Official: LA Noire Thread PS3 & XBOX 360: Game Drops On 5/17: GOTY For 2011: DLC Info On Page 35

Originally Posted by EB4President

my brother is actually a character in this game, so i will def cop. He's been talking about it for a while now, hopefully it lives up to the hype
Click to expand...
eek.gif


What? We need more info?

What character is your brother in the game?

Surprised him & you don't have early access to the game.
 
This coming from a webmaster of a R* fan site that got a all expenses paid trip to LA from R* and early access to the full final build of the game:

Hands-On L.A. Noire:

I started playing L.A. Noire and first thing I would like to say is its nothing like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption and oh yeah its NOT Heavy Rain. The driving controls are kind of similar to Grand Theft Auto IV but walking/ running controls are totally different. If you guys are wondering if L.A. Noire cases are long; well yes they are long! You can't complete a case in 25 minutes, since you need to look for clues and if you are going to accuse someone you better have an evidence to prove it. I suck at this game, I couldn't tell if someone was lying or telling the truth. R* also told me the map is huge its 8 squares mile. In L.A. Noire you will never fail a case; it's just that you will have to spend more time on one case. I played through 11 cases and each case was about an hour long. I seriously can't wait for L.A. Noire to be released.
Since it was a private event I can't talk about the gameplay elements. Thank you Rockstar Games for inviting me to Los Angeles and giving me a chance to experience L.A. Noire before May 17.
Link:

http://rockstarhq.multipl...network.net/featured/60/
Click to expand...
 
This coming from a webmaster of a R* fan site that got a all expenses paid trip to LA from R* and early access to the full final build of the game:

Hands-On L.A. Noire:

I started playing L.A. Noire and first thing I would like to say is its nothing like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption and oh yeah its NOT Heavy Rain. The driving controls are kind of similar to Grand Theft Auto IV but walking/ running controls are totally different. If you guys are wondering if L.A. Noire cases are long; well yes they are long! You can't complete a case in 25 minutes, since you need to look for clues and if you are going to accuse someone you better have an evidence to prove it. I suck at this game, I couldn't tell if someone was lying or telling the truth. R* also told me the map is huge its 8 squares mile. In L.A. Noire you will never fail a case; it's just that you will have to spend more time on one case. I played through 11 cases and each case was about an hour long. I seriously can't wait for L.A. Noire to be released.
Since it was a private event I can't talk about the gameplay elements. Thank you Rockstar Games for inviting me to Los Angeles and giving me a chance to experience L.A. Noire before May 17.
Link:

http://rockstarhq.multipl...network.net/featured/60/
Click to expand...
 
[h1][/h1]
[h1]How the L.A. Noire makers re-created the city of 1947[/h1]

I'm on the city's surface streets, heading from downtown to Hollywood. Only a few cars share the road. I don't bother to pull onto the 101. Because it's not there.

No, this isn't 3 a.m., or the apocalypse. It's L.A. Noire, the latest interactive world from Rockstar Games.

In a dark suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, I'm test-driving this single-player detective thriller set in 1947 Los Angeles. Launching May 17, the graphic procedural takes place before Miranda rights and DNA testing. Before the city was slashed by 10-lane expressways. It's a chance — albeit digitally — to experience the city as most of us never have.

And after years of work, including months of research in L.A., Rockstar and Australia-based Team Bondi, who jointly developed L.A. Noire, are set to unveil a digital Los Angeles so dense and cinematic it was the first video game to be accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"Everyone's talking about it. I know architects and historians dying to get their hands on it," says Kim Cooper, a student of Los Angeles history and, with her husband Richard Schave, the proprietor of Esotouric, which offers noir-themed bus tours of Los Angeles and was asked by Rockstar to conduct a special tour for people brought in to Los Angeles to try out the game before its release.

Noir L.A. conjures a cast of characters ranging from Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe to Bugsy Siegel to Elizabeth Short ( a.k.a. the Black Dahlia). Cooper calls 1947 "a turnkey year, when Los Angeles gives way to the L.A. of today." She should know — Cooper and Nathan Marsak curate a blog called the 1947project, a painstaking assemblage of period news stories, then and now photos, and urban reportage.

The blog offers the type of detail Team Bondi used to re-create a three-dimensional L.A., a vice-ridden playground complex enough to hold 40 to 60 hours of gaming.

