Haze Comments by Kristan Reed

Comments on the review, not the game (sorta).

Can't help thinking the IGN and EG reviews are being overly harsh. Fair enough it has its problems, but is it really worse than Blacksite etc? Just because it's 'OMG ANOTHER FPS' and had a bit of hype, doesn't mean the review scores shouldn't be kept in perspective.

Also, where are the views on how the game works when you change sides? The review doesn't seen to cover everything, it just seems like an exercise in picking out everything wrong with the game in a very poorly written one-sided way.

@BlankOBlank!
Dear god. This is when I find out you're actually sitting behind me. Considering your friends list it wouldn't surprise me too much, I think theres a few names on there I recognise. :)

Well, clearly the drugs don't work they just make it worse....

PS3 suck d**k that's a fact

I'm not surprised this got dropped from the 360. Obviously a tactic to dodge direct comparison from some of the best console FPS has to offer, in a lame attempt in avoiding gamers noticing how average the game is.

Personally saw this coming. I honestly didn't see what made this such a standout title. They kept going on about 'the story' when we all know (especially in a FPS) if a developer does this its usually means its got a medicore game if its story is the only thing to shout about. In fact the only thing it did have going for it, is it being exclusive to the PS3, which gave it alot of hype and publicity. Just seems like a regular thing, the Playstation is so starved (360 market oversaturated) of shooters that even obviously average shooters get loads of attention and hype. I feel sorry for PS3 owning FPS, well only a bit, why would you own a PS3 if you wanted to play FPS??? :-P

Yes... Ouch!

I own both consoles, only keep the PS3 for the blu ray, give it a couple of years and we'll all be digital downloading HD films anyway.
Did I mention PS3 sucks d**k.
What a total waste of time. Goldeneye is still better than this.

The drugs don't work.

"Also, where are the views on how the game works when you change sides?"

On the first page.

@ Uncle_Fishboy
"The next gen starts when we say it does.

Hurry up please "

To be fair, you cant really blame Sony for a game made by a third party developer.

Oh, and damn you EG. I thought IGN were just being cunts. ;)

lets hope kill zone 2 does something a little bit special, like a 6 or 7 out of 10

to be honest I saw this coming from a mile away, nothing really led me to believe this would be anything special. And the fact that Korn is involved in this automatically subtracts 3 points from the score, so 1/10 for me it is.

4/10

Ouch.

Hang your heads in shame FRD

Bummer - with my recently acquired PS3 sadly bereft of quality games and being a huge Timesplitters fan, I was kinda looking forward to this.

Sadly the universal panning and godawful demo have kind of put me off ;)

At least I didn't pre-order the damned thing, I guess.

@zuljin

Small industry, my friend. :)

A Halo beater, is that what I heard, my arse. Just cos a game begins with a H and consists of four letters, don't mean it's gonna beat the King of FPS's, COD4.

I was looking forward to a bit of co-op with this game but the review(s) has turned me off far too much to warrant a buy or even a bargain bin.

@BlankOBlank!

"but then there are coders out there who generate bug free code to"

Care to point me towards one? =o)

I don't believe there is a single coder out there (myself included) who doesn't create bugs.

Oh god,the reviews for this games have fallen into the "so bad it's funny" category.

@redneon

Fair point. :)

Poor Nekotcha :(

This settles it. The guys at Rare and the guys at Free Radical are SHIT without each other.

Ha! They fucked it!

I have it on good authority from my own mother that I am an excellent designer and a very handsome little boy.
You sure she wasn't confusing you with your brother Blanko? ;-)

Kristan hit the nail on the head, folks. Expectations certainly (and rightly) factored into the assessment -- most should know that FRD's capable of more than what Haze turned out to be.

After finishing up last night, it's the lack of nuance, the plainness that gets me. Basic, static lighting. Long corridors, stairs galore, and sandy vehicle sections for level design. Very standard phyics and animating. Unnoticable music, and uneven voice acting. There's nothing broken about Haze -- the AI didn't bug up for me, no odd graphical glitches that I noticed, but it's really just point-and-shoot with little incentive to press on. The last level may be the exception, being a bit more cinematic.

Genuinely, Turok is a better play in any facet I can think of -- exposition, level design, weapon selection, hell...the existence of bosses. And this was the game that did somersaults with the screen any time an explosion landed nearby.

The_Marine: I don't know, I think people's expectations have been getting progressively lower for quite a while now. And it's still failed to live up to them.

