Today’s been a busy day for Mark Zuckerberg; following the announcement that Microsoft’s Mixer would be shuttering in a migration to Facebook Gaming, the beleaguered tech company announced another major acquisition. Starting today, developers Ready at Dawn — creators of The Order: 1886, Daxter, and the handheld God of War titles — will now be owned by Facebook.
Revealed in a blog post moments ago, Facebook revealed that Ready at Dawn would be making the transition onto the broader Facebook team. The move isn’t entirely a surprise — over the past three years, Ready At Dawn has solely focused on a collection of games for Oculus Rift, including Lone Echo, Echo Arena, Echo Combat and the forthcoming Lone Echo II (seen in the trailer below):
To some degree, the eventual acquisition should have been seen as inevitable with Ready At Dawn’s track record and the recent run of acquisitions from Facebook.
On the other hand, many legacy PlayStation gamers have enjoyed a wealth of Sony-exclusive content by Ready at Dawn. PlayStation had trusted the studio previously with some of its most flagship properties like Jak & Daxter and God of War. More recently, Ready At Dawn created a technical marvel with The Order: 1886, a game that will tragically end of a cliffhanger that likely won’t be closed.
According to the blog post that introduced this move, Ready at Dawn’s acquisition played into multiple factors — not just the games and broader goodwill they carry. The blog post directly mentions the studio’s ‘signature zero-g continuous locomotion system and full-body IK (inverse kinematics).’ While those words probably mean something other than buzzwords, the takeaway is that Oculus is likely hoping to acquire some proprietary VR tech and systems.
The blog post offers some other interesting glimpses — notably that the entire team is moving over to Facebook (instead of a smaller project division), that other acquisitions are likely on the way “for the next few years,” and the team’s main focus will remain Lone Echo II until further notice.
In any case, Lone Echo II was delayed due to the worldwide pandemic though is still targeting a 2020 release date, exclusively on Oculus.
The post The Order: 1886 Developer Ready At Dawn Acquired By Facebook by Lou Contaldi appeared first on DualShockers.