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Haze comes out on May 20th and Just now Learned that there will be a demo of Haze in early May. That's right Haze fans we'll be able to fire up the ole Playstation and see what it's like! Here to celebrate this cool news is a new photog from Free Radical! Thanks Fellas! Good Job!

You can bet that we here at Lost Planet will be getting that demo and bringing our thoughts to you about it here on the #1 Haze Page. So keep coming back and demand, I mean demand that your friends follow you! How else will they know what's up!? :P

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Well now, We have a few new Haze matters to go over... first an interview with Haze Screenplay Writer, Rob Yescombe and then a new Vid from Korn who created a new song just for the Haze game. In fact the song was so good that now Korn is putting it on it's new album!


But First the interview with Rob there are some cool photos from Sprong as well!

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Interviews// Haze's Screen Writer, Rob Yescombe Link to this: http://spong.com/feature/1010976523 Apr 2008 09:26


by Mark Johnson

Rob Yescombe. This wasn't our fault...Like a neon-clad, slow-moving juggernaut, Haze is coming. It's one of the most anticipated games for the PS3 and one of the few FPSes that might prove to be a console-seller for Sony. All that and, much to my frustration, the release date has seemed to stay forever on the horizon. Until early April, that was!





To warm up for the release, I trundled off down to London to take a look at the game and have a chat with its screenwriter, Rob Yescombe. After Rob had stopped oggling the sports camera I was using to record the interview, we got going on subjects ranging from Haze's multi-player to which side of the game's conflict Jesus would be on to TimeSplitters. Here is what was said... SPOnG: You've been worried in the past that certain elements of Haze weren't getting enough media coverage. Do you feel that Haze would have have benefited from having a single, high concept? Do you feel it has one already? Rob Yescombe: Well, here's the single high concept two games in one. The problem is that you have a totally unique skillset and play style and experience on both of those sides. The problem is that we've got a great high concept, but beneath that you've got another tier that is all the features from two different games to explain in one demo which is incredibly hard to do. On top of that, you've got the whole story and narrative side of things which we're pushing pretty strongly, as well. So, in fact, the problem Haze has is that it's got too much good stuff in it! SPOnG: It must be tough... Rob Yescombe: It is! Even if you can list 50 good things to someone, if the experience they come away with is, 'God, I feel confused', that's bad.





Today, for instance, you've got a good few hours to play. You can get to grips with it and understand some of the subtleties of it. But doing all the trade shows, when you're talking about demoing both sides of gameplay and explaining how it works and explaining controls and talking about the story in a seven minute demo... it's madness! But that's, unfortunately, the way that marketing is constructed. And that's not Ubi's fault, by any stretch of the imagination that's just the forums in which you can market things... that's what's feasible to do, and that's all you can do. SPOnG: You guys have been really active in promoting Haze yourselves, that's quite unusual in a developer. Rob Yescombe: Well, it's not that we were going rogue. Everything we do is tandem with Ubi, but we've combined forces so that, hopefully, rather than them having to organise something with us and then organise it with you, we can speak direct as long as everyone's working towards the same direction which we are, of course. SPOnG: Do you have a favourite aspect of the game? Rob Yescombe: All my stuff! No... again, that's the great and terrible thing about it. There's so much stuff that I really enjoy cos for me, I can get an immense amount of pleasure just from an animation, for instance, where I know you feel cool when you disarm someone when you spin that rifle in the air, catch it, shoot them that's fucking cool.