The standard for the production design was high. The game uses MotionScan, a new technology that captures an actor's smallest facial movements. "We had to have a truly immersive world," says Team Bondi production designer Simon Wood. "We didn't want these amazingly subtle faces in an environment that didn't match. We knew the game had to be a time machine."

Assembling an accurate virtual city became a massive scavenger hunt. Wood and his team started at the Huntington Library, digitally stitching together scanned Works Progress Administration maps from the 1930s to create a sprawling cityscape, with commercial and residential zones distinguished by color. They overlaid topographical information from the U.S. Geological Survey to delineate elevations.

After that, the team crossed town to raid UCLA's Spence Air Photos collection — an aerial history of L.A. inadvertently created by Robert Spence, hired by the city's rich to lean out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera and photograph their mansions. But Spence didn't just document upscale real estate: His 50 years in the sky captured the filming of Cecil B. DeMille's "Ben-Hur," the rise of downtown's skyscrapers and more. "It was better than satellite photography," Wood says. "Like the CIA, we analyzed hot spots. Where the quiet streets were. How many vehicles were on the road. The angle of the sun at different times of the day. Trolley car routes."

Wood, art director Chee Kin Chan and lead artist Ben Brudenell then donned white gloves to sort through UCLA's exhaustive news photo archive. "One photo of a diner tells you so much," Wood says. "What the men were wearing. How they served coffee. What the specials were that day. If the counter is 18 feet long, then you can estimate the dimensions of the diner. The cliché is a picture paints a thousand words. Well, we used 180,000 photos."

But can pixels capture that sharp cocktail of postwar malaise, German Expressionist influence, sexual anxiety and smog?

Cooper, Schave and Marsak mull over the question in a wood-paneled room at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Chandler himself played bridge.

The noir city wasn't just a metaphor. A fog of manufacturing chemicals and soot from incinerated trash choked downtown in a permanent cloud. Marsak recalls a story about a particularly toxic influx: "A group of Western Union secretaries went out to lunch one day. There was so much burning soot in the air, their nylons melted."

Wood chased that kind of authenticity with obsessive fervor. He and director Brendan McNamara talked to Los Angeles Police Department veterans about old interrogation techniques (leather gloves are involved). They assembled hundreds of period props at Sunset Studios and photographed them meticulously. They walked the 120,000 square feet of period clothing racks at Western Costume Co. to find the right hats and suits. "You can't imagine how tiny these clothes are. People were quite slight then. Rhett Butler's suit from 'Gone With the Wind' would fit a 15-year-old boy today."

Western Costume didn't have period firemen's clothing, so Team Bondi went to the source, the L.A. Fire Department's small museum. Wood tried on an old uniform: "It was unbelievably heavy. The inside was charred. The smell of fires from 50 years ago was still there."

In a few cases, Wood acknowledges, L.A. Noire takes some license. Most of the palm trees in L.A. are imported; in 1947, many of them stood about 3 feet tall. "But when Chee Kin put them in the game like that, they just looked ridiculous," Wood says. "So we made them taller. Sometimes you have to art direct past the reference."

Rockstar has stayed on top by breaking the rules. Before the success of Red Dead Redemption, the consensus was that gamers would never play a period western — the weapons weren't cool enough. But L.A. Noire is even more of an anomaly. Will it lure "Law & Order" junkies who've never spent $60 on a PlayStation game? Will younger players find the game's meditative pacing too slow? Will L.A. Noire come close to matching Grand Theft Auto IV's first five days gross of $500 million?

Wood feels there's an irresistible pull to 1947. "There's a real romance to the time, as well as incredible violence. Doctors told you to smoke. Everybody danced. There was a formality to things." The production designer confesses he unwinds by cruising his own (re-)creation: "I go to Pershing Square and watch the secretaries eating lunch. Or I just drive. It's so relaxing. And if you're in a bad mood, you can go find some murder cases."

Link:

http://www.latimes.com/en...20110424,0,2500813.story

Good article.

R* and Team Bondi putting in some serious time & effort into this game
pimp.gif
Click to expand...
 
[h1][/h1]
[h1]How the L.A. Noire makers re-created the city of 1947[/h1]

I'm on the city's surface streets, heading from downtown to Hollywood. Only a few cars share the road. I don't bother to pull onto the 101. Because it's not there.

