Haze
Multiplayer. The perfect drug?
We've already brought you our hands-on impressions of the single-player and co-op modes in Haze, so now it's time to sink our teeth into multiplayer in Free Radical's upcoming PS3-exclusive shooter.
Given how often the - perhaps unwelcome - comparisons with Halo have been pulled out of the bag in the past year, it's to Haze's immediate credit that its multiplayer is distinct from Bungie's opus. Helpfully, it's also got very little in common with the present occupant of the FPS throne, Call of Duty 4. In a genre that's crowded with far too many me-too games, that's a huge plus point.
Much of Haze's distinctive flavour comes from the two opposed forces in the game - the Mantel Troopers (who you play for the first part of the single-player) and the Rebels (to whom you defect for the rest). Rather than simply having different models and weapons, these two sides actually come with radically differing abilities, strengths and weaknesses.
Mantel Troopers are arguably the more conventional of the forces, in FPS terms. They're armoured, so they take some killing, and they have a fairly powerful, useful zoom mode built into their helmets, and a strong melee attack. In addition, they can dose up on Nectar, a drug which makes them faster, stronger and tougher, and makes enemies glow bright yellow on their display.
The weaknesses of the Mantel Troopers are, in general, where the strengths of the Rebels lie. Mantel players need to be careful not to overdose on Nectar - you have a slowly replenishing supply, which you inject by holding L2. Ideally you'll just fill your Nectar bar, but inject too much and you'll go crazy and start shooting wildly, even at your team-mates. Many rebel abilities focus on using Nectar overdoses to gain the upper hand.

So, for instance, Rebel players can shoot the Nectar pack on a trooper's back for what isn't just a one-shot kill, but actually an opportunity to cause some collateral damage with the cloud of Nectar that sprays out. Similarly, if you kill a Mantel trooper conventionally, you can steal the Nectar pack from his back, stab it with a knife and strap it to a grenade, and throwing this grenade will create a cloud of Nectar. Any Mantel player stumbling into that cloud will run the risk of overdosing and going berserk. Helpfully, you can achieve the same effect by hitting someone with the throwing knife you used to stab the pack.
Arguably the most interesting of the Rebel abilities, however, stems from the fact that Mantel Troopers see a slightly edited version of reality - where blood stains don't exist and, more importantly, where corpses fade away after a second or two.


Rebels can take advantage of that by feigning death. When taking fire, you simply tap R2 to throw yourself to the ground and stay perfectly still - and on the screen of the Mantel player who was shooting you, your "corpse" will disappear. It's an extremely powerful ability for the rebel side - although the game doesn't allow you to leap up and get straight back into the fray, as you'll be momentarily disoriented as you stand up, which should hopefully prevent rebels from simply bouncing up and down from feigned death constantly.
Obviously, with sides this different from one another, the question of balance is of supreme importance. Indeed, according to creative director Derek Littlewood, much of the extra time afforded to the team at Free Radical by Haze's delay late last year has been spent on tweaking and polishing that balance, to the point where the team is satisfied that it's created a level playing field between the two very different styles.
Some of the fruits of that balancing can be seen in the quirks of the various abilities - for instance, there's the few moments of disorientation after getting up from a feigned death. But on the flip side of the coin, the team has also balanced out the Nectar ability to make enemies glow brightly by giving Mantel forces neon yellow patches on their armour, which means the rebels can pick them out relatively easily. It's very much a skirmish-heavy, balls-out shooter as a result - there's not much sneaking and hiding to be done here.
One rather unusual - and potentially annoying, although obviously essential - piece of balancing is that Mantel troopers can't hurt anyone they can't see - so you can't just shoot at the spot where you saw someone fall down just in case they weren't really dead. Without this, of course, the Rebel feign death ability would be near-useless - but it's still frustrating, as a Mantel soldier, to know that someone just feigned death (it's fairly obvious, since if they were really dead their weapon would have dropped) but be unable to do anything other than wait for them to get back up.
All in all, however, Littlewood is satisfied that his team has built a game that balances nicely - and one which has plenty to offer for fans of two entirely different play styles. "Different players always like slightly different things," he says, "and the thing we tried to cater to with the two different sides was two major archetypes of FPS players."


"With the Mantel troopers, you've got the very straight-up, action-based kind of player who likes to go for the headshots, get in close, do some melee and get out. Mantel troopers are very direct-action oriented. The Rebels are more about flanking, about using indirect tactics to get one over on your opponent - and, again, there's a set of FPS players who definitely prefer playing like that."
One group of players who may find Haze a little harder to get into are those who have become enamoured with the extremely quick, realistic kills of games like Call of Duty 4 and Counter-Strike. Despite its near-future setting and vaguely realistic weapons, the game is more of a traditional FPS where enemies must be worn down with multiple shots to kill them - but with CoD4 already dominating the one-shot-kill market, this may well be to Haze's advantage, of course.


