be bigger than expected. So it's a good conscious decision from us to target a platform that we could make the most of."
Weerasuriya acknowledged that console exclusivity means that a game reaches a smaller audience, but said that Ready at Dawn's focus is often more creative than financial.
"For us, the number one factor in making our decision was always creative," he said. "And to a fault over the last 10 years, we sometimes chose creative over a lot of other things. Yes, of course, there's an opportunity to make a dual-platform game and there are third-party publishers we can go to, and it's not something we'll ever dismiss, but for now since we've been so targeted towards working on a single platform it felt natural for us to make that decision regardless of the financial hit we would take."
Sony unveiled The Order: 1886 at its E3 2013 press conference. For more on the developer's first intellectual property, be sure to read Polygon's interview with Weerasuriya, which also contains a trailer and a gallery of screenshots from the reveal.