Over the weekend a YouTuber called
PlayMeThrough uploaded
the entire game, including cutscenes, to the video site. Adding up the length of each video we get five hours and 30 minutes.
Last week I had a chat with Ru Weerasuriya, founder, CEO and creative director of Ready at Dawn, to discuss The Order's length after a previous report indicated it could be completed in just a few hours.
"I know there are numbers out there," he said. "I know why the question comes up. I know numbers have been put out there that are actually not right. It's impossible to finish the game in that time, so we know the numbers are wrong.
"At the end of the day, we're not going to comment on it. We can't stop people from writing the things they do. And we're not going to jump at every single mistake that is made out there. Every time somebody has the wrong impression of something we made, or somebody writes the wrong thing about what we did, it would be a full-time job to be like, oh no, that's not right. We make games. We do what we do for the players. And, ultimately, that's where I want to leave it."
While Weerasuriya denied The Order, which leans heavily on interactive cutscenes and quick-time events as it blends third-person shooting, exploration and puzzle-solving with in-engine cinematics, can be completed in just a few hours, it is clear the game won't be considered long by anyone's standards.
But how long, exactly, had Ready at Dawn's tests shown The Order to be? Weerasuriya wouldn't reveal the average playthrough time, but he was willing to enter into the debate about it.
"Game length is important," he said. "Every 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.
"Any of these games need to pack in what it needs to to deliver the experience you were hoping to deliver when you first tackled it. For us that meant, it's not going to be a short game, it's going to be something that rewards you as you play through, that there is a storyline, that 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.
"Our industry is diverse enough that we need different games. We have to allow for different genres and single-player games like we do, multiplayer games, co-op games, social games, whatever it is."