Whether Free Radical likes it or not, Haze will definitely also end up being a flag-bearer for the PS3's online gaming capabilities. It will help if the rumours of an early summer launch for the in-game XMB menu system turn out to be true, and who knows, if Haze lives up to its potential, it might even help to drive people to actually pick up Bluetooth headsets for the console.
All of that's an "if", however, and much depends on Free Radical's balancing. Then again, few development studios have its depth of experience with multiplayer FPS titles. We'll let you know how it turns out as the launch date approaches.
Haze is due out exclusively for PS3 on 23rd May.
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Comments (76) Latest comment 4 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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yeah sounds a bit weird, hopefully it will be balanced well, like you can only do it one every few minutes or something, and there is a way of countering it
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Mantel guys can shoot up some nectar to increase their abilities, the Rebels have the wonderful special power of pretending to be dead. Ok, that kinda sums up it USP right?
Pass.
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^Was thinking the same thing. Maybe the Mantel will have some kind of counter to this? 'Cos if there was a mode, say like deathmatch in COD4, based on a teams kills, if the rebels got the upper hand they could all feign death and win the match by timer-count-down. Yeah, I know that sounds stupid, but as a veteren of many online games I know how far many will go to win.
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6/10
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This whole "death feigning" idea just sounds a bit daft.
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Despite none of them having played it.
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as a trade off, you can lose your current weapon if the enemy picks it up
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The main reason I can't love Halo 3 as much as COD4
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The guy who pointed out that during clan wars, rebels who are in the lead score wise will just all use this trick and until the timer reaches zero is totally spot on.
It seems like it would be cooler that Feinting death would make you drop your weapon (but you keep your secondary weapon), and Mantel guys could still shoot you. That would be logical. This isn't.
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If you think about it realistically, if you were in a battlefield and pretended to be dead, there'd be little you could do to stop your opponent coming along and picking up your weapon - unless of course you want to reveal yourself as faking it. I don't see why FRD don't just build in a weapon drop to the feign death move, so that that particular little hiccup is removed.
The pretend-dead soldier would then have to resort to their reserve weapon (assuming everyone can carry two or more at a time?) when they get up again until they can steal one back from another kill. Shouldn't be too much of a handicap for them yet would stop the feign death move being quite so obvious from the other side.
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Yeah, and instead of being disorientated when the get up, they could spend that time recovering their weapon, i.e giving the Matel player time and balancing the game. What would happen if the Mantel player picked up the dropped weapon though? Maybe that's a risk you take feigning death. So you're only left with you pistol until you find a better weapon. Or, is it that the Mantel players weapon replaces the rebels one on the ground, can they carry two primary weapons?
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http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=IrNonqsWphU
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Wait and see.
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Don't tell me, you briefly played that old build they demoed at that Wembley thing earlier this year?
Well done. *slow claps*
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Oh no I've played it much more than that.
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In fact it looked like a shooty RPG! Still if Fallout 3 and Mass Effect can do it...
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Better use the PS Eye with mic. More comfortable, useful for other purposes and makes you look less stupid...
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I think that'd make sense - you could also replace the artificial handicap of being disorientated with a handicap of grabbing your gun and re-cocking it or something.
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Rebels get the upperhand points-wise, then all just feign death until the clock counts down. Meaning everyone will try to play as rebels after the 'tactic' becomes widespread. Making the game broken.
/yes, spitballing. No, of course I'm not psychic - but annoying kiddie players do this kind of thing all the time and it really gets on my mammaries.
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feign death sounds wank, especially when you know they arent really dead. Make them pick up their weapon again after it drops at least.
To be honest, when placed against Halo & COD4 this game looks terrible. Which makes you wonder why they bothered really.
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"Rebels get the upperhand points-wise, then all just feign death until the clock counts down. Meaning everyone will try to play as rebels after the 'tactic' becomes widespread. Making the game broken. "
we're all assuming here that this is entirely possible in the game. We can't slate something as being broken without actually going hands on ourselves!
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+1
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The screenshots look ropey (it looks like a game world, rather than hiding the fact everything is boxed in which I personally think COD4 does quite well). I dont hold out much hope of FreeRad here.
I think all this 'nectar' rubbish is sounded pretty stupid from day one, I mean I cant even get discounts at Sainsbury's or shoot people pretending to be dead. Maybe its a game designed for 12 year olds.
6/10
I know I'm being harsh and dont know the whole story/haven't played it. But this is a forum. First impressions count
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Hahaha! I can sooo see this game ending up like that xD
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Well done, good clip, brought a smile.
