f13.net

An upcoming game from Rockstar

The acting detail and level of motion capture they are using for this is unreal. I'm also really liking the setting.

[Gametrailers] Video of Motion Capture (http://www.gametrailers.com/video/developer-diary-l-a-noire/708505?type=flv)

I'll wait til it comes out on video..

waaaaiiitt a second.

Thats quite amazing!

Wow that looks cool. Too bad it's not going to be available on the PC.

That was my first thought.

Holy shit, that IS really good.

They managed to stay out of the uncanny valley in quite a few places.

I know, which impressed me a ton. The bit when they had just the actor and the head side-by-side really shows how good this stuff is.

The mouths are awesome.

Goddamn shame the bodies are still standard Rockstar assy mc ass ass.

My uncanny valley sense kicks in when I see the neck do awkward things when attached to a lifeless husk. Protip: Don't stare at the neck.

Ugh, the skin. Right in uncanny valley. The texture on the skin is just super waxy. Very good graphics and movement, but my god the skin texture.

Watching it again, that's what was bothering me in the head only shots.

The necks didn't really bother so much as the lack of shoulder movement at times.  The rest looks good and if I wasn't looking for strangeness, I probably wouldn't notice it while playing (except for the diner scene with the female character, that definitely felt off).

That actually does look pretty cool, but I have to agree with schild. The bodies are shitasticly animated.

I'm wondering how it is going to play as a game. Cops of the time could get away with a lot, but probably not GTA-level death counts.

Gameplay intro (GT) (http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gameplay-series-l-a-noire/710343). The action/clues combo and moving up the ranks of being a cop looks fun.

Reminds me of what Dick Tracy could have been.

I like the setting, and the mechanics seem interesting. The facial capture stuff is fantastic, even i the rest of the animation is pretty uncanny valley, especially by comparison.

Once I noticed the head and the body do not ... work right, I could not stop staring at it.  :ye_gods:

It's still pretty impressive, don't get me wrong, but eek!

I am now really stoked for this game. I was mildly interested before, but that gameplay trailer really hit the highlights. I love that setting. As long as the shooty bits aren't assy, this should be very good.

It looks like it'll be mirrored after Red Dead.

If it's mirrored after RDR, then the shooty bits will be sufficiently non-annoying (albeit auto-aim fire auto-aim fire) that I'm possibly even going to buy it, even if it doesn't come for the PC. That surprises me a bit, I have to admit.

This.

The only face/head tech I've seen that looks good outside the Mafia series.

Looks pretty good, but I can't help but think, how does this make for a better game. It's not exactly going to work for anything interactive.

What do you mean? If you mean the facial recognition stuff you should check out the video in the OP.

Wow, a reason to actually buy something on my 360.

I thought the point was that you would have to determine if the person you are talking to is lying based upon the cues in the facial animations.  In that case, isn't it important that they be very lifelike?

To me that just conjures the spectre of CD-ROM FMV adventure games of yore. Still, I'll buy the game because Rockstar quality storytelling is rare in videogames.

This thread has been stale for a while.....

Anyone picking this up tomorrow?  I definitely will be - I have been watching and reading nearly everything that comes out about it.  The game looks fantastic.  I really hope it is as good as it looks and the cases are challenging without being ridiculous.

My only concern is that there looks to be no replayability, since once you solve a case, you know who the villain is.  But since I rarely play games over, that is minor.

If this doesn't make it out for the pc within a year, I'll probably have to get a PS3. Fiancee's eyes got all wide and she looked at me excitedly...and I told her 'not for the pc'. Rockstar's been decent at 'console exclusives' coming out within a year for the pc (except Bully, which took forever), so I'm still hopeful. Looks awesome.

Yeah, I'm onboard.  Hoping it's more RDR than GTA4, knowing that it's neither.  Looks amazing and very atmospheric. 

Definitely picking this up.

This is next on the list after Witcher 2, provided reviews are favorable, which is likely. 

After the whole PSN thing you'd still go PS3 over Xbox? This isn't an exclusive.

I wouldn't hold your breath on this being ported. I think after GTA4 they've given up.

I'm in.  Gameplay looks more challenging than just watching for shifty eyes.  Driving around from mission to mission looks boring but there is an option to just warp to the destination.  The running chase scenes look straight out of an old movie.

Neat online feature uses "intuition points" to see what other players picked during an interview if you need help reading a perp.

Doesn't the PS3 version have some bonus content?

Reviews are pretty positive so far (http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/la-noire/critic-reviews).

Best Buy's doing a midnight release with a $10 gift card, I've got a $5 certificate, might as well.

That's kinda where I stand.  I thought about waiting a week or two to see how it plays out, but I'll probably end up buying it tomorrow.

I hope it's neither RDR nor GTA IV. Both have had more flaws positive things.

RDR is also an example where the ending retroactively destroys the whole enjoyment of the game by being basically a big "fuck you" to you. I also hope that LA Noir refrains from having NPCs call me constantly to try to get me to do stuff with them.

Personally I thought the ending redeemed the story quite a bit (I liked the story quite a bit, but it dragged in a lot of places like most R* games).

Completely agree.  I never once thought it could have ended any other way.  It ended perfectly, imo.  Mexico dragged a lot for me, though.  Too much time was spent being fucked over on missions for information, only to end up empty handed. 

I do hope Rockstar learned their lesson about the GTA phone for 5 though...

Picked this up at midnight last night and logged a few hours; it's fun but very unique. Most of the game is spent talking to people and searching for evidence, and there's relatively little combat; I'm not sure how the typical R* fan is going to like it but I'm having a blast. My only complaint is the driving controls/handling, but you can make your partner drive (fast travel) for everything except the chase scenes. I hope the facial scanning tech catches on; I'd love to see something like that in an RPG, or even a modern cop game.

I'm about 45min into it and I don't like how the game (spoiler just in case)


Otherwise, it's an amazingly beautiful game and it looks to be a lot of fun.  It is the closest to "playing a movie" that I've seen yet in games. 