No, this isn't 3 a.m., or the apocalypse. It's L.A. Noire, the latest interactive world from Rockstar Games.

In a dark suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, I'm test-driving this single-player detective thriller set in 1947 Los Angeles. Launching May 17, the graphic procedural takes place before Miranda rights and DNA testing. Before the city was slashed by 10-lane expressways. It's a chance — albeit digitally — to experience the city as most of us never have.

And after years of work, including months of research in L.A., Rockstar and Australia-based Team Bondi, who jointly developed L.A. Noire, are set to unveil a digital Los Angeles so dense and cinematic it was the first video game to be accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"Everyone's talking about it. I know architects and historians dying to get their hands on it," says Kim Cooper, a student of Los Angeles history and, with her husband Richard Schave, the proprietor of Esotouric, which offers noir-themed bus tours of Los Angeles and was asked by Rockstar to conduct a special tour for people brought in to Los Angeles to try out the game before its release.

Noir L.A. conjures a cast of characters ranging from Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe to Bugsy Siegel to Elizabeth Short ( a.k.a. the Black Dahlia). Cooper calls 1947 "a turnkey year, when Los Angeles gives way to the L.A. of today." She should know — Cooper and Nathan Marsak curate a blog called the 1947project, a painstaking assemblage of period news stories, then and now photos, and urban reportage.

The blog offers the type of detail Team Bondi used to re-create a three-dimensional L.A., a vice-ridden playground complex enough to hold 40 to 60 hours of gaming.

The standard for the production design was high. The game uses MotionScan, a new technology that captures an actor's smallest facial movements. "We had to have a truly immersive world," says Team Bondi production designer Simon Wood. "We didn't want these amazingly subtle faces in an environment that didn't match. We knew the game had to be a time machine."

Assembling an accurate virtual city became a massive scavenger hunt. Wood and his team started at the Huntington Library, digitally stitching together scanned Works Progress Administration maps from the 1930s to create a sprawling cityscape, with commercial and residential zones distinguished by color. They overlaid topographical information from the U.S. Geological Survey to delineate elevations.

After that, the team crossed town to raid UCLA's Spence Air Photos collection — an aerial history of L.A. inadvertently created by Robert Spence, hired by the city's rich to lean out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera and photograph their mansions. But Spence didn't just document upscale real estate: His 50 years in the sky captured the filming of Cecil B. DeMille's "Ben-Hur," the rise of downtown's skyscrapers and more. "It was better than satellite photography," Wood says. "Like the CIA, we analyzed hot spots. Where the quiet streets were. How many vehicles were on the road. The angle of the sun at different times of the day. Trolley car routes."

Wood, art director Chee Kin Chan and lead artist Ben Brudenell then donned white gloves to sort through UCLA's exhaustive news photo archive. "One photo of a diner tells you so much," Wood says. "What the men were wearing. How they served coffee. What the specials were that day. If the counter is 18 feet long, then you can estimate the dimensions of the diner. The cliché is a picture paints a thousand words. Well, we used 180,000 photos."

But can pixels capture that sharp cocktail of postwar malaise, German Expressionist influence, sexual anxiety and smog?

Cooper, Schave and Marsak mull over the question in a wood-paneled room at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Chandler himself played bridge.

The noir city wasn't just a metaphor. A fog of manufacturing chemicals and soot from incinerated trash choked downtown in a permanent cloud. Marsak recalls a story about a particularly toxic influx: "A group of Western Union secretaries went out to lunch one day. There was so much burning soot in the air, their nylons melted."

Wood chased that kind of authenticity with obsessive fervor. He and director Brendan McNamara talked to Los Angeles Police Department veterans about old interrogation techniques (leather gloves are involved). They assembled hundreds of period props at Sunset Studios and photographed them meticulously. They walked the 120,000 square feet of period clothing racks at Western Costume Co. to find the right hats and suits. "You can't imagine how tiny these clothes are. People were quite slight then. Rhett Butler's suit from 'Gone With the Wind' would fit a 15-year-old boy today."

Western Costume didn't have period firemen's clothing, so Team Bondi went to the source, the L.A. Fire Department's small museum. Wood tried on an old uniform: "It was unbelievably heavy. The inside was charred. The smell of fires from 50 years ago was still there."

