10 Times Video Game Developers Totally Destroyed Their Own Creations

3. Ready At Dawn Get Lost Clarifying If Length Equals Quality

In the weeks immediately preceding the release of The Order 1886, a serious concern was being raised that the game was going to be far too short to represent anything near decent value. Later, when a YouTuber uploaded a series of videos said to detail the whole game's campaign in just under five and a half hours, the concern became larger and the developing studio had to step in to try to fan the flames. Sadly, however, Ready At Dawn didn't manage to do much more than help the fire spread.

Ru Weerasuriya, the studio's CEO, told Eurogamer, "It's not going to be a short game, it's going to be something that rewards you as you play through, there is a storyline [and] you have information there, and then also it opens the door to a lot of questions you might be able to answer either by what you find in the game, or hopefully by what you will find out in the future."

Make sense of that, if you can. It was acknowledged that the game would never reach the length of a 12-20 hour RPG like Skyrim, but that this shouldn't matter for an immersive experience.

Weerasuriya conceded that "game length is important", of course, but added that "very game has to take its own time to tell its story. Some games can be short. Some games can be long. I still remember the first time I picked up Modern Warfare, I finished the campaign in about three-and-a-half or four hours. And it was fun because they made that campaign work for that because they had something else."

This is an admirable view, of course, but given that Ready At Dawn still insisted on charging premium prices for a short game with no multiplayer, there's hardly much to be said for such boldness.