On the fence about this. I love the style and the overall feel but watching a live-stream the actual gameplay seemed a little too simple and lacking. It doesn't seem like either investigation or interrogation is particularly involved. Will wait for more opinions.

Hawkbit, that's just a tutorial. You do a few missions as a beat cop just to learn the various mechanics (combat, driving, investigation, interrogation); once you get promoted to Traffic the proper cases start.

Interesting to hear.

As for your last comment, did you play Uncharted 2?

or Heavy Rain?

Basically I loved both of those games, and this looks pretty damn good so far.

Yah, this sounds like something I'd possibly really, really enjoy.  I'm pretty sure they'll still be selling it in a month, so I can wait a bit.

Yeah, after Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat both went on sale for half price 2 weeks after release, I'm very hesitant to pick up anything on release day right now (aside from Dark Souls and Mass Effect 3).

It was $10 off at Fry's today, so I figured "why not."

And I'm one of those dumb suckers who buys early for the pre-order bonus (stupid I know, especially if it'll all be in the DLC eventually)

This is me, with the added hilarity of having it on the PS3 so I can't even use my DLC codes.

I keep getting stuck in aim mode (ps3) while in combat.  Anyone else or is my controller shitting the bed?

Hasn't happened to me so I'm gonna go with your controller.

No news for two days.

Friends have commented the game isn't a real sandbox but on rails for them. You can just sprint around crime scenes till your controller vibrates and you search for clues at that point. Another gripe is you either fail or pass the interrogation with no impact on the story(it seems). This was up to and around traffic cases.

It's definitely on rails, not a traditional R* sandbox. If you fail the interrogations or don't find all the clues, you might not have the evidence to convict (or even discover) the right guy. Hell, there's even a case where the "good" choice is to charge someone who ISN'T the murderer because he's a complete scumbag. Basically, the story of each case (and your rating at the end) varies based on how well you do in the interviews/clue hunting.

So you cannot convict the wrong guy just a plain failed?

Yes you can convict the wrong guy, no it does not give you a "failed".

One of the reviews mentioned turning off the clue indicators.  Makes it a little more hunt and peck like an old adventure game, but might be more immersive.  ymmv.

Excellent!  :awesome_for_real:

Just like real life then.

The clue indicator you're talking about is just controller vibration, and it doesn't necessarily signify that something is a clue; it only tells you that you can interact with it to SEE if it's a clue. The only time you can see exactly where your clues are is when you use your intuition points.

This is playing havoc on the old OCD.  I can't leave an interview until I get all the correct answers so I have to quit the game and resume, go through all the (unskippable) dialogue, recollect the clues, reanswer all the right questions until/if I screw up a later one.  Then I have to rinse and repeat.

In some places if you run away far enough from the crime scene it auto saves so that helps but if you try that in other places it assumes the interview is over and fires up the next storyline scene...

I hate autosave is basically what I'm saying.  I also find the "revolutionary" facial technology creepy and awful looking.

Aside: I liked red dead redemption but by the end I was just playing it to finish the damn thing.  And seriously fuck whoever thought cougars that jumped out of nowhwere to one shot your horse and then one shot you as you're dazed on the ground was a good idea.

I don't suppose you could be confusing aim mode with the cover system?  You hit either r1 or l1 (I forget which) to take cover and then hit it again to leave.  If you mean you're just always aiming your gun and it doesn't go away when you release l2 then yeah maybe your controller is shot.

Edit: Oh, also:

The more I hear about this the more I feel like the negatives outweigh the positives for me. CSI sounds like a pixel-hunt if you turn off hints or just nothing if you leave them on, and interrogation sounds too trial-and-error.

I feel like a Heavy Rain approach might have been better. Instead of scoring cases and encouraging you to do perfectly just let the player fail or succeed and keep going, with whatever the result is changing the story.

I turned off clue indicators and am not pixel hunting like in adventure games. With indicators on I was just waltzing around waiting for rumble but with indicators off I am paying attention to the environment and only interacting with things that look fishy. If I miss some bullet casings, oh well! I know that OCD pixel hunting feeling but I left that back with said bullet casings.

Everything outside of clues/interviews is a snooze. Driving is as boring as I thought it would be so I'm fast traveling everywhere and avoiding all side-missions. Shooting/fighting is terrible and chases are so scripted it hurts.

Interviews are fun though. There's real tension trying to get the questions right based on what you've found and how the interviewee is acting. However, the Doubt interview option should be renamed to Lie Hunch; the first time I picked Doubt I expected to hear a subtle question but instead I heard something along the lines of "YOU LYING FOOL I WILL SHOOT YOU HERE AND NOW!"

Hopefully the cases get interesting enough to outweigh the repetition of travel --> clues --> interview. But even with all the negatives no QTEs puts this leagues above Heavy Rain.  :oh_i_see:

I've been playing this off and on with my girlfriend, taking turns doing cases. We were both raised on adventure games (Sierra for me, Lucasarts for her), so we were really looking forward to this. I have to say, I seem to be one of the few who isn't really digging the game at all. It's incredibly repetitive, the driving is godawful (after one "street crime" side-mission, we vowed to never do one ever again), and the (blessedly few) shooting sequences are among the worst I've ever seen in a game. I also tried so very hard to like the characters and writing. The characters just feel so soulless and stilted; the writing simply fails to grab me at all.

The main problem with the interview sections is that while you're meant to deduce what the correct answers to their responses are based on vocal tone, their facial expressions, and their posture, there are actually quite a few instances where the scripter's choice of "correct" answer does not readily match the POI's mannerisms, leaving you to simply guess what it is.

It's a pretty ambitious, interesting, and unique game, but the whole just does not outweigh the sum of its parts for me. I think it's a rental at best, or maybe at a very deep discount later on. I could not justify spending $60 on this, and I'm thankful my girlfriend didn't (store credit).