In a few cases, Wood acknowledges, L.A. Noire takes some license. Most of the palm trees in L.A. are imported; in 1947, many of them stood about 3 feet tall. "But when Chee Kin put them in the game like that, they just looked ridiculous," Wood says. "So we made them taller. Sometimes you have to art direct past the reference."

Rockstar has stayed on top by breaking the rules. Before the success of Red Dead Redemption, the consensus was that gamers would never play a period western — the weapons weren't cool enough. But L.A. Noire is even more of an anomaly. Will it lure "Law & Order" junkies who've never spent $60 on a PlayStation game? Will younger players find the game's meditative pacing too slow? Will L.A. Noire come close to matching Grand Theft Auto IV's first five days gross of $500 million?

Wood feels there's an irresistible pull to 1947. "There's a real romance to the time, as well as incredible violence. Doctors told you to smoke. Everybody danced. There was a formality to things." The production designer confesses he unwinds by cruising his own (re-)creation: "I go to Pershing Square and watch the secretaries eating lunch. Or I just drive. It's so relaxing. And if you're in a bad mood, you can go find some murder cases."

Link:

http://www.latimes.com/en...20110424,0,2500813.story

Good article.

R* and Team Bondi putting in some serious time & effort into this game
pimp.gif
Click to expand...
 
Hideo Kojima’s most wanted game is L.A. Noire


Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid and head of Kojima Productions, has high hopes for Rockstar’s L.A. Noire. It’s his most anticipated game of the year.

“It seems that the Japanese release for L.A. Noire has been set for July 7, tanabata
Click to expand...
 
Hideo Kojima’s most wanted game is L.A. Noire


Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid and head of Kojima Productions, has high hopes for Rockstar’s L.A. Noire. It’s his most anticipated game of the year.

“It seems that the Japanese release for L.A. Noire has been set for July 7, tanabata
Click to expand...
 
[h1][/h1]
[h1]L.A. Noire plays in the shadows[/h1]
61045966.jpg


Aaron Staton is used to being in front of cameras. But it wasn't until the actor best known as ad account executive Ken Cosgrove on "Mad Men" starred in the video game L.A. Noire that he acted in front of 32 of them.

On a winter morning in a warehouse in Culver City that has been turned into a makeshift acting and game development studio, Staton was wrapping up his last day on the job. Sitting alone in a small room surrounded by the dozens of cameras and pupil-shrinking lights that eliminate any hint of a shadow, he worked his way through one gritty line after another — the type most people haven't heard since the days of, well, noir.

"A 15-year-old girl told me she was drugged and molested at a casting house with a mermaid out front," Staton growled. On the other side of a thin white wall, Brendan McNamara talked into a headset. "Make it a little more urgent," the game director said with his Australian accent. "This guy throws his rival off a roof."

By the next day, a bank of servers helped transform the performance into Det. Cole Phelps, an animated character who isn't so much based on Staton as possessed by him. Every dart of the eyes, tilt of the head and crinkle of the skin caught by those 32 cameras can be seen in the game, making for an eerily lifelike performance.

It's not uncommon for video games to feature professional actors doing voice work and even motion-captured movement. But McNamara was searching for something different in L.A. Noire: a video game in which players spend less time shooting people and more time interrogating them. "People hear about this game and they wonder what buttons they press, but it's not about that," McNamara explained. "It's doing what your brain has been doing for millions of years: Reading faces."

Seven years in the making, L.A. Noire (due out May 17) is the latest release from Rockstar Games, the company forever associated in most people's minds with its blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. However, the New York publisher has long struggled to find another series that could stand behind it, with titles such as Bully and Manhunt falling well short. Rockstar finally hit the jackpot in 2010 with Red Dead Redemption, which sold 8 million units and swept industry awards.

It also revived the western at a time when it was virtually dead not only in video games but the larger pop culture. The company has mined different angles of the crime drama with its GTA sequels and is now looking to do the same with noire. "This is a very risky game, but it's also consistent with what they are known for," said Adam Sessler, co-host of the video game news show "X-Play" on cable network G4. "There's no other game developer with Rockstar's interest in mining American mythologies."

L.A. Noire shares traits with GTA and Red Dead such as a huge, open world — in this case 8 square miles of 1947 Los Angeles, from downtown to Hollywood, faithfully re-created with the help of a cadre of historians. But it stands out from most big-budget games for one simple reason: It's not a shooter or a fantasy role-playing game or any of the other industry-standard genres on which publishers are typically comfortable spending tens of millions of dollars. Action, in fact, is minimal, and there's no online multi-player, a de rigueur feature for most big-budget games nowadays.

