Haze: Exclusive Hands-On Preview

Beauty, Bloom and Boomsticks

Haze is pretty. Like, really pretty. The textures are detailed in and the models are superbly drawn and animated even in normal gameplay (no doubt partly due to Rob's motion capturing talents), still it's when the Nectar kicks in that the mouth-watering really begins.

With Nectar running, the game is overlaid with an extra level of sharpness and clarity and the slight blurring around the periphery helps give the game an awesome sense of focus as players hone in on targets. The opposite is true when the Nectar is disrupted and the game plunges into black and white, a fish-eye effect distorting your view of the world and the world swaying of its own accord.

"That swaying doesn't feel right, it's like he's on a ship" said Derek, though Rob and I both insisted it gave the game a certain wooziness which helped to emphasise the disorientation the player would feel as the Nectar left his system.

By far the most beautiful thing about Haze that I noticed however was an effect which I've never seen before and couldn't think of how to describe at all. It's an effect caused by the bloom and HDR in the game, which can be seen when the player is in an area which is darker than the rest of the environment or when the player puts some cover between themselves and a grenade.


What does it look like? It's hard to describe, but when the grenade detonates there's the impression that the light is being caught up like elastic debris and briefly hurled away from the explosion before being pulled back to where it started. It looks like the world is bleeding in the direction of the explosion, as if the rules of physics had been momentarily disregarded and the very air had become a ragdoll.

"It's a zoom and light effect," Derek explained, when he finally grasped what the hell I was talking about. "The engine basically takes an image of the light as if it were zooming out really fast because of the explosion and then overlays that on the screen. It also takes the HDR into account to get that effect. Honestly, it's the type of thing which has been in movies forever and people never notice it, but nobody's ever really seen it like this before in a game."

There are also a selection of smaller effects used in the game, the type of thing which really adds to how a game feels and plays in the long run. The weapons for instance are interesting on the rebels side as most of their weapons don't have scopes on them, so clicking down the right thumbstick switches to an iron-sights aiming mode.


Not remarkable in itself, though it is something which I really appreciate in modern FPS games, but it's the subtle way that the end of the barrel moves in a slightly different way to the butt of the weapon which helps make the iron-sights feel more fun to use than a simple scope.

The game also uses a mixture of effects and filters to help plunge players into the game and make them feel like they actually are Shane Carpenter. A lot of simple game actions, such as running up to low obstacles and vaulting over them or using the melee attacks as the rebels to disarm troopers, are achieved through a fusion of third and first person cameras.

"It's difficult because of the way that game-world items and screen-world items sometimes interact. We had to use a mixture of different filters and techniques to get it working right, so some of the things you see are actual models and some aren't."

To watch it though, you honestly wouldn't be able to tell and the different animations flow into each other seamlessly.