David Doak differs Haze from ‘American shooters’

HAZE may be about the most elite Mantel troopers enhanced by the effects of Nectar, but it isn’t about going “all gung-ho,” blasting everything that moves and isn’t clad in a Mantel combat suit. Thinking shooters and feelings aside, much of the design of HAZE (coming out first for the PlayStation 3, then for the Xbox 360 and PC) is based loosely on just you.

 

Unlike much of the American shooters, where the it’s all about the hero in you, your gun and the nameless baddies you steamroll through, HAZE doesn’t revolve around that. In fact, it doesn’t even revolve around the conflict or the war; instead, it revolves around the soldier fighting someone else’s war.

“It’s not John Wayne. And a lot of videogames are John Wayne,” Free Radical‘s David Doak explained in a recently published interview with EuroGamer. But he did admit that most gamers will be buying the game to experience another typical shooter, so HAZE will incorporate mechanics for gamers to jump in shooting from the start right to the end.

But then that would only remain skin-deep for HAZE. In fact, Free Radical wants to slowly convince the player that it provides a lot more than just mindless shooting. “We have to somehow change your opinion about that as you go through, and make you uncomfortable about it, make you pleased about it, make you upset or whatever,” said Doak.

Click on Full Article for more of Doak’s views of what they’re doing with HAZE.

HAZE may be about the most elite Mantel troopers enhanced by the effects of Nectar, but it isn’t about going “all gung-ho,” blasting everything that moves and isn’t clad in a Mantel combat suit. Thinking shooters and feelings aside, much of the design of HAZE (coming out first for the PlayStation 3, then for the Xbox 360 and PC) is based loosely on just you.

 

Unlike much of the American shooters, where the it’s all about the hero in you, your gun and the nameless baddies you steamroll through, HAZE doesn’t revolve around that. In fact, it doesn’t even revolve around the conflict or the war; instead, it revolves around the soldier fighting someone else’s war.

“It’s not John Wayne. And a lot of videogames are John Wayne,” Free Radical‘s David Doak explained in a recently published interview with EuroGamer. But he did admit that most gamers will be buying the game to experience another typical shooter, so HAZE will incorporate mechanics for gamers to jump in shooting from the start right to the end.

But then that would only remain skin-deep for HAZE. In fact, Free Radical wants to slowly convince the player that it provides a lot more than just mindless shooting. “We have to somehow change your opinion about that as you go through, and make you uncomfortable about it, make you pleased about it, make you upset or whatever,” said Doak.

Free Radical may be outdoing themselves for the first-person shooter genre, but people may become worried that the game might force them to steer their interests elsewhere. That doesn’t mean they’re willing to back down from their efforts. Doak gives a lengthy conundrum that Free Radical thought about:

It’s funny, because the videogame industry almost damns itself by just going out and saying, ‘hey, we’re all generic and boring and we just do the same shooters all over again, and let’s make another one,’ which is a shame. And then people look at us and say, ‘you know, you guys, you’ve got nothing useful to say about the world, because you’re just there beating off in your little box making the same kind of thing’. I’d like to push it. I think with TimeSplitters we were also trying to push it, because we’re saying, ‘these shooting games – let’s not take them too seriously, because it’s good fun’. And some people get that and some people don’t get that. It’s most disappointing, when sometimes in the States people get TimeSplitters and say, ‘well why’s it so stupid?’ Well, it’s just trying to be fun.

HAZE is set to make its debut to the Sony PlayStation 3 first, a unit they have no qualms developing for – likely a personal favorite since it’s a setup up from the PS2. Will PlayStation 3 players be worried about HAZE not going to contend with Microsoft and Bungie’s Halo 3? Not exactly, as Doak explains:

I am very happy to go up against Halo 3. They have a different agenda. We’re doing something, we’re bringing a lot of new things; and it’s a new story. New story and new types of gameplay is our edge there. I mean, their edge is they have a juggernaut [Microsoft] driving them along and they have an almost fanatical following. On the flipside of that, they have to change it, and they’ve got all the people who liked [Halo] and all the people who liked [Halo 2], and both those sets of people expect different things from the one that they liked. So there’s an inevitable compromise there.

Via EuroGamer