Making a game centered on investigation is inherently a chancy proposition. Players raised on a diet of fast-paced shooting and epic action sequences might struggle to stay interested with the more methodical tasks of investigation and interrogation, no matter how stylish the backdrop is. With the exception of sports simulations and a few long-lasting and well-known brands such as Super Mario and the Sims, hit games in the U.S. not centered on shooting, stabbing or stomping are rare. Other games that emphasize style over action, like last year's murder mystery, Heavy Rain, have been modest sellers.

"This is a very bold move in that most people won't really be able to understand what it is until they play it," said Andy McNamara, editor in chief of the gamer magazine Game Informer (and no relation to the game director). "I don't think it could have gotten made at any other company."

But Rockstar, about to kick off a significant marketing campaign for its latest creation, believes L.A. Noire can be a hit among an audience much broader than the typical young male gamers. They're going after people who watch police procedurals like "Law & Order" and "CSI." "I think it's going to appeal to a very broad audience that is familiar with this type of thing in television or movies but never before in interactive entertainment," said Jeronimo Barerra, vice president of product development for Rockstar.

And Brendan McNamara said that if nothing else, he's confident L.A. Noire takes his chosen art form in a much needed direction. "If the future of games is only about body count," he said, "then it's not a very interesting future."

Going on a hunch

McNamara and his core team of developers previously worked on Sony's racing video game series the Getaway. In 2004 they formed their own studio in Sydney, Australia, called Team Bondi and set to work on L.A. Noire. As a fan of Humphrey Bogart films, the books of Raymond Chandler and the man he calls "Mr. Ellroy," McNamara thought the then-in-development PlayStation 3 could for the first time create the genre's foreboding shadows in a video game.

Developing the story and setting was the easy part: In 1947 Los Angeles, a World War II-veteran-turned-police-detective is haunted by his actions at the Battle of Okinawa while he investigates crimes based on infamous real events, most notably the Black Dahlia murder. From music to lighting to case names like "the silk stocking murder" and "the red lipstick murder," L.A. Noire was designed from the start to embody its title.

The problem was what the gameplay would be. McNamara knew he wanted to center it on interrogations but wasn't sure how to translate that into something compelling for the player. Verbal sparring was too technically complex, and letting players beat the truth out of suspects resulted in almost comical barrages of smacking.

At the same time, however, McNamara had begun working with researcher Oliver Bao, who was developing a system called MotionScan to more accurately capture facial movements. Starting with two cameras in a shed, Bao's dream was to re-create every nuance of the human face in digital form without the help of an animator. "I wanted to make a 3-D scanner out of cameras that could capture every little twitch," Bao explained.

McNamara's intention had been to use Bao's technology for the narrative scenes in between the action. But he eventually realized that lifelike facial performances could be at the heart of it — players would analyze suspects' facial tics and attempt to determine who's telling the truth, who's lying and where to take the investigation as a result.

"The first half of developing this game was basically stick figures and texts," recalled Barerra. "When the heads started coming on-line, it was a 'Hallelujah!' moment."

Those heads were portrayed by Australian stand-ins until late 2009, when video production began in Los Angeles. More than 400 actors performed in the game, first by acting out their characters' movements on a stage and then in the Culver City offices of Depth Analysis, where Bao is head of research.

It has taken more than a year of on-and off work to make it through a script that weighs in at a staggering 2,200 pages because of the multiple paths each investigation can take. The game features 20 cases as Phelps works his way through the Los Angeles Police Department's traffic, robbery, arson and homicide desks, investigating crimes. In one, a boxer goes missing after winning a fixed fight he was supposed to lose. In another a young woman comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom and ends up raped and nearly dead.

To the last detail

On Day 82, according to a call sheet taped to the studio's white walls, Staton was one of several actors wearing orange T-shirts who were going through hair and makeup before sitting in the blindingly bright room with the expensive cameras. Bao was proud to show off his technology but also paranoid about letting strangers get close. The last time someone accidentally tapped one of the cameras, he explains, it took nearly four hours to recalibrate the system.