As a bonus, here's what a QA guy from 2k who worked with the game thought, from an IRC channel I talk in when I started mentioning my experiences with the game so far:


Seemed to match up with my experiences pretty well.

Basically if they are making any sort of eye movement you know it is either lie/doubt, then if you have evidence for the question you pick lie and hope you pick the right thing.  You would think lie would always have more facial clues than doubt but no, it doesn't.

I don't know if the game starts out like the GTA series where your first section of the city looks kind of crappy but I don't much care for how the city looks so far.  They also, for some reason, omitted the path finding function that all their other games have so if you are driving you constantly go to the options menu, choose map, hunt for your destination and then determine the best route.  After a few times of that you will just have your partner drive you everywhere...  I agree that the streetcrimes suck, sometimes they are incredibly far away too.

I still like the game but it could have been so very much better.  At least it's something different.

I agree that the driving is awful, but I hated it in the GTA games as well. The lie/doubt thing is also annoying, since I've even had times where I have the evidence for Lie but the correct response is Doubt. I've mostly been using the strategy guide for the conversations since I'm pretty bad at them, and I care more about the story than the challenge of guessing what shifty-eyes is supposed to mean this time.

Soooooo with everyone in agreement the stuff outside interviews is bad, and interviews can be confusing / repetitive / not good, how is this scoring so well in reviews???  I've given up looking outside of f13 for game impressions but these reviewers must be smoking money hats and I'm standing downwind.

a.) It's a game that's fairly unique and does something most gamers these current generations haven't really ever seen before, so the only real recent competition to maybe make a flawed comparison to is Heavy Rain. It's also something that people didn't really expect from Rockstar.
b.) It's from Rockstar. I don't think a single Rockstar game since GTAIII has scored under an 85 or so average. They're a company that gets good reviews pretty much by default.

It's not a terrible game by any stretch, and when they work, the interviews and some of the cases are extremely good. But the game has deep, deep flaws and damn near everything outside of the interviews is pretty bad. It's a pretty 70-75 game at best.

I applaud them for trying something new, but yeah, it doesn't entirely work.  They went sofar as to create a 1947 version of LA, but took out the life of it.  I'm not even sure what the point of being able to drive around is. 

I do think it is worth playing at some point to see what they did with Motion Cap, and how you can do NPC interaction, even with the flaws. 

I hope some form of DLC offers something else to do in the city.

It does have the path function but it doesn't *show* it to you, you have to ask your partner for directions while you're driving and he'll say things like "straight on thru", "take the second left" "next right" "turn left now" which interspersed with his screaming when you smash thru pedestrians and newspaper boxes really captures the experience and inefficiency of real driving (or I suppose you could obey the traffic laws but who does that?)

OK just got this and played the first missions. it's actually quite comforting that Rockstar's different studios never seem to learn anything at all from previous games.

I guess you could call it annoyingly consistent.

So let's see.

Broken, clumsy and annoying control scheme: Check (Half of the time while steering I activate the siren, that is if I don't crash into things first)
Vehicles and NPCs that handle like crap: Check
Spending most of your time driving or better bumping into other cars, pedestrians and walls: Check
Broken shooting and cover system: Check
A GUI and on screen design that makes everything unintelligible if watched from a common viewing distance for TV's: Check
Frustrating lack of save points: Check (No do overs, if you want to do anything differently you have to restart the whole mission)
Unskippable cut scenes: Check (which makes restarting missions even more fun)

This game has nearly every staple of frustrating "hurl your controller at your TV" kind of gameplay experience down, short of quick time events.

Having to restart THE WHOLE FUCKING MISSION, because I missed one clue made me ragequit the game.

Since your playing police now you aren't even allowed to run over pedestrians anymore. Which is kind of problematic because citizens of LA are every as much suicidal as the NPCs in every other Rockstar game. At least in GTA IV I can shoot somebody who cut's me off at an intersection.

LA also seems to be the city where every signal's red

I also don't seem to get what those groundbreaking facial expressions want to tell me. Most of the time it feels like a game of "guess the right answer" to me. It doesn't help that my character seems to bring out his inner douchebag every time I get an answer wrong.

How this thing got the rave reviews it did is completely beyond me. It could be a decent game. The facial expressions are quite good to make the characters believable even if they largely fail as a hint system and they have the feel of forties LA down. The first cases also seem to capture the flair of Dragnet or early noir movies even if it's mostly "where's Waldo" type clue hunting plus guessing the right answer (is it door one two or three? Let's make a deal!)

The minutes long driving from scene to scene and lack of save opportunities already get old however even though I'm only playing it for three hours. There's also very little to do in such a large city.

Did I misunderstand earlier posts? I thought it was possible to miss clues, perhaps convict the wrong person but still move on in the game?

Ya you can miss clues.  He may be referring to OCD tendencies to catch 'em all.  I've accepted that I won't get all the clues especially after I turned off rumble hints.  Turning off hints made the game less boring and hand-holdy.  I'd suggest trying it to everyone.


Do you mean the cut scenes that can happen between autosaves? I have failed a few missions due to controls and skipped the cut scenes after the load at my last autosave by jamming on one of the face buttons on the controller.  


Fast travel is a must!  When approaching your car, hold triangle (Y?) and make your partner drive to the selected destination. A loading screen awaits you. Which is better than the city. The only problem is without something to break up travel --> clues --> interview, the repetitive nature of the game can become more apparent.

That's not how I do it, mmmmkay?

Seriously, let me save and let me reload when I fuck up. Like Miasma I want to get it right, preferably without replaying the same shit over and over again 20 times in a row. Even though implementing real saves might hurt the sensibilities of some game designer who's afraid that I might not enjoy the game exactly as he had intended it.

Guessing the real answer from the tone and facial expression is impossible at least for me. I fully expect that if you plot the percentage of me being right the first time it will probably be around 40% (guessing with a few points of intuition thrown in). So probably exactly the expectancy value for just guessing.

