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The reason why we chose the year 1886 is because of everything that happened before,
but also what was going to happen after.
Life changed from the industrial revolution in 1848
all the way through really to the First World War.
The Victorian era, the city itself, the booming industrial revolution.
You’re kind of at the cusp of the modern era.
At the same time you almost have this lingering sense of mysticism.
We definitely drew from a lot of that stuff. I remember being enamoured with the whole
idea of Camalot and the Knights of the Round Table.
Something that was not religious but really about humanity.
If you look at the Arthurian legend, there’s some of them
that go back to pre-Roman and Celtic,
and we wanted to get some of that Celtic lineage back
into the oldest part of The Order.
It’s so rich with the lore, with those interactions and people,
these noble knights basically protecting humanity, and it was like
“If we could meld a story like that. If we build those people
If we build something that is slightly outside the bounds of reality,
can we make it real enough?”
We want that double take, where it feels like the 1886 that ‘was’,
but then out of the corner of your eye,
there’s thing where we deliberately deviate from history
just to get that balance between getting that first read and believability
and that second read of “wow that’s kind of cool and different”
We tried to echo a lot of things that were true of the time.
We didn’t want to recreate history, we wanted to twist it.
We just poured over the history of the era, maps and the layout of London.
Understanding the city. Understanding really how it was laid out.
We went to London with twenty people locations scouting
and shooting extensive amounts of photos.
If you hadn’t been there, you have to go there to understand what life is like,
what it feels like to walk in the streets, because a lot of it still exists.
There’s so much history that you can see the layers of time
and layers of architecture built on top of each other. Even at that time.
We poured over period costumes and did photo-shoots.
Not only capturing all of the intricate details of the costumes,
but also how people moved in them.
A lot of European militaries at that time, they had a lot of craftsmanship,
a lot of symbols and patches and a lot of embroidery.
Recording the armoured georgettes and bracers,
those are things we spent a lot of time poring over reference,
but then inject all of our lore to craft these specifically for these characters
and for this Order.
When we started melding this fiction and non-fiction,
there was the need to make sure we had some control over it.
We early on had a lot of elements that were more ‘fantastic’.
It was very tempting and very easy early on to say
“If we’re going to do ‘alternative history’ let’s alter the world a lot”.
The risk of approaching a game like this and bringing that balance between fiction and non-fiction
is that once you’ve basically broken that suspension of disbelief,
there’s in no buying it back from the player.
It kind of undermined the reality and the believability of the situations and the characters
And then it was like “all bets are off”.
We didn’t want everything to be pushed into ‘alternate history’,
so more often than not; modes of transportation are the same.
Like horse drawn carriages, but then there are technologies like airships
that did exist in that era, but we pushed them ahead in the timeframe.
We brought in things that were potentially two or three decades ahead of its time,
and brought them back into the 1886 era.
We were able to keep the overall skyline of London, but then you see certain things
like the mooring towers for the airships and the searchlights with them
that give you this layered alternate twist to the feeling of the world.
And that’s really the doctrine we followed throughout the game
It’s asking the question of whether or not people today,
that live today, could believe the fiction that we’re adding into our history.
That’s something that sort of ties everything together
to make it feel like an era that existed out of place and time.
What’s so fascinating about history is that, regardless of all the fiction we write,
I don’t think it’s ever as mysterious as history has been.
You can go back and read books about events that have happened in the past
and they’re really never 100% sure.
There always something that actually is slightly ‘off’.
That gave us so much ammunition to build this I.P and build in a narrative
and making this game feel like you’re actually living through it.
We wanted people to understand how it was to live in that world,
and to experience the differences in our history,
first hand, through the eyes of someone who has seen that history as well.