By the same token, I'm pleased with the bigger things like the theme running underneath it, I think is not preachy, which I think is something we really wanted to make sure we didn't do. We didn't want people to feel like, 'God, I'm being lectured by a video game'. We wanted the gameplay to come first, and that's something we've done really well, I think. As well as that, Derek's... sorry, Derek 'Sizzlewood', has done a great job balancing those two completely different sides. That's hard work. SPOnG: Erm... was he always Derek 'Sizzlewood'? Because I'm sure I remember him being Derek 'Sizzlin'' Littlewood at one point... Rob Yescombe: I change it. He doesn't like any of those names. I was pleased to hear the other day that his Mother rang him up and said, Hello, Sizzlewood. SPOnG: A lot of the time with FPSes it feels like you've got a multiplayer game with a single player campaign tacked on or vice versa. Do you feel that one or the other is the core experience of Haze? Rob Yescombe: You know, recently we were looking back through the old notes hundreds and hundreds of pages of design documents that we've written and refined over the three years of development. The very first sheet from the very first meeting, the things we had on it were; four-player co-op; asymmetric combat, streaming no loading screens and just the word, 'story'. Which, you know, I had to expand on... (laughs). There are things that we've had to drop, things we've added on, things we've improved, but the thing that we wanted right at the beginning was that co-op experience and that multi-player experience.





We're not stupid. We know that our lifeblood is replayability making sure that there's a community of people online that enjoy playing together. The communal aspect of games is, most of the time, the most fun part. That's why the co-op isn't some short mission thing. It's the entire single-player campaign, no loading screens, you can sit down with your buddies through the whole thing without having to miss out anything as if you were playing by yourself. SPOnG: So... replayability brings us to downloadable content... Rob Yescombe: There will be some. SPOnG: What form will it take? Rob Yescombe: I don't know if we can talk about it yet... Some cool stuff... I guess it's fairly obvious that we can say there will be maps downloadable and, playing some of those the other day for the first time because the multi-player aspect - as the writer I'm not really involved with it past a certain point the downloadable maps are fucking cool. The maps that come with the game are great but, of course, you're learning all the time while you're still playing and finishing those. By the time we've got those set and ready we can start work on the downloadable stuff and know exactly what's going to be amazing so all the best things are distilled into that. SPOnG: In regular deathmatch, if one player makes another overdose and the player overdosing accidentally kills someone, who gets credited with the kill? Rob Yescombe: When someone is overdosing in deathmatch their kills are credited to them, not the person that overdosed them.





SPOnG: And if you play as a Mantel Trooper in regular deathmatch, do other Mantel Troopers become highlighted by Nectar? Rob Yescombe: Other Mantel troopers are highlighted if you're using Nectar in deathmatch (essentially the glow appears over any character that's a threat, so even in team games, other troopers who are currently overdosing will be highlighted, because they constitute a threat to you). Fact-o-rama! SPOnG: How long do you expect the single-player campaign to take? Rob Yescombe: If you were running as fast as you possibly could, about 10 hours. If you were slow, probably about 12, I would think. SPOnG: I just dodged a really bad Tiffany reference... Anyway, the delay. If you look back at the original press release for Haze, it was slated for a Spring 2007 release. Why has it taken so long? Rob Yescombe: I'll be honest. We lost the keys to the office, and we got locked out from Novemeber. And then, luckily, we knew a guy, who knew a guy who could jimmy the lock. We got in, and then we were like, 'shit, we'd better release this bad boy'. (Pregnant pause).





Also... I mean, it's all typical stuff - we wanted to make sure the frame rate was rock solid and just to try and improve the experience. I mean, the fact of the matter is, Ubi could very easily have said to us, 'no, let's hit the Christmas market', and it would have been fine. But we have a reputation to protect, Ubi has a reputation to protect, and rather than putting out a good game, it's better to put out a great game, because that replayability, building that community, is what is going to energise the success of that game. You can get a little splurge spend at Christmas, or you can build a brand and life long appreciation of this thing. SPOnG: And get people to come and play Haze 2? Rob Yescombe: Yeah. If we're lucky enough to do that, then yeah. SPOnG: You're not working on the script for Haze 2 yet, then? Rob Yescombe: Haze 2 is... no one's talking about it yet, we're gonna wait and see. We're not committed to anything. SPOnG: Busy with TimeSplitters? Rob Yescombe: That's the thing, we've got this LucasArts project and TimeSplitters 4... we're a big team, but that's still a big ask. SPOnG: How have you found Sony through the development process? Rob Yescombe: They've never interfered, if that's what you mean. There are these weird, kind of bogey man stories that publishers are evil, that Sony's evil, that Microsoft are evil. They're not! They recognise that people have a creative ability, that that's what we do for a living, and they let us get on with it.