Rockstar's developers need someone who smacks them over the head with a bat regularly. They should hire Ironwood for that purpose. Maybe he'll even call them cunts if they pay well enough.

Look the answers up online if it bothers you that much.

Really, when you're just guessing -- that's when it's time to use an intuition point.
What I hate is the ones where you don't know what part of their statement you're supposed to be responding to (or the few times when it's just someone telling you their intentions and yet you need to yell out you Liar!)

Good stuff - I was on the verge of buying this yesterday but held off. Looks like it's bargain-bin time for you, Noire!

Rockstar are the masters of gaming reviews/previews. Their PR is second to none. They do an excellent job of either inspiring or shaming reviewers into giving them great scores.

I do like that they are willing to make games in non-standard settings, something other than the typical space marine / army dude bullshit.

You don't usually hit the breaking point with a Rockstar game until deep into the second or third act.   Do actual reviewers play the entire game or just the first act and crib notes from a presser to fill out the rest?

It's possible they just liked the game and some of the people here don't.  At the very least, I'd say Brad Shoemaker from Giantbomb, and Ryan Scott (currently at GameSpy, formerly of CGW and GFW) are both people I trust to give an honest review, and their L.A. Noire reviews are pretty positive.

A lot of reviewers don't play the entire game.

I'm not claiming that Rockstar games all deserve lousy reviews or something, just that they have the process down. They are great at making their games seem important, at points they've outright told reviewers that their newest game is going to be a GOTY contender with great reviews so dissenters better get on board or look bad. They also do a good job of not showing too much of the game early, keeping both fans and eventual reviewers hyped. And their games have a lot of initial possibilities and promise that build goodwill early - and if you don't actually play through the entire game that initial promise is that much more powerful.

They position their games as awesome AAA event games that should be judged on an 8-10 scale.

Example:

Sorry - had to fix this.  :)

I've wondered if this deserves a separate thread, but articles pointing to how publishers are starting to really put the screws on game review sites (http://nohighscores.com/node/508) are pointing towards things getting worse when it comes to games journalism. If that were even possible in an industry where Jim Sterling is considered a wise old veteran.

Started this, since the Witcher 2 is completely failing to grab me. *Much* better. Seems like the main character is a bit of a douche though.

I put this on hold until PSN is back up.  Seems like I'd want to snag my preorders and any DLC before I charge into it. 

Nothing in that article (or the original one it links to) seems like anything particularly new or surprising.  GFW did a pretty good podcast on this sort of thing after the Gamespot/Gerstmann thing back in December '07 (following on the heels of another podcast they did back in November where Shawn Elliott talks about some shit he got from other sites and fans when he gave Crysis the "low" score of an 8 of 10).

You are right in that it isn't a new problem. I remember reading articles about similar issues at least back as far as my Amiga 500 days.

That the problem still exists is an issue, especially since concentration of publisher power only seems to be increasing. Especially if they are starting to turn the screws on reviewers who won't play ball with them.

That video game success is often so front loaded (i.e. early sales) mean that early reviews have disporportionate power. Plus every site wants those sweet Day 1 pageviews, making the ability to hold games back from them even more of an influencing factor.

This however is the reason why I usually buy games half a year or year after it's release.

Game reviews by most if not all gaming rags/sites are utterly useless nowadays. They just hype everything into a 85% to 90% experience. Either because they buy into the hype themselves, wish to appease the publishers which are also the ones paying for advertising or even worse wish to appease the rabid fanbase of a game that are pissed off if their newest overhyped saviour of a game doesn't get the 100% rating it "deserved".

I wrote about my experiences with LA Noire on a number of sites and most people acted as if I just hated on a picture of baby Jesus holding kittens. You should see the vitriol on a gaming site if a reviewer has the audacity to criticise a AAA game for *gasp* actually sucking. He/She'll get worse flack from the game's fanboys than the publishers.

So you basically cannot trust any review before the game has been out for a few weeks. You'll either get astroturfed by the publishers, tricked by the professional reviewers that have to rely on their paycheck either by the kindness of the publishers or their readers or you get 5 star reviews by the true believers in a game. No of the entities mentioned have finished the game by that point.

So it's usually buying used or GOTY editions of games. I can actually find real reviews of games after 6 months or a year, the most critical bugs have been fixed by that time and the game dropped from $70 to $30 so it's a lot less critical if you pay for a dud.

I picked this one up, not because of any reviews, but because I had an EB Games card lying around and jack to spend it on. I haven't finished it, nor do I think I am going to. It's one of those games that impressed the hell out of me at first, then I slowly came to hate it. If, for any reason, you have to restart a mission, you are in for one of the dullest experiences in gaming. I mean, you already know where the clues are, and what the witnesses have to say, yet you are doing it again. There was one part, where I fucked up interrogating a suspect, and when the police chief came on screen he started yelling, where my hand instantly shot to the off button of the XBox, lest the game save in the brief seconds. When I loaded up and realized where I was, and what I would have to do again, it was basically curtains for the game.

Also, just as a small pet peeve. Why does every Tom Dick and Harry witness in the entire city seem to lie or misdirect the police out of spite?

Does EB have a 7-day return policy in where-ever-you-live? Might be worth looking at.

Actually I found it really threw me off when I had to interview an honest person: but...but...I've got this notebook full of evidence that ... doesn't contradict that at all.
I'll get you next time...

I don't understand this obsession with getting the "right" conclusion in each case.  This is film Noir, right?  Shouldn't ambiguity and rare justice be a part of your play experience?  Why not just ride it out?

We're conditioned to only expect one 'right' ending in games, that failing a certain thing inside the narrative is the same as a mechanical Game Over. There was a really interesting post from Dave Gaider in relation to a spoilery thing from DA2 where they actually ended up taking out the 'happy' ending for one of the quests because the very fact that it existed meant people would continually reload until they got it rather than accept a 'bad' ending and move on.