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Haha
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did nobody think that during the last few months of careful game balancing that FRD have been doing, someone there might have thought of the 'game breaking' thing you're talkin about? and that maybe it's not actually possible in-game? maybe there's a time limit on how long you can feign death for or something. if a bunch of random people on a game forum have thought of a way to break the game within minutes, i'm sure it's occurred to the professional game designers at FRD sometime over the last few months...
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I feel really sorry for the developers because this just screams 7/10 :/
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Ooh, time for me to write a game.
You can't see anything .. because of the drugs
You can't hear anything .. because of the drugs
The enemies don't exihibit realistic behaviour .. because of the drugs
You can't control your actions .. because of the drugs
39.99 please. Any takers?
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You'd be surprised how easily professional game designers can miss obvious problems when they're concentrating on getting their 1000 pages of dialogue into the game.
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You can bet your ass I still would. Platform means bugger all to me - except when it comes to issues like controllers (I just plain think the 360 pad is better than the PS3 one simply because I have larger hands that cramp up with Sony's).
But I see your point - there is a slight whiff of platform-favouritism that accompanies many a game thread. Would Halo 3 have been bashed so mercilessly if it was also out on PS3? Hard to say, but the initial gut reaction is "Of course it wouldn't". Fanboy-esque insecurities guarantee an element of 'X-franchise is crap because it's not on Y format'.
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http://ww w.gametrailers.com/player/userm...
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dialogue's got nothing to do with game design - especially when FRD have a proper writer on staff who handles all the dialogue. plus the article says they've spent that last few months since the game got delayed balancing the multiplayer - i reckon something so obvious that breaks the whole game might have cropped up quite early...
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At about 3:30 he talks about the play dead ability. You can only play dead if you are nearly dead anyway.
There, discussion over.
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Dialogue doesn't get magically written directly into the game you know. It requires implementation by designers. Cutscenes need to be manually created etc. Otherwise the dialogue would only exist in microsoft word. I imagine 1000 pages of dialogue would take quite some time to implement into the game. Especially if you have shit tools.
And games don't get delayed for balancing. They get delayed because you fucked up and didn't deliver the features you promised to the publisher on time. You tell the press that the time was spent "balancing and tweaking" the gameplay because saying "We fucked up and can't make next gen games on time" would be commercial suicide.
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They're bashing games based on the comments of someone else, who has played. Also, they're bashing an aspect of this game that they're finding baffling. You don't need to play it, to find the idea as it is explained, a bit awkward. Or to point out possible flaws.
This is the closest to evidence that most of us have to base discussion on. It seems valid enough a concern (not nitpicking), and one which for all we know may well in fact have been addressed...We'll find out whether that's the case or not though, only when the review is published.
@Triggerhappytel:
Like some other outlets, EG split the latest preview coverage into separate single and multiplayer stories. The game has also had several release date postponements. I don't find it that unusual that EG would have checked in fairly regularly on the work of a leading local developer.
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@BiscuitBase: generally either the cutscene people or the sound designer triggers dialogue in game. it's got nowt to do with the game designers. i'm a sound designer for a living - i know how the dialogue gets into cutscenes cos it's often my job to do it!
as for games not getting delayed for balancing - did you read the article? it specifically states they've used the delay time for balancing the multiplayer. it didn't get delayed for that reason (as you say, the main game probably needed some attention), but the multiplayer team have used the extra time for balancing...
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Well that's interesting. I'm a game designer for a living and I'm pretty sure I remember spending months putting dialogue into cutscenes. Glad your company can afford a dedicated sound team!
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That shouldn't be too much of a concern. Mantel helmets glow red when they OD. If it stays yellow, there's your griefer.
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Thats enought to make me totally lose interest.
Oh Wel,l Demo in May I guess.
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God, please no. Any time you get into a game of WarHawk with people on mics, you either get the griefers yelling abuse, mouth breathers taking it waaay to seriously spouting lines from their favourite 80s movie without the faintest shred of irony, or the freaks singing or chanting some nonsense. Best bit about the new APC - creates teamwork without voicechat.
Silence is golden.
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Amen to that. Finally had enough with the little darlings of HIcksville and succumbed to the lure of the 'Mute everyone not on friends list' option.
Much more enjoyable experience.
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"You'd be surprised how easily professional game designers can miss obvious problems when they're concentrating on getting their 1000 pages of dialogue into the game."
/rolls eyes at armchair critic
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I do internally lol at shouts of "GIVE ME AIR SUPPORT" though.
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Just read your other comments, so I take back the accusation of armchair critic. However, talk of spending months adding dialogue to cutscenes does suggest (from the limited view I have of the situation) that something in that particular pipeline needs a bit of sorting out. Adding audio should not be that time consuming, and to be honest its not a job a designer should be spending time on.
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Rinse & Repeat.
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Answer those questions correctly and I'll definitely buy this.