Then, when we come to the end, of course, they've helped us with some of the testing in terms of getting staff in. They've just made it very easy for us to do. SPOnG: In terms of technical stuff getting to grips with coding for the PS3 how have they been with that? Rob Yescombe: The fact is that our pedigree was on the PS2. Those coders know that hardware extremely well. I think for us it's perhaps been less of a challenge although naturally challenging because it's new hardware but I think for us it's been less of a challenge than for some developers who haven't had that time developing on that kind of hardware. SPOnG: And you've got rumble in there, right? Rob Yescombe: Yep. And Sixaxis. If you're on fire, shake it shake it shake it! Also, when you're overdosed on Nectar, if you try and throw a grenade, you'll end up holding on to it, so you'll end up having to try and throw it out of your own hand. (Frantically shakes imaginary Sixaxis.) SPOnG: Can you talk about TimeSplitters yet? Rob Yescombe: The irony is, I can talk about it very little because we've got so much going on. The thing is, in our company, everybody volunteers ideas, and it's a very sweet open-door policy to design. However, when it comes to TS4, everybody's got a million ideas, and all of them are as valid as the next guy. So, what we have is an enormous list of great ideas that no one wants to trim anything out of. So, right now, there's no way we could have it out before the year 3000. We've got to figure out, 'how do we reason trimming out great stuff in order to make a game in time?'





SPOnG: Can you give us a hint as to what we might see parodied? Rob Yescombe: I'll tell you something that didn't make it in, how about that? SPOnG: OK. Rob Yescombe: This was my idea, it was deemed not bizarre enough. A vehicle lava tanks. The most deadly weapon in the world, made out of lava that's driven by a pirate that fires ninjas. SPOnG: Was it the coders that kicked that back out? Rob Yescombe: No, no. It was a mutual creative decision. SPOnG: Veering away for a second, what do you think to Manhunt 2 being allowed to go on sale and all the controversy surrounding violent games? Rob Yescombe: Fine. Why not? It's this bizarre idea... For instance Cliff Richard. This is something that cracks me up. Cliff Richard was once deemed to be spawn of the devil. His music was gonna make people into monsters. Rock 'n' roll was gonna destroy the world, and now it's the same with games. 'Oh my God, games are gonna destroy the world!' Of course they're not! It's the same as anything else. It's not gonna make us into monsters. People were bashing each other's heads open as cavemen. At least now we're streaming it into something online instead. I have no objection to Manhunt, and from what I've heard the censored version's in fact pretty tame anyway.





It's kind of an odd thing. It's one of the underlying themes of Haze, which is that I find it weirder and weirder as I get older that I pay the bills helping to make stuff in which you shoot people in the face. Whilst like any normal person I detest real violence, I love virtual violence. That dichotomy is a very strange place to find yourself as an adult. So, yeah, playing a game like Manhunt, there's a part of me that thinks, 'God, this is a little weird'. I worry about what this could do to somebody else, but the fact is it doesn't do anything. It doesn't do anything to me, it doesn't do anything to anybody else. SPOnG: There's been some criticism buzzing around that Haze doesn't look all that great. Obviously there's loads going on in terms of gameplay mechanics. Was there a decision at any point to focus one way rather than the other? Rob Yescombe: How do you think it looks? What do you think it looks worse than? SPOnG: It looks good. Not as good as, say, Uncharted or MotorStorm. Rob Yescombe: That's the thing, though, it's kind of odd. Someone the other day who I met someone not in the industry, a regular gamer said 'Grand Theft Auto doesn't look that good'... are you mad? Because it's not, 'how does it compare to Crysis', it's, 'how does it compare to itself'. There are concessions you have to make in order to make something. Of course we don't look as good as MotorStorm, because we're not a straight line where it has loading times in between. I mean, we're talking about a 12 hour streaming experience. That is fucking massive, it's enormous. And, personally, I think we look absolutely great. But we don't look as good as Crysis, because it's a totally different game, totally different hardware. Inevitably, we're going to look A instead of A+, because there's more going on in the game. The more we give you, that's the concession you make. Same with Grand Theft Auto.