Redcliffe's conclusion in DA:O made them suspect this was the case (as most people took the "everyone wins" ending, even though that was the least interesting), the DA2 instance showed it wasn't really a fluke.

Not that I find that a particularly odd compulsion for people, I'm sure we all have things we've done in real life that we would reload from an earlier save point and fix if we could.  :why_so_serious:

In a game about solving crimes, I'm not going to run around and fuck up at every turn and just accept that it makes my character a giant dope who has as much intuition, accumen, and gut instinct for the work as the guy playing the game. By all means you can play the game 'as is', but I don't really feel like turning my character into a washout who can't hack it.

Also, ever accidentally die in the tacked on action bits? Guess where that leads you?

It sort of depends on the game for me.  In an RPG I'll try to avoid the "everyone wins" solutions as much as I can once I know they're out there.  I suspect a game like this would trigger the opposite response like I get sometimes in Centerscore games where getting things "wrong" angers me greatly.

I guess it sort of depends if the failure is treated as evidence of your greater failure as a person or if the game takes it in stride as just something that happened.  If I remember from one of the reviews I saw, it mentions it quite clearly that "you could have done better" so I'd be all CAL SMASH pretty quickly over this game.

Edit: Clarity and... I guess along with my general dislike for Rockstar games I can safely ignore this one.  Sad, I might have enjoyed taking a spin around LA.

The main difference between this and Dragon Age is that in DA you had a choice between good, and bad, in terms of morality. In this, it's mostly between good and bad, in terms of competence. Not as cool.

The thing is, I want this game to succeed. I really do. I like it's style and what it's trying. I just don't think it's all it was cracked up to be.

Eh, the example of Dragon Age I'm specifically talking about isn't actually Good or Bad in terms of morality. Redcliffe, there are three ways to solve the problem, and none of them are really "bad," morally. You can make the case for all of them. But one spares people a lot of emotional pain AND solves the problem, the other two make more sense in the moment but only solve the problem, at what most people would call too high a cost. So people almost always pick the "winning" option.

That said, if you're screwing up every single case, reloading makes some sense, just because you'd start to wonder how your guy is keeping his job.  :why_so_serious:



I make myself not reload ever on my first time through an RPG where there might be "less than awesome" outcomes for problems, because I know in the future, once I know the "right" way to do it, I will always do it that way. I'm totally disappointed my first time through ME2, I "won" the ending, and now will never have a Less Ideal ending, because I totally can't bring myself to semi-fail on purpose. I have problems.

The difference between roleplayers and gamers. Games want to game the system, roleplayers are willing to accept the non-optimal path, because it's often more interesting and fun.

Also why there is such a clash in achiever-driven mmo.

The ambiguity and rare justice is forced. There are times you are presented with multiple suspects and have to decide which one to arrest but ultimately it doesn't matter. That was a huge let down since the story ends up being linear no matter your decisions or evidence.  I haven't fired the game up since the open story illusion was dashed.


Does the second half of the game open up with actual wrong arrests possible that affect the story?  All that's left is striving for perfect interviews which at times are confusing instead of challenging.

Every choice in every narrative game is forced.  It could be argued that LA Noir doesn't do a good job of capturing the atmosphere of Noir (and in many cases I'd agree) but to complain that you are forced into awkward decisions?  Such are video games.

I find as long as I don't sit around over analyzing the game design I'm enjoying the game. Hate the character animations or not, the visual design/detail of the game is pretty great. I am pretty terrible at the interview sections, but I'm actually kind of glad that repeating them would be such a tremendous pain in the ass, because it stops me from just reloading and trying for the 'perfect' thing every time.

I wish I could stand to play in B&W for longer, because then the game *really* looks right. It becomes a little too hard to keep track of some stuff that way though (follow the blue car!)

It's forced in that it has no point.  You are basically told to choose between an apple or orange so you choose one even though you smell pizza.  After your choice, you end up being given pizza anyway and your apple/orange is thrown away.  The choice didn't matter.  The decision doesn't affect the story which is what I was hoping I would get to do through super sleuthing.  It's similar to the QTE's in Heavy Rain that you could totally fail or pass perfectly and either way when the sequence ended you moved on the same.


LA Noire might have meaningful arrests that can actually go more than one way in the second half of the game and I'd like to hear about it if it does.

The point is to maintain the narrative.  This is a problem with ALL video games with a narrative.  They can only allow you freedom to the extent that it doesn't destroy the story that is trying to be told.  I'm not done Homicide, but it's pretty clear to me where it is going, and if I was able to make the decisions that I WANTED to on the previous cases, then the story would suffer for it.

After you beat homicide, click my spoiler and let me know what you think. I have no problem with linear gameplay to maintain a narrative but the sleuthing gameplay indicated branching points and I'm disappointed with the linear result. Could be a misread on my part / wrong expectations.

It's an adventure game, not a sandbox.

Super wordy Irish police chief guy is hilarious.

I think a lot of people expected a sandbox from Rockstar.

I'll still get this eventually, but this is probably bargin bin.

Well, it does have sandbox trappings but yeah, it isn't nearly as sandboxy as their others.

Yeah, he is pretty awesome.

I'm now at the Arson desk and I'm also at a point where the game is only boring me.

It's an adventure/it's a sandbox/it's a pony: I don't care. It doesn't work very well as either one of those.

As a sandbox there is simply not enough to do in LA. The city is completely devoid of anything and only serves as a backdrop for the cases without any purpose except to stretch the playing time due to all of the driving.

As an adventure the game isn't nearly as challenging and varied enough. You can ask questions and collect clues but there are only three real puzzles in the entire game and they are beginner level. The game is so linear that most of the time you cannot even select which destination to take first, there are no red herrings and most of the clues are only there to give you automatic hints on how to proceed next.

