You heard it here folks, it's no longer "gameplay > graphics", it's "story > all".

:P

So a politically stupid story makes up for vast amounts of technical issues and a rushed product.

Haze was very hardcore. Free Radical are no more. Haze was a huge bomb of a game from both sales and review perspectives.

So Free Radical, an amazing FPS dev intended to make an FPS that dealt with a current crisis with political overtones. A game like that could have been huge. Would have been huge.

Instead, the company had to deal with delays and redesigns and release an FPS that looked like most other Futuristic shooters.

So Ubisoft killed Free Radical. Damn you Ubisoft.


And to everyone who is saying "Bush Bashing is stupid"... In your game set in the current Iraq war, what would the banter between soldiers sound like? "I sometimes contemplate if this policy was in the best interest of my nation. But in a time of war we should not doubt our commander in chief."

A game about the Iraq war with realistic dialogue would have people bashing bush in it. And yes, that's different than the game bashing bush. Of course, if the game itself wanted to bash bush (with comical speeches by an idiot baboon manchild)... Well that would have been pretty awesome too.

+1

I'd like to see some political humour in video games.

I don't see why it would fail seeing how successful The Daily Show and Cobert Report are so successful.

Actually, knowing honest-to-God service people (clearly, unlike you), no, they don't actually sit around and bash Bush nor do they spend an inordinate amount of time questioning what they, by and large, feel is a just mission.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of service people are actually pro-Bush (poll after poll has demonstrated this, as has the vast majority of hte military vote going to Bush and then McCain) and they, like most everyone else that isn't suffering advanced Bush Derangement Syndrome, don't spend their time coming up with the latest (and lamest yet) monkey joke--jokes that, if they were ever funny, stopped being so around, oh, 2004--they spend their time like the rest of us: playing, talking about women, working out, talking about their families, home, etc.

So congratulations on your smug self-righteousness: now that Bush is out of office you'll have to find some other target at which to direct your inchoate rage--I suggest pointing it at the comedian in the mirror, for starters.

You'd only like to see it as long as it's skewering that with which you disagree.

And the reason you don't see it is because it's a great way to alienate vast swaths of your potential audience.

And if you want to see some political 'humor', there's "Hail to the Chimp" and "Area 51", both of which are pretty lousy games undergirded by lots of crude, idiotic humor.

this.

the bashing if it was really bashing you have giving it advertising, or hurting it we don't know about that.

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.

Ubisoft's fault Haze flopped?

publisher ruins a game what no way must be a first lol.

stupid ubi, sucks the game industry is so cowardly and lacks balls to make real stuff.