Reading a teleprompter and staring at a mini-"Mona Lisa" as his eye line, the 33-year-old Staton rattled off lines like the experienced video game pro he has become, though McNamara occasionally had to remind him to stop blocking his face with his hands. Speaking later on a bench outside, he acknowledged it has been a bizarre process as an actor and not at all what he expected when, in November 2009, he was offered a part in a game code-named "Hard Boiled."

"With a television show or a movie, you have an idea of how it's going to look because you were there," he said. "In this, you feel very removed because the physical process was separate from the line reading. I have no idea how it will look when it all comes together."

McNamara has a pretty good idea after all the time he and his colleagues have put into the game. The question is how many consumers will be as fascinated as he in the underbelly L.A. in the late 1940s. "The detective story has always been great in literaure; it's always been great in films," he said."We're asking: 'Why hasn't it worked in video games?'"
Link:

http://www.latimes.com/en...20110424,0,3035403.story

Long but very good read about the game.
Click to expand...
 
[h1][/h1]
[h1]L.A. Noire plays in the shadows[/h1]
61045966.jpg


Aaron Staton is used to being in front of cameras. But it wasn't until the actor best known as ad account executive Ken Cosgrove on "Mad Men" starred in the video game L.A. Noire that he acted in front of 32 of them.

On a winter morning in a warehouse in Culver City that has been turned into a makeshift acting and game development studio, Staton was wrapping up his last day on the job. Sitting alone in a small room surrounded by the dozens of cameras and pupil-shrinking lights that eliminate any hint of a shadow, he worked his way through one gritty line after another — the type most people haven't heard since the days of, well, noir.

"A 15-year-old girl told me she was drugged and molested at a casting house with a mermaid out front," Staton growled. On the other side of a thin white wall, Brendan McNamara talked into a headset. "Make it a little more urgent," the game director said with his Australian accent. "This guy throws his rival off a roof."

By the next day, a bank of servers helped transform the performance into Det. Cole Phelps, an animated character who isn't so much based on Staton as possessed by him. Every dart of the eyes, tilt of the head and crinkle of the skin caught by those 32 cameras can be seen in the game, making for an eerily lifelike performance.

It's not uncommon for video games to feature professional actors doing voice work and even motion-captured movement. But McNamara was searching for something different in L.A. Noire: a video game in which players spend less time shooting people and more time interrogating them. "People hear about this game and they wonder what buttons they press, but it's not about that," McNamara explained. "It's doing what your brain has been doing for millions of years: Reading faces."

Seven years in the making, L.A. Noire (due out May 17) is the latest release from Rockstar Games, the company forever associated in most people's minds with its blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. However, the New York publisher has long struggled to find another series that could stand behind it, with titles such as Bully and Manhunt falling well short. Rockstar finally hit the jackpot in 2010 with Red Dead Redemption, which sold 8 million units and swept industry awards.

It also revived the western at a time when it was virtually dead not only in video games but the larger pop culture. The company has mined different angles of the crime drama with its GTA sequels and is now looking to do the same with noire. "This is a very risky game, but it's also consistent with what they are known for," said Adam Sessler, co-host of the video game news show "X-Play" on cable network G4. "There's no other game developer with Rockstar's interest in mining American mythologies."

L.A. Noire shares traits with GTA and Red Dead such as a huge, open world — in this case 8 square miles of 1947 Los Angeles, from downtown to Hollywood, faithfully re-created with the help of a cadre of historians. But it stands out from most big-budget games for one simple reason: It's not a shooter or a fantasy role-playing game or any of the other industry-standard genres on which publishers are typically comfortable spending tens of millions of dollars. Action, in fact, is minimal, and there's no online multi-player, a de rigueur feature for most big-budget games nowadays.

Making a game centered on investigation is inherently a chancy proposition. Players raised on a diet of fast-paced shooting and epic action sequences might struggle to stay interested with the more methodical tasks of investigation and interrogation, no matter how stylish the backdrop is. With the exception of sports simulations and a few long-lasting and well-known brands such as Super Mario and the Sims, hit games in the U.S. not centered on shooting, stabbing or stomping are rare. Other games that emphasize style over action, like last year's murder mystery, Heavy Rain, have been modest sellers.

"This is a very bold move in that most people won't really be able to understand what it is until they play it," said Andy McNamara, editor in chief of the gamer magazine Game Informer (and no relation to the game director). "I don't think it could have gotten made at any other company."