As an interactive novel the stories aren't written well enough. I've seen better executed storytelling in most of the current crop of TV procedurals than in this game and it cannot compete with the brilliance of an LA confidential or even a Heavy Rain in the storytelling department.

The first time the game lost me was at homicide  even going so far as to pull the real killer out of the hat like a rabbit in the end.

The second time was the way they demoted you to Arson.

Right now I don't see the point of the story. The killer was found and brought to justice, yet I'm still doing case work but I don't exactly know why the game is still going on. The character I'm playing, Cole Phelps, is a first class douchebag and after homicide and the 13th or 14th case running around collecting clues, driving and talking became rather tedious and boring.

The action sequences are frustrating because they are heavily scripted (most often than not you just chase the guys until the scripted scene ends and they either blow out a tire or run into a dead end) and the controls are clunky.  They even realized that it was frustrating by letting you skip those sequences if you failed them too often.

It's unpolished and unfinished and the only redeeming quality is the atmosphere, the characters and the novelty value all of which gets old after a while.

Bored to tears with this game.

If they were going to make a game this linear it would be nice if the story was interesting.

Luckily with my pre order credit and my trade in back to Amazon this game cost me a grand total of $6.24 and I'm still not sure it was worth it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EDYl2hSV-0

This shouldn't be nearly as hilarious as it is.

AHHHHWWWW



AHHHHWWWWW


:heart pounding:

Fucking roof.

Hehe that was good, Ragdoll Physics!

Ending spoiler complaints:

It sounds quite a bit like Mafia II in this regard.

I finished it on the weekend. I agree with you guys, you could tie in the end with the rest of the game easily if you tried but the way they did it it feels tacked on instead.

I now tried to five-star a few of the remaining missions for the achievement and I'm really enjoying the "you won't get five stars if you cause too much damage, run over too many people" mechanic combined with the "no save points" idea.

It's fun if you simply screw your five star rating with the final chase scene where you accidentally run over a pedestrian and correcting that mistake would mean to redo the whole case (and about two hours worth of game time because of unskippable cut scenes and dialogue).

I'm also really bothered that a lot of games now do the "This is a secret achievement, we won't tell you what you need to do in order to get it unless you accidentally stumble over it" schtick.

Rockstar is the publisher.  The developer is Team Bondi, which is a studio founded by the guy who was Director on the PS2 game The Getaway.

I'm a little over halfway through I think (just finished the first Vice case).  I've mostly only been playing in small doses.

To start with, I think the game could have used a better tutorial.  They needed to explain better from the start the difference between Doubt and Lie, as well as the fact that you can back out of a lie accusation if you realize that the statement you're trying to contradict (not always clear until you pick Lie and hear the dialog) doesn't correspond with any of your evidence, and what you're supposed to look for to tell if somebody is lying (they actually have the two main examples in the manual though).  Once I got all that down, it's been pretty rare for me to completely bungle questioning people.  Typically I'll maybe screw up on one question.  The few times when I completely botch something are typically my own fault, although there are a few instances where a person is just hard to read.  I'll restart if I just completely fuck up.  Yes, it's boring, and no, I'm never going to go back and try to 5 star all the cases.

The story is also somewhat weaker than I had hoped (it also feels a lot less Noir than I had hoped).  I'll echo what others have said about the Homicide section.  It continues on for 2-3 cases after most people will have figured out where it's going, and becomes a bit frustrating because of it.  Cole also feels like a bit of a dull character.  They try to build him up a bit with the war flashbacks every so often, but at the same time I was so disconnected to this character that I didn't even realize he had a wife and kids until he makes a remark about it to his partner in homicide a good chunk of the way into the game.  Maybe this gets mentioned earlier, I don't recall.  For me though, it was a pretty jarring reminder that they spend pretty much zero time exploring his life outside work (at least as far as I've gotten into the game).

The city itself is pretty well designed.  It's a shame that the extra stuff like finding cars and golden film reels don't actually do anything for you as that might have given incentive to explore it more.  I still haven't come across a single film can yet, not that I've really been looking, but my understanding is that pretty much the only reason to find them is for challenge of finding them.  Likewise, driving around in different cars is mostly pointless, even assuming you don't have your partner drive everywhere for you, since most cars don't have the police radio or siren.  Also, a lot of the cars look so similar, good luck trying to figure out which of the 95 different cars you haven't been in yet.

The game is essentially carried by the fact that it borrowed heavily from Phoenix Wright (minus the charm unfortunately), added on the facial animation stuff, and dropped it into an underused setting for video games.  The novelty in that might account for some of the love this game has gotten.  Conversely, I think what most people will find here is an ok game from an unproven developer, dressed up to look like a AAA game from the makers of GTA and RDR.  It has probably sold well, due to Rockstar slapping their name on it so prominently, but in the long run, I don't think it's up to their standards.

Hahaha that exact same thing happened to me.

The very first scene in the entire game is him leaving his house and his wife being there, but yeah you don't see any kids.

This is about the fairest assessment I've seen of the game.

Gimme back mah hat!

Edit: nevermind.

So, I finished this tonight. Game got the look and feel really down. Ending is a bit  :uhrr:, and the sandbox elements are awfully weak for people who want that sort of thing. I give it a rating of "fine", there was a fair amount to enjoy here, and I like that someone tried this type of game. If Steam existed for consoles though I'd say wait for a sale.

I loved RDR so much I figured I'd love this.  Once I put Noire down for a few days to wait on the PSN to come back up for the DLC, I never picked it back up.  Traded it in yesterday at Gamestop, who is running an extra 50% on stuff now.  Got $48 in trade for it, so that's not totally terrible.  $12 to find out I don't like a game, can't complain too much.

http://kotaku.com/5814824/la-noire-headed-to-the-computer

Self descriptive URL is self descriptive  :grin:

Can't believe they're porting this over RDR.

Companies aren't out of touch...

 :mob: :mob: :cthulu: :mob: :mob:

What's RDR?

