Haze Q&A

Apr 2, 2008

Since moving exclusively to Sony's PlayStation 3, the glare upon developer Free Radical's latest first-person shooter has somewhat intensified, taking the game from being an intriguing multi-format proposition to a game that now fights a lonely battle on a console that is relatively threadbare in terms of the genre. Unfairly it's been billed at times as a challenger to Microsoft's own exclusive four letter word that also happens to begin with an 'h' – but given the game's emphasis on providing players with a thought-provoking narrative, maybe comparisons to another of the Xbox 360's flagship shooters that had gamers in rapture would be more apt. At a recent press event we had a brief chat with Haze's creative lead Derek Littlewood to get a grip on what's shaping up to be one of the more unique releases on the PlayStation 3 this summer.

IGN: Firstly, what inspired the decision to move exclusively to the PlayStation 3?

Derek Littlewood: When we were developing the game, the PS3 version was always doing very well. At Free Radical, with TimeSplitters - and particularly with the first one which was a launch game with the PS2 in Europe - our coding teams have always had good success with the PlayStation hardware and they've always liked working with the format and we were seeing some very good results with the PS3, and it reached a point where it was an obvious decision to make. You're always trying to focus your development to maximise the potential of whatever you're working on, the more different things you're working on the less you can fully maximise that, so we hit a point where it was an obvious decision to make to really focus on ensuring that the PlayStation 3 version was the best version of the game.

IGN: It's a bold move as the PlayStation 3 has so far in its life suffered a relative dearth of first-person shooters.

Derek Littlewood: The PS3 still has this thing where you don't see quite so many FPSs on it, the 360 like the original Xbox is still seen as the shooters console.

IGN: Could that be a problem with mapping first person controls to the SIXAXIS' dual analogue sticks?

Derek Littlewood: There are a lot of people that do prefer the 360 pad for shooters. Personally I prefer the PS3 pad and I prefer the symmetry of it. I don't know if it's because I've got relatively small hands, but I don't see the controller as being a good reason to not make a game for that format.

IGN: That's definitely something we'd agree with after our time hands-on with the game. There's a really nice weight to Haze at the moment...

Derek Littlewood: No matter what the pad, it's not going to save you if you've got badly calibrated controls, so we spent a long, long time polishing them. There are so many different things you can do in the game that we wanted to make sure that everything felt right, and it has a very tactile feel to it which is what we're aiming for.

IGN: There are two distinctive sides to Haze, with the trooper and the rebel sections of the game both having their own unique feel. How did this come about?

Derek Littlewood: When we started making the game there were two things we wanted to do – it's something that's been established in our previous games, and particularly Second Sight has been noted for raising this – we wanted to have a story that explored the idea of putting the player in a situation where the guys that they're fighting against aren't just these generic villain stereotypes, and we want to put the player in a position where they ask the question 'Am I actually on the right side of this war', which implied this idea of switching sides.

IGN: We particularly enjoyed some of the touches employed when playing as a trooper, like bodies fading out of view after dying – they seem like a cute little reference to gaming's past.

Derek Littlewood: One of the things about playing as a trooper is that there is a feel about it – Nectar is just a power-up, and that's what makes the game interesting, so you have the trooper stuff which is just standard FPS, you've got your power-up and the bodies fading out, but the rebel is a complete flip-side, it gives you all these other options, and that's what makes [the game] so interesting, because you've got these two asymmetric sides, and you're always looking for the different ways they interlock and the different ways the abilities can be used against each other.

IGN: There are some elements of Haze's story that can be seen as erring on the political. The nectar itself could be seen as reference to some of the more outlandish theories surrounding Gulf War Syndrome.

Derek Littlewood: There are a number of parallels that you can draw with real life, and yes, there were deliberate parallels, but we've deliberately tried to be not too overt in drawing particular parallels to a specific event or sequence of events. There is a message in there that goes beyond the gameplay, but we wanted people to draw their own conclusions so it's not just one specific thing.

IGN: Finally, is this a standalone title, or the start of a series?

Littlewood: Haze is a complete game in itself, it's not like you reach the end and we're like – 'and now you're expecting an ending, but a-ha, it's in a different game' – you get to the end and the major questions about the game have been answered, but that's not to say that there aren't threads which we've started that couldn't be continued in some fashion. In the process of making the game we've done a lot of development of the back story of Mantel, of Shane, of The Promise Hand and their leader Gabriel Merino – we've done a lot of development of those things beyond what you see in the game, and there's a lot of stuff that there that is ripe for being developed in another game, definitely.