eu.playstation.com catches up with Derek Littlewood, Project Lead on Haze to get the lowdown on the exciting new first person shooter game coming exclusively to PLAYSTATION 3.
Can you tell us about the setting of Haze?
The game is set in the year 2048, where there has been an uprising in South America by a rebel group known as the Promise Hand. The Promise Hand has overthrown the government and a private military company known as Mantel has been drafted in to sort it out. The player takes on the role of a guy called Shane Carpenter who is a Sergeant working for Mantel, on what is his first day in the war.
The main tool that the Mantel has in addition to all their tanks, bombs and guns is a bio-enhancing medication called Nectar. Nectar gives the troopers lots of different advantages. As the player progresses through the game they come to realise that there's more to Mantel and more to Nectar than initially meets the eye, and it allows them to explore their perception of the world as they first see it and to toy with it as they progress through the game.
What effect does Nectar have on gameplay?
When you drop into battle using Nectar, the first thing you notice is that it gives you four main benefits. It gives you Nectar Focus, which is an enhanced sniping aid that gives you that extra bit of aim steadiness to let you get that perfect headshot, it gives you Nectar Perception which highlights any enemies nearby in a bright orange glow and allows players to identify where they are. There's Nectar Foresight, so when a grenade lands nearby or someone's about to melee you, you get a ripple effect that emanates out from them giving you that split-second of warning you need to get out of the way, and finally there's the Nectar Melee Blast which is an overpowered melee attack that can send enemies flying up to 15 feet away.
The other aspect of Nectar is the fact that you dose up with it yourself. You can administer as much as you want but if you administer too much you'll overdose. When you overdose two major things happen. The first thing is you can't tell friend from foe, the Promise Hand and the Mantel Soldiers all look the same to you. The second thing is that control of your trigger finger is taken away from you, so whenever your aim passes over an enemy you automatically start to fire. So you get to this state where suddenly, in the middle of all your Mantel squadmates, you become this smart bomb, because you start shooting at your own team.
When you're playing as a Mantel solider you're always trying to avoid overdosing while using all the other benefits of Nectar, but when you're playing as a rebel you're always trying to overdose the troopers and exploit the weaknesses inherent to Nectar.
What kind of weapons will you be using throughout the game?
We've got a range of weapons, including variants on existing real-life weaponry, but I do feel the interesting thing about the weapons in Haze is the way that you use Nectar with them. So you can create a Nectar grenade by strapping a Nectar pack from a fallen Mantel trooper onto a grenade and throwing it at the enemy, which emits a cloud of Nectar gas that can overdose anyone in that area. You can also use a Nectar knife - when you create a Nectar grenade you also slather your knife in Nectar, and when you melee attack or throw that knife at an enemy trooper that will overdose them. Another thing you can do is you can overdose enemies by going up to them and smashing the Nectar pack on their back, or you can snipe it from a distance.
As a rebel there's other useful things you can do with weapons. You can steal enemy weapons, you can scavenge ammo from any fallen gun and recalibrate it, meaning you can use shotgun ammunition in your rifle and vice versa, and you can also lay mines by converting grenades and hiding them on the floor so soldiers don't see them as they run past.
What kind of multiplayer experience can we expect from Haze?
In addition to our four player co-operative mode that runs right throughout the single player campaign - it's drop in, drop out, so you can jump into someone else's game whenever you want - we are also offering 16 player online multiplayer with split screen support, meaning you can do two player split screen as part of a LAN or online multiplayer game. We're offering a wide range of multiplayer modes, including the standard deathmatch mode, and the main direction of the online game is the battle between the Promise Hand rebels and the Mantel troopers. It's important to stress that all the abilities that the troopers and rebels have in the single player are available in the multiplayer and you'll find plenty of interesting ways in which they interact online.
The other thing we have is a range of team assault modes that are like little stories in themselves - they're objective driven scenarios that tell a little bit of extra story about the campaign scenario.
There's been so many great FPS games coming out recently, what makes Haze stand out?
I think the unique feature Haze has is the asymmetric gameplay it has running through it - the Mantel troopers and Promise Hand rebels have very different abilities and they're available in all modes of the game.
The whole concept of the game started from Free Radical, who are famous for TimeSplitters which has a great multiplayer game. So when we started making Haze we were thinking about what we could do to make multiplayer more interesting. So we said "how about if the side you choose isn't because of the look of the character, but because of how you want to play the game?" So you can choose to be a Promise Hand rebel if you like the more guerrilla, improvisational style of gameplay, or you can choose to be a Mantel trooper if you just want to dose up on Nectar and go for the headshots and go for the melee attacks.
Then when you play the multiplayer game all those abilities interrelate. A good example of this is the Promise Hand's ability to play dead. Because Nectar presents a sanitised version of reality to the Mantel troopers, dead bodies seem to disappear to them. The rebels can use this to their advantage by playing dead so that they will appear to vanish to the Mantel Troopers, then can jump back up again and attack. All these abilities interlock in the multiplayer game, which gives you an enormous range of options before you even start considering the normal range of weapons and normal FPS gameplay that Haze already has. So I think it just adds a whole other layer to the gameplay that you won't find in any other game out there.
Haze is out on May 23rd. Be sure to check out the preview and more Haze news at eu.playstation.com.PS3 Fanboy review: Haze
Haze initial reviews are not promising
