PS4 exclusive The Order 1886 had working multiplayer in second year, was part of a trilogy

The Order: 1886 was supposed to be the start of a bold new trilogy of games for Ready At Dawn, but the game never gained enough traction and eventually the studio shut down.

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PS4 launch game The Order: 1886 made waves in 2013 for its impressive cinematic sequences and eye-opening visuals. There was just one issue: the game was really short. As a result, Ready At Dawn's third-person action game didn't blow up as the studio had hoped it would--the devs ambitious plans for sequels.

We now have a better understanding of what could've been in The Order franchise. Former Ready At Dawn creative director Ru Weerasuriya recently outlined some of those ideas in a recent interview with French YouTuber Julien Chieze.

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According to the interview, Ready At Dawn actually had a working multiplayer build of The Order: 1886 in the second year of the game's development. There were story ideas for a trilogy of games, complete with big jumps in time frames.

After The Order's launch, the studio also wanted to dramatically boost the amount of combat interactions, eventually aspiring to have players face off against dozens of enemies at once.

Below we've compiled a transcription of the machine-translated interview segment:

"There was a world where, in fact... I started writing the Order in 2007. I think the first time I started writing stories about this, the year was 2007. I spent the first three to four years actually just doing that without anyone because, well, I was in charge of the creative [team], and I wanted to create new IPs.

"So that wasn't the only new IPs [that] I created. There are others that I really like that we have never released. But we spent a little time not working on a game, but I just worked on the story and actually at the beginning I wrote the story before the Order, the story during the Order, and the years after--even the modern story of the Order in the 20th Century. I actually wrote six [stories].

"In 1886, it was really this environment in fact because there was all the past and there was the future. And actually during the end of the Order when we were working on the sequel, I already had the basis of the sequel, the synopsis, and I wanted to write that.

"We made a little deck of about 10 pages, a little presentation, with what we were going to do. There were things we hadn't been able to do in the first one that we were going to do on the second one, in particular,the size of the fights.

"We had made a decision because technologically it was already very difficult to do what we did on PS4. We had made the decision to do some fighting [in the sequel], I think it was about a dozen people, 15 people at most, shooting at each other and all that.

"And with the Order it was just one-on-one. Most of the time, it was done like that.

"The future was actually based on the fact that we had introduced Lord Hastings in the game, which was another half-breed of the IP.

"Actually, the goal there was to have dozens and dozens, maybe even more, of enemies that you fight with--enemies that are easier to fight, but are are a slightly different fight that changes things. It's individual against the bosses, you have fights against humans with guns and all that. And you have fights against creatures that go from a dozen creatures to maybe 50, 60 creatures.

"We had other ideas, I think we talked about it in the past, we had multiplayer--the multiplayer had been done--we already had a version of multiplayer that worked during the second year of development."