Red Dead Revolver

:oh_i_see:

Redemption, not Revolver.

I suspect you may have fell into his sarchasm.

Possibly, but I was clarifying for Engels in any case.

At last they put a good Irish actor to play an Irish character in a game & not the usual drunken Leprechaun (Police Chief). The acting and dialogue are good and the facial expressions really work well. Does feel like an interactive movie but that's about all it has going for it so far.

As people have been saying the city feels a bit flat and dull, don't find myself wanting to explore like I did in RDR. The physics aren't great, oh hey I just bounced a two ton vehicle off the top of a wooden fence. I would have liked to have access to more/control of music while driving & why can't I choose what car to run a mission in? Free roam should be between every mission like GTA, not accessed from main menu. It lacks the spirit of RDR so difficult to overlook the flaws. Definitely not a 9/10, 7.5 would be right.

I do have to admit that with a likely steam release (and sale at some point), the fiancee does want to sit in on this, and that's rare. So I'll probably end up with it at some point. TV ads, working wonders on non-gamers who don't buy gift games.

I might do this on PC once it has a complete package with all the DLC cases.  On sale.  If I'm bored. 

Picked this up yesterday, Completely blown away! What an excellent refreshing title, quite a game changer. I hope to see more from this. Really enjoy seeing so many well known faces in it as well.

Stumbled upon this article about the stresses and personal/professional drama of LA Noire's development. Sad to hear.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/117/1179020p1.html

Team Bondi's studio head (McCarthy) seems like a real world class dick with the typical rock star ego bullshit that makes working in the games industry a continual kick in the balls. Fuck him in his tiny earhole.

You mean Brendan McNamara?

In Australia there are very few gaming projects and the industry maintains itself on work-for-hire projects. Or did, until the exchange rate helped make it less cost effective for US publishers. However, there are game design schools / courses that pump out eager young things who want to build games and the idea of working on a major title would sound fantastic to them. Grist for the mill for projects such as LA Noire.

The alternative is either indie game design and / or apps work.

It's a more limited dev market than the US, which allows poor working conditions to dominate because there is nowhere else to go if you want to stay in game design at a professional company.

When Team Bondi closes as a studio (or relocates, or whatever) they'll complain it was because there was a lack of government incentives (read: money) to offset the development costs, not the mismanagement claimed by Team Bondi staff.

That's the penis wrinkle in question.


He actually says as much in the article. What a colossal tool.

Heh, it makes GameSpot's very friendly recap of LA Noire's development take on a different light (http://au.gamespot.com/features/6320047/la-noire-final-thoughts/):



Also, Team Bondi is likely to shift regardless of LA Noire's sales because it the $AU / $US exchange rate makes another full title economically problematic.

I've read the article and I'm absolutely flabbergasted.

That guy has absofuckinglutely no clue whatsoever how to run a company. In any other company a 10% turnover rate would be considered to be a huge red flag yet they had turnover of hundreds of people most of which didn't even last 6 months and he doesn't even realize that this is a fucking disaster.

With that amount of turnover probably half of those seven years are just overhead, he basically burned tens of millions of dollars of Sony and Rockstar money on his incompetence.

Nearly 100% turnover.
"Informal" hierarchy (usually euphemism for 'no hierarchy at all').
Huge amounts of development overhead due to employee atrition
Eternal overtime and crunch time

and a Studio head with no trust in his leads who is a huge control freak

Sony or Rockstar shouldn't have cancelled the project they just should have fired his ass and hired somebody who is not a huge psycho and douchebag.

And yet he shipped a game that got good review, sold well and he made a pile of money.

And could very well change story telling in games.

Yeah, when Rockstar stepped in and basically rescued the whole project while spending insane numbers on promotion. I mean they even ran commercials for the game over here. We never get ANY commercials for games on national television except LA Noir

I'd like to see the revenue vs. capital invested numbers I assume that they basically need a huge success to offset all of the wasteful spending.

If it were a US based game studio he'd basically not been able to finish it because everybody would have walked out on him long ago.

He was lucky it turned out to be a successful game while basically doing everything wrong that you'd learn in management 101.

Also would the game have sold as well or even have reviewed as well if it was any other publisher except Rockstar that picked it up?

I couldn't finish. McNarma's responses were that bad.

Bloodworth, you're one of those art at any cost types, I guess?

Rockstar may have invested so much in the game in order to see the development of that face capturing tech and other things that may benefit their GTA games. LA Noire may have been a big R&D opportunity. McNarma kills the studio and becomes the bad guy, Rockstar gets the tech.

If he were at my company and he'd report that attrition numbers I'd report him in and if he offered me the kind of answers he did on this interview I'd fire his ass.

Not sure what you mean. My comments are about the finished product. I'm not personally invested in painting some guy one way or the other.

Given the choice, would YOU work for him based on the questions in that interview?

Nope. Not unless it was my only option. Some times you don't find out about a person till you work with them though.

Good thing he did that interview then isn't it?  :oh_i_see:

I enjoyed the game but it isn't changing anything except upping the creepy factor in animation.

Actual actors performances, and relying on the player behind the controls, not some arbitrary skill, is not likely to change story telling? Its leaps and bounds ahead of anything else in one of the most difficult areas to animate, and convey emotion in. The face.

I disagree. If the underlying tech is feasible to be used in other games, I foresee big things as it gets more refined. Could you imagine this tech being used in the next elder scrolls?

I think it might tighten or sharpen up story telling but I don't think it will fundamentally change it, no. And there's also a lot to be said against hyper-realistic rendering of people from both an uncanny valley standpoint and for some games from an artistic standpoint.

 
The tech requires a massive amount of memory, so much so that it was mentioned somewhere they were limited on how much non-facial animations they could do in the engine.

It also requires quite a lot of retraining.  On the other hand, Uncharted 1 and 2 used real actors, had good writers and good animators (who didn't have to be retrained) and did an amazing job (imho at least) at story telling, both in and out of cutscenes.

