14 DAY TRIAL // Free Radical has been one of the most popular studios in the UK in recent years, releasing franchises like TimeSplitters, which became quite successful and generated a fair amount of sales all around the world.
But it seems that everything went downhill after the company made the PlayStation 3-exclusive title Haze, which, even though it had a massive hype and marketing campaign behind it, fell flat of the expectations of both the studio and its publisher, Ubisoft.
Speaking with Develop, Karl Hilton, the co-founder of Free Radical, now called Crytek UK, as the creators of Crysis bought the financially struggling studio at the beginning of the year, revealed some sensitive issues about Haze and how the PS3 made things quite challenging for his team.
“We hit a few stumbling blocks on it that meant we spent more time trying get the game running properly and less time to design the game properly,” Hilton said, revealing that Haze “wasn't the game it should have been.”
But don't go thinking that the studio will ignore the PS3 in the future, as he did admit that Sony's console was a “powerful machine but a difficult one to get the best out of.” This echoes the statements of various Sony executives who revealed that the complicated nature of the PS3 stemmed from the fact that developers needed a lot of experience with it before managing to harness its true power.
Hilton concluded by saying that, now that they were a part of Crytek, things would be much easier thanks to the great tools at their disposal. “We know the PS3 can do amazing things, and no one has pushed it as far as it can go, but I think the CryEngine gives us a great head start on it,” he said.
There is certainly a lot of potential at Crytek UK, meaning that we might expect some good things from the studio in the future.