I agree, but I think under different circumstances (although probably not with FR as the dev) the publisher may have forced it out, although I think they probably could have got it done by March, could a serious bug take half a year to fix?

Publishers do release bad games sometimes, but perhaps that saw what happened with Lair. Lair was a heavily hyped game just like Haze that was just bad. The Lair publisher hoped that the game would sell on hype alone but it was just so bad it couldn't. The Haze publisher knows this and they saw fit to spend more money to hopefully save it.

As for the bug, I don't want to say that it's impossible for a bug to take six months to fix, but it's highly unlikely. A single bug shouldn't take an entire team six months to fix and a single bug shouldn't delay a game like that a month before release.

You don't indefinitely delay a game a month before release that you already have printed ads advertising that release because you're afraid of the competition.

Just off the top of my head, I would say it's one of these three things in this order:

1. The game wasn't fun down at the very fundamental basic gameplay level.
   • This seems the most likely because it makes the most sense (to me at least). The team probably knew that the game wasn't fun the entire time but they pressed on. The publisher finally had enough and rather than scrapped and gave them a time line to fix it. If they didn't get it fun in that time line, then the game would be handed to someone else that could make it fun.
2. The game is no longer exclusive and is being made a simultaneous release.
   • This makes sense too in that making the game playable and ready for the 360 would take a fair amount of time. Everything would have to be retested and how the levels are presented and everything in those levels would have to be rethought. It would take a considerable amount of time and would warrant having that firm date moved.
3. The game had frame rate and LOD model problems similar to Mass Effect.
   • This makes sense to me in a weird way. Mass Effect was a great game but it received a fair amount of criticism for those glaring problems. Bioware saw fit to release a game like that so perhaps Free Radical did as well. Free Radical saw the fallout that Bioware received and decided that it was worth the effort to fix the framerate and LOD model problems.
4. There was some major bug found.
   • This one is believable but I don't think it would be one that takes this long to fix. As more and more time goes by without word on the game, this one really does become less and less believable.  Anything major enough to give this kind of delay would have been known earlier, would have been fixed earlier, and a single bug *shouldn't* take this kind of time to fix.

That's four things not three... but they all make sense. Watching the 'short' vids released it just looks like the gameplay might be a little generic and not differentiated enough - take pot shots in dense jungle, drive around shooting a bit, etc. Also one or two of the vids seemed to contain definate frame rate jumps when showing co-op play. Right now if you release an FPS and want it to sell it needs to be pretty damn well polished IMO, there's just too much competition otherwise.