SPOnG: Has anything about the use of nectar surprised you? Any of that much sought after emergent gameplay? Shane CarpenterRob Yescombe: There are things that people have learned to do how to use things tactically that we didn't even think about. Like, with the nectar grenades, when they go off, they've ended up becoming almost like a mobile cover system. The rebels can run through it, but the Mantel guys don't want to risk running through it. So you can almost set up a perimeter with those, and likewise with playing dead, you can end up with these really great ambush situations, where you've got three guys who are playing dead together, and they've set up a bunch of mines nearby. So, standing up makes the Mantel guys run in a certain direction... You've got people using these things in a clever, team-based, dynamic kind of way. SPOnG: Some of the Mantel guys have crosses on their helmets. Is that a reference to anything? Rob Yescombe: (Grins). It's NOT a Jesus reference! I can't stress that enough. It was just something that someone thought looked cool. SPOnG: OK. But if The Devil were in Haze, what side of the conflict would he be on? Rob Yescombe: (Pauses). It's a good question. He would be one of the butterflies that lands on your gun if you stand still for long enough. In the jungle, they might land on your gun. You can shake them off.





SPOnG: With the Sixaxis? Rob Yescombe: You know, I don't know if they ended up doing that. You can just move and they'll come off. But we should have done Sixaxis. That's a trick missed. You know, you're telling me right. Maybe it does! We should find out. I can't wait to find out. SPOnG: If it's not... Rob Yescombe: Then you don't have to buy the game. I'll give you a copy for free. SPOnG: Could you speak a little about the scripting process? You've said that you started with 100 pages and now you're over 1,000. Rob Yescombe: The process is, I write, basically, a screenplay, which is the narrative structure, the skeleton, if you will. It's like reading a movie. It's like 'this is what we want the ideal narrative experience to be. Then, on top of that, your bolting on all the mission objectives, the in-game speech... So, as different game units are designed and developed, then of course you need to provide the sign-posting and the dialogue for that as well, so it kind of blossomed like that. But it's all centred around that initial 100-page through-line of the story.





SPOnG: The voice acting is looking good. The bit with the *******EDITED FOR SPOILERS******* was impressive. Rob Yescombe: Yeah! That's a guy called Chad Ellis. But, other guys we've got in there (the main character) Shane Carpenter's played by Bertie Carvel, who is playing that in a very particular way for a very particular reason. He's an up-and-coming guy... very good. We've got Rupert Evans, who you may know from Hellboy, he's the... SPOnG: Was he Abe Sapien? Rob Yescombe: No, he's the young guy who's looking after Hellboy. Agent John Myers. As well as that, the guy playing the rebel leader, Skin Coat Merino, is a guy who used to be quite a big star in Spain (Carlos Riera). He retired, and he came out of retirement, when he read the script, to do this! I'd heard him reading a Book at Bedtime on Radio 4, and he's got this amazing voice, so I begged him to come and do (Haze). He's done a really great job. SPOnG: How long did you have the guys in for with the voice acting? Rob Yescombe: One thing that was really important to me in the casting and directing was I didn't want to do what a lot of other games do, which is record all the voices separately. So, all the main characters who were in that 100-page story together, we had them all in the studio, all recording together, because some of these guys have worked in radio, so it's like a radio play, effectively. That meant that they could act off each other, instead of me recording one guy, recording a line one way, then having to explain to the next guy, 'this is how the other guy did this line.' It's much better, 'cos then there's chemistry, you know?