I'd quite like to give Warhawk and Uncharted a try, other than that I'm not in the least bit compelled to get a PS3 at the moment. It'd just be one more seldom-used console to find space for under the TV (and I can't even replace the PS2 with it). Perhaps LBP will be Earth-shatteringly good?

This is a case of PS£ - the publisher can't afford to keep delaying these games to optimise them, so they kick it out of the door as a turd, hoping it will sell on hype alone.

Shame on Sony for releasing the P$£ in it's current state.

monkie_king, Warhawk is by far one of the most fun online japes I've played. King of that for me was Halo 2, then Day Of Defeat:Source, but just another level. Can't buy it to wave to people about how pretty it looks, but to play.... just joy. Oh and £20 is nice. People cite RFOM's 40 player online as marvellous but I found the weapons unbalanced, where Warhawk's is refined to perfection.

Oh and well worked online too, no lag, lobby is pretty much like Steam, can't fault it!

Uncharted is great BUT I would like to see more puzzle and less shooty elements from the next in the series.

Whether 2 games can sell you a system, I dunno. I feel the same, I want to check Lost Oddessy and the Square Enix jobbie thats announced on the main page, but that again is just 2 games. I guess roll on a couple of years when all of the systems are £60 off Ebay! I got my original xbox for £64 + 5 games, barg that!

Forget bluray!...HD digital downloads and HD holographic disc are the next step in HD - and soon too.

another crap PS3 game, Sony really do have an excellent marketing/pr department to be able to keep shifting PS3's with such a woeful range of games available.

Crap argument, the Wii has three times the miss rate so I guess Nintendo are bust or something? Sheesh! Haze does not make UT3, R&C:ToD or Uncharted disappear.

Sounds about right from what I played of the demo. I want to hear more about the developer defending this game, it's jaw-dropping.

EG it really isnt as bad as you make out, its actually quite fun in a dumb kind of way

"That would be the ideal, but I've never, ever seen anyone play through their own game with anywhere near the rigor required for that who didn't have either tester or designer in their job title. "

But as long as you have 2 scripter/designers, they can play each other's stuff to cut out the personal preference stuff. If you have a team of them then everyone plays everything and you get a lot of feedback.

Oh dear.

The Playstation 3 is surviving on the strength of the 'Sony' and 'Playstation' brand. There are many people who have bought, or will buy, a Playstation 3 simply because they had a Playstation 2, and only bought a Playstation 2 because they had a Playstation before that. The 'Playstation' brand has become synonymous with gaming in the minds of many casual gamers and the media. The Xbox 360 is an ugly machine, with an awful name, cringe worthy marketing and, to boot, is made by Microsoft, who everyone knows is the great satan. I cannot take seriously the claim that the Playstation 3 has been successful for its high quality software, its incredible and unrivalled processing power, and its ability to play Blu-Ray. In almost every regard, Sony has royally cocked-up the Playstation 3, with uncooperative and underpowered hardware, ridiculous high pricing and, most importantly, with hardly an exclusive title worth purchasing, a problem compounded by the fact that almost every cross-platform release is better on its rivals' hardware--Haze is now just another chapter in the sorry story.

However, the 'Playstation' brand is being damaged as they put together their opus of cock-ups, and Sony cannot ride the wave indefinitely; eventually, even the "casual" gamer will begin to look elsewhare for their gaming fix, it just takes them a little longer than the "hardcore" gamers who have already, by and large, abandoned ship. That said, I sincerely hope that Sony can turn things around, for the good of the industry and the games which I will be playing five years from now.

i received this game this morning and it is the biggest disappointment ive ever played......give it a couple of weeks this will be traded in....terrible terrible game

"EG it really isnt as bad as you make out, its actually quite fun in a dumb kind of way"

+1

How they can give this game a 4 is pretty crazy, unbelieveably subjective and inconsistent when compared to how other games 20 times worse in every way can score the same if not more.

Just kinda seems like they lowered its score cos it wasn't what was promised which is the poor fable reviews all over again, although fable was sweet and haze is just average.

@Nocturne


"unrivalled processing power" - i think folding at home proves it can.

"Underpowered hardware " - Burnout Paradise - Cod4 - Uncharted - Racket and Clank TOD - hardly underpowered.

"Playstation' brand is being damaged as they put together their opus of cock-ups," - much in the same vein as MS EPIC fuckup of its hardware wouldn't you say?

programmers should do some QA on their work to make sure it is ready to be fully QA'd, that is all.

