"Haze was initially very hardcore", says former Free Radical employee

[stof]

Since some people seem to be overreacting as to the original quote, lets break it down part by part. Remember children, we're going in to this knowing that Free Radical is a terrific FPS dev, and that they crashed and burned when they developed the bomb called Haze. Dudenaughty explained that Haze had gone through a number of major creative and conceptual overhauls

. Major Creative and conceptual overhauls - This is not and can not be good for a game. It means time, resources and money. It also means an artistic team in disarray. This game went in with a vision, it came out with whatever they could scrap together.

contributing to the development difficulties Free Radical experienced with it.

Like I said.

"Originally Haze was a very hardcore thing. In terms of the content, the issues it was dealing with, the gore, the politics; it was a very adult game,"

A lot of this we don't actually have much to take away from. Hardcore content? could mean anything, gore we know and that's nothing new. But Politics is interesting. How often do games even claim to take an adult look at politics (whatever that means, few games would make the claim)

he said. "Right at the beginning Haze was set in the modern day in Iraq and it was like Bush-bashing, a politically centered thing.

Set in Modern day Iraq. Not a random modern warfare in "lotsofsandistan", or a Tom Clancy like "situation" in the near future. This game was going to be set in a current conflict that has left many people with very strong feelings. Many of those feelings are negative towards the United States administration. There is no claim here as to whether the game would make overt political statements, however any attempt to take a realistic (or at least adult) look at a current conflict would have to address the feelings people have. And a lot of people who disagree with this conflict lay blame on the U.S. President. If the soldiers in this game talk, it would be hard to avoid having some of them take up a position of insulting George Bush. Again, this statement doesn't say that this would be an Anti Iraq or Anti Bush game, only that there would be Bush Bashing in it. Grand Theft Auto has a lot of things in it, doesn't mean Rockstar is taking a pro beat old ladies with baseball bats stance. 

It got re-written dozens of times on [Ubisoft's] request and it ended up being this futuristic kind of thing about something totally unrelated."

This one is self explanatory. Did anyone know it went through this nightmare before it came out? If we did we'd have far lower expectations. The games story, atmosphere and esthetic consist of "what we were able to scrounge together when we couldn't do what we'd originally intended for the game" That's now how good games are made, that's how flops are made.