SPOnG: How does it compare to other voice acting sessions you've had? Rob Yescombe: Well, Haze is my first game, but the things I've brought from spending some time in the TV and film industry part of that was having actors actually working together. Having had experience directing people before, that's something that Free Radical gave me free reign to do. Hopefully it's paid off pretty well. SPOnG: Can you say anything about the platforms for TimeSplitters yet? Rob Yescombe: We haven't even decided what we want to do yet. It could be any platform. It's still paper design at this point. We haven't got to a stage where we're pitching to publishers exactly what platforms. It's still unsigned, so we wanna do it our way and then say, 'this is what it's going to be, do you want to pay money for it?' SPOnG: Can you give us a bit of background on how you came to be writing games? Rob Yescombe: Well, I started writing professionally 11 years ago, while I was still at university. I oddly got writing for Indian cable television. Even though no-one was watching it, it gave me a chance to get the bug. From there, I got into TV format development. From there, I got into feature film development, script editing. The way I ended up at Free Radical was kind of weird, because I wrote a sitcom that never got made, but it got shortlisted for a TAPS award, and Free Radical were speaking to TAPS saying 'we need a writer' and they happened to find me, and the rest is history. SPOnG: How does writing for games compare to writing for TV? Rob Yescombe: The main difference is it costs as much to blow up a truck as it does to blow up a firework, and that's the coolest thing about it. And even thought there are restrictions that are kind of abstract, like in a movie you can have a thousand extras and it wouldn't really cost you very much, and in a game it's much harder, rendering characters and having them do what you want with AI it's very hard to do that. But you can have a big explosion for cheap. So it's ebb and flow... It's a good life! SPOnG: Long hours? Rob Yescombe: Most of the time, the more technical you roll, the more consistently you're doing long hours. For me, I'll do long hours for a very short space in time, get a lot of stuff done, then sit on my hands for a week or so while we're waiting for that to get into the game, see if it works, then get into something else. So I'm up and down. SPOnG: Once the hardcore coding gets underway, is there a lot for you to do, then? Rob Yescombe: Well, that 1,000 page doc doesn't get done all at once. The purpose of having someone in-house - because, you know, a freelancer will come in, write a script and disappear being in-house means that when something needs to be tweaked, or re-designed, or cut, or added in, it means they're not waiting six months for someone to polish dialogue that was written by a designer, instead they've got someone there who can write and have it in the next day. And that is a constantly present thing. SPOnG: Is Haze going to be on the 360 or PC at any point? Rob Yescombe: I don't know. I don't even know! SPOnG: Would you be personally disappointed if it didn't make it onto either of them? Rob Yescombe: Sure. I want as many people to play it as possible. But then, those people have the free will to go out and buy a PlayStation 3. SPOnG: It's more affordable these days... Rob Yescombe: And now they've got a game that'll make them wanna buy it! SPOnG: You see Haze as that game that will make people go out and buy a PS3? Rob Yescombe: I would really like that. A lot. SPOnG: Will your online multi-player be better than CoD4? Rob Yescombe: It'll be very different, because... CoD4, me and Derek were looking at it, and there's a lot they've obviously got a lot that's... not ripped off from, but very similar to GoldenEye. Things that GoldenEye did right, they've noticed and capitalised on. They've got the golden gun, of course, as well. We're just trying to do something different. People say, 'how do you think you compare to Halo? Well, you know, there are similarities in the sense that they're first person shooters, but the core combat experience is completely different. SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time. Rob Yescombe: Thank you.

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Now onto the Korn Story and Vid of Haze's Korn song.

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Korn's Latest "Haze"

Single inspired by upcoming game now available for download.

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April 23, 2008 - Earlier today, both Ubisoft and EMI announced that Korn's latest single, "Haze" was available for purchase from online music sites. The single, inspired by Ubisoft's upcoming video game for the PS3, will also be included on the enhanced CD version of Korn's untitled album that was released on April 21st in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Haze, developed by Free Radical, is exclusive to the PS3 and will be released on May 22nd.





To highlight the single, Korn, Ubisoft and EMI have released a video of "Haze" that melds live concert footage of Korn with clips from Haze itself. To check out the video, click on the link below.

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