PS3 struggles hurt Haze development

by Justin McElroy on Aug 12th 2009 4:00PM

It's no secret that some developers have a tough time with the PS3. In fact, Gabe Newell hates the thing so much he once forced an elephant to eat a crushed up 20GB model, jammed a cardboard cutout of Jack Tretton into the resulting dung pile and burned the whole thing in effigy. Karl Hilton of Crytek UK (formerly Free Radical) brings a more restrained (though ultimately more hygienic) protest today, telling Develop that the developer's technical learning curve hurt the development of critically maligned PS3 exclusive, Haze.

"We spent more time trying get the game running properly and less time to design the game properly," he said. "The PS3 is a powerful machine but a difficult one to get the best out of."

And no, before you ask, Hilton doesn't expect to have similar PS3 problems with Crytek's CryEngine 3. Shockingly.

Source

Tags: cryengine-3, crytek, crytek-UK, fps, free-radical, haze, ubisoft

Reader Comments (137)

Or maybe, the game just sucked. It happens.

They could have spent more time with it, but sometimes, you can only do so much, you know?

Haze was truly...awful. Anytime a game is dubbed a "Halo killer", it's destined to fail in almost every capacity.

a little bit of both, its sucked regardless but it sucked more cause of the hard ps3 development

I don't know. I can kinda buy into this. I've seen a lot of PS3 games that just don't have much content, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has to do with wasting time and energy learning a new platform and getting the graphics to look super pretty.

*cough* The Force Unleashed

Ctrl, that's just part of the development cycle. Look at any game that was released as a "launch title" for a system, then compare it to something released down the line. Final Fantasy 7 compared to FF9 for the PS1, or DMC 1 compared to DMC 3 for the PS2.

Like it was said above, its about evolution. Developers can't hide behind the "its hard" excuse to hide a bad game. This only really affects 3rd party developers though. The ps3 is tough to develop for, oh well, either shut up and deal with it, or go make it for something else. Then there are those who whine about it, like Gabe, despite the fact they refuse to even bother with the system. Hell, Sega didn't complain about it for Valkyria Chronicles, Media molecule didn't whine when it came to LittleBigPlanet.
Hell! Even Capcom didn't whine about how hard it was with Monster Hunter Tri when they were working on the PS3. They just went "oh its too expensive" and relegated themselves to porting the PS2 engine to the Wii to hide their laziness.

I remember hearing from an IGN interview with an ex free radical employee, that the game itself was re-designed about a zillion times. Originally intended to be some sort of Gulf war shooter, with a gritty storyline.

Now this is just my feelings on this, but its possible that pressure from both Ubisoft and Sony forced Free Radical into making the transition over to cliche space marine super soldier co-corporation storyline, like every man and his dog. In the interview it is suggested that the story was too controversial to put out, so it went back to the drawing board, again and again.

When you change something a zillion times, then of course it is destined to fail (Duke Nukem Forever springs to mind.) The originality that was once there leaked away to reveal another halo, which is mediocre at best (opinion not a fact). You rip off something that isn't that good to begin with and you fail again.

Captain Planet, Anything that is dubbed a 'killer' is bound to fail.

ont diss haze! its an awesome game. i dont like time splitters,haze is not time splitters. its a playstation version of the origonal halo, which also had glitches.

@devilsei: The Final Fantasies are a poor example however because those companies had a shitload of funds to work with and take YEARS to get out each next installment. And PS1 --> PS2, not THAT huge of a jump in terms of technology hurdles for development.

I'm not saying the devs have a good enough excuse to have had a crappy game (I think if your game mechanic works well, you shouldn't need much else), but it's reasonable to believe that they had had trouble developing for the platform.

Saria, Final fantasy 7 was a launch title for the PS1, and was released in 1997.
Final Fantasy 9 was released in 2000.

And between that, they released 8, now try and tell me that it took "Years" to develop that. I ain't talkin about the current gen versions of the games. I was comparing the first of the series, to the last, on one console. Square moved their series from the SNES to the PS1, huge shift in software and hardware. And when you compare the graphics of the two games I talked about, 9 is easily far better than 7's. The sprites weren't blocky like 7's, or rough like 8's. And the CGI was amazing at the time.

Capcom though, does have somewhat of an edge after they made a few games on the PS1, but nothing like what DMC is/was.

I'm not arguing that the PS3 is hard to develop for. I know it is. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't blame a system for your game's downfall. I don't remember the company that developed the horrid Gundam game for the PS3 for launch ever complaining about the system. Their fault, plain and simple. They are the ones making the game, not the system.

A good craftsman never blames his tools.

Don't be dumb; FF7 wasn't a launch title. It came out three years after the Playstation did.

Make a crappy game and blame the system you developed it exclusively for...

Classy.

It really is a horrible excuse. The game was overhyped to begin with and the story line is like watching ao old crappy 70's movie trying to force the point of the plot.

I got all this from the demo btw.

Sad thing is I bought the game from the bargain bin and still have yet to even unwrap it.

There should be no excuses, it had a crap story and horrible voice lines (whose idea was it to make every character Brucie from GTA?!), crap gameplay, crap weapons = they have nothing to do with programming and "development" of the actual the game.

ROFM was a launch title and a PS3 exclusive and it had a better story, gameplay and weapons, and on top of the graphics looked solid and had an excellent multiplayer mode.
It's easy to blame the console, but if other's could produce better results a year earlier then why couldn't they? It's not like they were new to the gaming industry or anything.......

