At E3 this year, Ready at Dawn and Sony showed a pair of trailers for The Order: 1886 that gave us a look at open combat with multiple armed enemies and a tense showdown with one of the game’s monstrous opponents, a Half-Breed. With the game still eight months away, the developers are back at work on the alternate history shooter, and have produced a trailer that details the development of the Half-Breeds known as Lycans.

In the trailer, Ru Weerasuriya, CEO and Creative Director at Ready At Dawn Studios discusses the background of one variety of Half-Breeds known as Lycans, explaining that their look is based on the various werewolf legends from around the world. In the game, humans have been at war with the Lycans for centuries, explains The Order: 1886’s director, Dana Jan, who describes the creatures as “another top-tier predator, just like man is.” While Lycans have a generally human shape, they will be faster, stronger and tougher than people, maintaining the intelligence of a man along with the bestial nature of a wolf. Jan says that the monsters’ intelligence is what makes them so scary.

To create the look of the Lycans, the team went for a realistic, imperfect aesthetic. Nathan Phail-Liff, Art Director for Ready at Dawn, says that they didn’t want to create a comic-book-style monster, but rather something that looks like it could exist in the world. Since Lycans are transformed humans, Phail-Liff focused on making the monsters retain elements of their appearance from before their transformation. “We wanted a sense of who that person was still transferred into the Lycan anatomy,” said Phail-Liff.

Garrett Foster, technology director for the game, talked about how humans transform into Lycans and vice-versa. To show the full, no-cut transformation sequences the team wanted in the game, they created character models that can transform in-game, with body parts gradually growing and deforming on camera. Creating technology to allow these transformations was a challenge for Ready at Dawn, especially when it came to the Lycan’s rapid hair growth, but the team believes that the final product will be worth the effort, and will present some major “wow” moments.

The Order: 1886 is scheduled for a Feb. 20, 2015 release exclusively on the PlayStation 4.

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