>"Speaking of fanboy retardation, your post is a classical example of that phenomenon. Is it too much to believe that FRD is of sufficient size to have two projects running concurrently"

No, not really.
The problem is when you fabricate the notion that it was made by a "B" team, if such a team even exists.
No information has EVER been given about there being two teams, let alone it being made by the B-team. If anything, due to the hype and feedback from nekotcha, it most definately was thier main project. So even if there was a B team, all indications point to it being a game that was thier primary project.

You jumped at the idea it was made by a b-team based on no evidence or indication at all. Seemed like clutching at straws there.

DaemonB,

The term 'underpowered' is relative. The Playstation 3 is only underpowered, overpowered, or sufficiently powered, relative to some task or goal to which it is set. In my previous comment the term 'underpowered' was intended to be understood relative to the marketing and promises of Sony, which the Playstation 3 has clearly failed to meet (the notorious Killzone 2 trailer is a case in point). It is not even clear that the Playstation 3 is superior to the Xbox 360, and even if the Playstation 3 does have more potential, its apparent difficulty to design for may mean that we never see that potential realised. In this respect, Sony were lucky with the Playstation 2, which had such a staggering lead over the competition that developers had no choice but to learn it well. However, as things stand in the current generation of consoles, developers would seem to have little incentive to eek out that extra performance from the Playstation 3.

Please understand that I am not an "Xbox fanboy", however, Microsoft is doing a better job than Sony in the current generation of consoles--I am just calling it as I see it. Microsoft have made there cock-ups, and I was rightly pissed off when my Xbox 360 suffered from the notorious "red ring of death", but the 'Xbox' brand is not nearly as valuable as the 'Playstation' brand, and Microsoft were not in a position to ride any wave while got their act together. In any case, Sony have yet to persuade me to buy a Playstation 3 and I do not think that will change in the forseeable future, and Haze is now another opportunity lost. The only games which interest me are Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid 4 and the next Gran Turismo, but I could happily live without each given the price of the Playstation 3. It is disheartening to see that Sony are left hyping Killzone 2, which for all its technical extravagance, is a sequel to a game which I put down and never returned to after two sessions, and is being put together by a developer with a track record which is at best described as 'average'--I suspect that Killzone 2 will be Haze all over again with prettier graphics.

Gooners2006, I wouldn't wait a couple of weeks - I'd get it traded in ASAP while it's still worth something!

The Bodybuilder,

The theory that Haze was put together by a B-team within Free Radical is actually quite a good theory, since it might explain the anomaly that is Haze itself, a poor and half-arsed game put together by a developer with an otherwise solid history of high quality output. Haze, and its 4/10 score, are begging for some explanation, and the notion that a B-team within Free Radical were behind its development seems about as good a theory as any other. It may be wrong, of course, but then every theory may be wrong. I am interested to see what the fallout, if any, there will be from Haze, and whether Free Radical, or some of their employees, will indulge us with some inside information.

As a couple of people hear have said, its not a 4 really its more of a 6 out of 10... its not as bad as some reviews are making out (certainly not as good as it should be as a sole platform game).

Someone mentioned that the designers/programmers should listen or get input from QA, in most cases QA teams dont get software till very late in the process and when they do any comments they make usually fall on death ears. In many cases games cannot be delayed any longer and companies cannot spend any more development costs on the game and it has to go out "as is". Sad but true.

I wouldnt say the PS3 brand is being damaged any more than the Xbox is for RROD, and the Wii for no high powered graphic games, they all have their faults. Its certainly not good that an exclusive comes out and its not as good as the PR, but this is not the first time its happened, and certainly wont be the last. Its not something the PS3 needs right now as its trying to pick up steam, but with big game releases in the next 3-4 weeks, Haze will be forgotten pretty quickly i think.

I do find it funny that some people say there is nothing to play on the PS3, there is enough, especially when considering the cost of games, I think some people must have way too much disposable income... though i do own a Wii and PC as well so my software purchases are split against all 3 platforms.

tonyferrino - ive decided that as soon as its completed its being traded in for a good game like Lego Indy Jones or something to that effect

Oh yeah did I mention PS3 suks d**k.
Three times and the spell is cast. Booya

weaselrat,

That's impossible. The Playstation 3 does not have a mouth.

ethernet shaped ones

You can squeeze in there? Ouch!

just, chafes a little (wonders if thats how you spell chafes?? never used it before)