They've been doing it on the wii for years now

Time heals all wounds. We'll recover from this.

nice avatar

For a split second, i thought i had gone back in time two years.

FLASHBACK!

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/20/megaowch-haze-handed-4-5-review-by-ign/

I would guess that Gabe Newell feeding a PS3 to his elephant probably means there won't be a good port of any Valve games for it anytime soon.

Anyhoo, let's hope that CryEngine 3 will help them make games like what Haze should have been (not a Halo killer for PS3, but simply a good FPS for the system).

Isnt Gabe THE elephant

1) Fat jokes related to Gabe Newell are so two-thousand-and-late.

2) Why is Tuesday D-Day?

Addendum:
3) Remember, I have a Mac, and our PCs are dinosaurs.

"two-thousand-and-late"

Stupid line for an absolutely horrible song. You sir, should be embarrassed for even using it. Hell, I'm embarrassed for even knowing it.

Macs are a bag of hurt.

yea...... we on dat next shit now...

I just so happen to like that song, and there is really no need to be up on a high horse because you think it's stupid. Just say it's stupid and move on.

"two-thousand-and-late"

I was looking through the old epic Haze thread posted above earlier and thought I was still in it when I read that.

Sooo, instead of getting more acquainted with the PS3 and making the game better, they released a so-so game that got mediocre reviews? I know time and money come into play, for sure, but if they were having a hard time developing the game they should've made sure it was a quality product and worked harder to make it better. To me this is almost them making an excuse for why the game was only OK. I understand where they're coming from, but still...

Yeah, and it's not like ALL of the PS3 release games sucked in almost every way like Haze did. I'm thinking of Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank Future and MortorStorm And Resistance: Fall of Man. Those were all great games!!!

"I know time and money come into play, for sure, but if they were having a hard time developing the game they should've made sure it was a quality product and worked harder to make it better."

So, you know that "time and money come in to play, for sure" but you insist that they spend MORE time and money?

Huh?

Out in the Real World -- the one not visited regularly by fanboys -- people have bills to pay. That means shipping games, hopefully on time, or at least close to schedule. And if there are technical problems along the way, the bank manager doesn't much care.

Would YOU spend more of your money, begging investors and the bank for more money, putting yourself in to ridiculous levels of debt? No, of course you wouldn't. But it's OK to tell other people that they should, eh?

Reality check: the problems and costs associated with PS3 are by now very well known. It's technically challenging to develop for the console, and the ROI is relatively poor. Not every company can be owned outright by Sony, and given access to however many tens of millions of dollars it takes to make a console-selling game. (See: Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games.)

"In fact, Gabe Newell hates the thing so much he once forced an elephant to eat a crushed up 20GB model"

Which he then ate.

NO WAIT I got a better one:

In fact, Gabe Newell hates the thing so much..."

More than exercise?!

it was probably a Slim model ;)

Naw, I doubt he even did this, cause one he is the elephant, and two, it be too much exercise to lift a PS3 for him.

When did bad writing and shitty voice acting mean the console was hard to develop for? That argument is so 2006 anyway. Killzone 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, Heavenly Sword and inFamous are a few amazing games developed by Third Party studios. They all had no troubles with the PS3.

We're so 2009, that line's 1900-

Line? Anybody?

"They all had no troubles with the PS3."

Except for a lack of actual sales.

badumching.

Do Naughty Dog isn't 3rd party. Sucker Punch technically is, but only so much as Insomniac is.

All those companys ARE third party. They choose to stay with Sony for various reasons (ease of development, nice communication).

@Billop - Man, you're so bloody misinformed, it's not even worth crackin' the smirk you need... I'm SO sick of all this fanboy NONSENSE!

Uncharted - developed by Naughty Dog - OWNED BY SONY - NOT 3rd Party

Killzone 2 - developed by Guerrilla Games - OWNED BY SONY - NOT 3rd Party

Ratchet and Clank - developed by insomniac - not directly owned by Sony, HOWEVER, the game was PUBLISHED by SONY, meaning the whole thing was financed by SONY's dime!! NOT A TRULY INDEPENDENT 3RD PARTY SITUATION... Besides, Insomniac hasn't developed a SINGLE game for a non-SONY system since its inception...

inFamous - Sucker Punch - not owned by SONY, BUT AGAIN, the game was PUBLISHED by SONY... NOT 3rd Party

So, the ONLY true 3rd party game (ie, produced by a non-SONY developer and a non-SONY publisher: completely NOT financed, coddled, propped up by, and/or helped-along by SONY) on your list was MSG4... and Konami is one of the largest game dev/publishing houses in the industry...they have FAR greater financial resources than typical developers to bleed out until the game actually runs on the intended platform...

I thought it was its generic gameplay and story that hurt it, but whatever.

A bad worker always blames his tools

And Sony tools always blame the developers ;-)

That was actually pretty clever. Too bad it's dead wrong.

that explains the bad level design. genius.

And so what did the developers of Ghostbusters say? I swore they had said the PS3 was their lead platform, that they liked developing for it and look how that port turned out.

It was still a decent game though. because it was designed well and it was fun.

"I thought it was its generic gameplay and story that hurt it, but whatever."

add in the bad voice-work and horrible dialogue... as a pure shooter it wasn't horrid, generic, but not horrid... it was the other aspects that pulled it down.

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PS3 struggles hurt Haze development

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