But Rockstar, about to kick off a significant marketing campaign for its latest creation, believes L.A. Noire can be a hit among an audience much broader than the typical young male gamers. They're going after people who watch police procedurals like "Law & Order" and "CSI." "I think it's going to appeal to a very broad audience that is familiar with this type of thing in television or movies but never before in interactive entertainment," said Jeronimo Barerra, vice president of product development for Rockstar.

And Brendan McNamara said that if nothing else, he's confident L.A. Noire takes his chosen art form in a much needed direction. "If the future of games is only about body count," he said, "then it's not a very interesting future."

Going on a hunch

McNamara and his core team of developers previously worked on Sony's racing video game series the Getaway. In 2004 they formed their own studio in Sydney, Australia, called Team Bondi and set to work on L.A. Noire. As a fan of Humphrey Bogart films, the books of Raymond Chandler and the man he calls "Mr. Ellroy," McNamara thought the then-in-development PlayStation 3 could for the first time create the genre's foreboding shadows in a video game.

Developing the story and setting was the easy part: In 1947 Los Angeles, a World War II-veteran-turned-police-detective is haunted by his actions at the Battle of Okinawa while he investigates crimes based on infamous real events, most notably the Black Dahlia murder. From music to lighting to case names like "the silk stocking murder" and "the red lipstick murder," L.A. Noire was designed from the start to embody its title.

The problem was what the gameplay would be. McNamara knew he wanted to center it on interrogations but wasn't sure how to translate that into something compelling for the player. Verbal sparring was too technically complex, and letting players beat the truth out of suspects resulted in almost comical barrages of smacking.

At the same time, however, McNamara had begun working with researcher Oliver Bao, who was developing a system called MotionScan to more accurately capture facial movements. Starting with two cameras in a shed, Bao's dream was to re-create every nuance of the human face in digital form without the help of an animator. "I wanted to make a 3-D scanner out of cameras that could capture every little twitch," Bao explained.

McNamara's intention had been to use Bao's technology for the narrative scenes in between the action. But he eventually realized that lifelike facial performances could be at the heart of it — players would analyze suspects' facial tics and attempt to determine who's telling the truth, who's lying and where to take the investigation as a result.

"The first half of developing this game was basically stick figures and texts," recalled Barerra. "When the heads started coming on-line, it was a 'Hallelujah!' moment."

Those heads were portrayed by Australian stand-ins until late 2009, when video production began in Los Angeles. More than 400 actors performed in the game, first by acting out their characters' movements on a stage and then in the Culver City offices of Depth Analysis, where Bao is head of research.

It has taken more than a year of on-and off work to make it through a script that weighs in at a staggering 2,200 pages because of the multiple paths each investigation can take. The game features 20 cases as Phelps works his way through the Los Angeles Police Department's traffic, robbery, arson and homicide desks, investigating crimes. In one, a boxer goes missing after winning a fixed fight he was supposed to lose. In another a young woman comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom and ends up raped and nearly dead.

To the last detail

On Day 82, according to a call sheet taped to the studio's white walls, Staton was one of several actors wearing orange T-shirts who were going through hair and makeup before sitting in the blindingly bright room with the expensive cameras. Bao was proud to show off his technology but also paranoid about letting strangers get close. The last time someone accidentally tapped one of the cameras, he explains, it took nearly four hours to recalibrate the system.

Reading a teleprompter and staring at a mini-"Mona Lisa" as his eye line, the 33-year-old Staton rattled off lines like the experienced video game pro he has become, though McNamara occasionally had to remind him to stop blocking his face with his hands. Speaking later on a bench outside, he acknowledged it has been a bizarre process as an actor and not at all what he expected when, in November 2009, he was offered a part in a game code-named "Hard Boiled."

"With a television show or a movie, you have an idea of how it's going to look because you were there," he said. "In this, you feel very removed because the physical process was separate from the line reading. I have no idea how it will look when it all comes together."

McNamara has a pretty good idea after all the time he and his colleagues have put into the game. The question is how many consumers will be as fascinated as he in the underbelly L.A. in the late 1940s. "The detective story has always been great in literaure; it's always been great in films," he said."We're asking: 'Why hasn't it worked in video games?'"
Link:

http://www.latimes.com/en...20110424,0,3035403.story

Long but very good read about the game.
Click to expand...
 
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