Yeah, Uncharted used a like system, but more of a Rotoscoping system. My point being, this is just the start for this kind of collection and display. Uncharted was using systems that have had years to develop, thats why by the time it was used, it translates so well.

Breaking the face problem is a huge step in conveying emotion, I am excited by the possibilities.

When I'll be impressed is when they can do it effectively with stylized characters rather than just the modern version of FMV.

I want to have to watch the ugliest 3d rendered faces on the planet and try to figure out if the character is lying or having a stroke? The Elder Scrolls games are not the ones to hold up as paragons of face tech.  :why_so_serious:

Thats not quite what I was getting at, lol. 

Be nice to see it in the next Mass Effect trilogy :)

But I thought the face tech from Mafia was going to push stuff forward but it didn't really catch on.

What he's getting at is that he wants story-driven heavily-scripted narrative "games" to be able to better portray the actors that are, what I assume, critical to the enjoyment of a story-driven heavily-scripted narrative "game".

With that laser-like focus on one small aspect of a game, I can see how it's extremely important that they spend incredible amounts of time and money delivering a better representation of an actor's emotions as that is what makes a good story-driven heavily-scripted narrative "game".

Frankly, I think good voice acting makes a lot more difference than plastic doll facial tic technology. Not that it isn't cool, but I don't think it's going to make as much difference for a LONG time.

Perhaps thats a better line to have said. Still, what I was trying to say was clear.

The problem with the facial capture technology is that it requires a lot of money to do - hire actors (in LA Noire's case, non-A-list but recognisable actors), have them do several takes, possibly come back in and do some re-takes if the script is changed. Plus then there is the time to do non-verbal expressions.

Even if the cost of the tech drops, it still will be out-of-budget for all but the largest of studios. Much cheaper just to animate some polygons than get an actor in to do the same thing.

Is it? Facial animation by hand can take a VERY long time depending on the complexity of the rig. Rerecording 1-5 minute snippets of dialog a few times VS. what may be days if not weeks of animation is a big difference.

We would have to see some real comparisons to know.

Mouth movement is auto-generated these days (since the source engine at least), but I honestly haven't noticed that much lack of bad facial animation.  Any facial animation lazyness can be hidden with decent camera tricks and staging your scenes well, and those things will give you a better sense of immersion anyways (imho)

Yeah, the output of audio to motion is not even on the same level.

I never said it was on the same level.  My point is if going to the same level is worth it due to opportunity costs, when there are other tricks that games (and movies) have used for ages to make it not matter.   For some specific games (LA Noire, Heavy Rain, etc..) having detailed and realistic facial animations will enhance the gameplay a lot, but for a lot of games (uncharted, elder scrolls series, etc..) having ultra-realistic facial animations don't add enough for it to be worth it if it's going to degrade the game and cutscenes in other areas.

Its a given it won't be for every project.

Ok I just completed the main story, this game has the best plot in a game yet, The Getaway was pretty damn good too. It also has a ton of major flaws, but at least the main story is kickass unlike a lot of other titles with Rockstar attached. Seems to be at a cost though, I wish the mission endings threw you straight into free roam like GTA games, it would give you an incentive to explore and do the collectibles which I won't be arsed to do now. You're not going to do this during missions cause it negatively effects your final score. The driving is similar to that seen in The Getaway (I thought this had the best car chase sequences of any game) which I would have classed as a step above GTA, but it isn't utilized enough throughout.

The layout of the city is awesome with trams and vintage cars and some slick background music, but things like not being able to crash through wooden fences ruin immersion. Also the oblique things random NPCs blurt out is a bit jarring at times, though some are quite humorous. All the characters are brilliantly played and the facial-tech really brings things to life, although you never really fall in love with the main character Phelps.  Basically a really great game marred by a litany of misdemeanours.

I don't see it as a revolutionary title but definitely a step in the right direction.

The facial animation tech will fully come into it's own next generation. In the meantime I'm sure a lot of it will now be rolled across the R* studios (f it hasn't already) and incorporated into their other titles. Maybe the GTA series characters will look a bit less assy in GTA V?

I'm not really sure what the detractors to the face tech are comparing it to. I found really well done, while there may have been times of breaking the illusion ( Necks and some movement mismatch ), thats dwarfed by the presentation and integration. Its really incredible stuff to look at, and more times than not its seamless to everything else, we have never seen this level of reality or expression in games before.

Basically, those saying its one of the worst things they have seen, I think you are a bit crazy.

You could contrast it to Deadly Premonition:

(http://images.mmorpg.com/images/galleries/formatted/272011/4addefbe-7c0c-4fe7-a342-1df17f6b35d4.jpg)

Not even close. Only similarity I see is the shader/lighting. The facial animations was not even close.

Whoa you can't contrast it using still images, it isn't the high graphical detail that we're talking here. It's the human-like fluidity of the expressions and realism of various nervous ticks that haven't been seen before.

I hope this isn't a BW.

Funny or Die does real life LA Noir (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXnGjrVFifQ)

That's epic.

Haven't played the game but that was great. They should do more like that.

Haven't played LA Noir either, but they've got the head turning from RDR down perfectly.

After selling over 4 million units of LA Noire on consoles, Team Bondi is shut down (http://www.smartcompany.com.au/intellectual-property/20110901-sydney-video-game-studio-team-bondi-in-administration.html). It has administrators basically selling off its assets now.

Brendan McNamara seems to have disappeared.

Some may think, "Well, Team Bondi treated its people badly, it deserved to close," but there are some other issues to consider:

1) In the last two years or so, Australia's lost a ton from its console games development industry. Krome, Pandemic, THQ Australia / Blue Tongue and now Team Bondi have all shut their doors. And LA Noire was one of the top selling games of the year.

2) Good luck for all those Team Bondi devs chasing credit on LA Noire. Now they need to deal directly with Rockstar and prove their case if they want that credit.

LA Noire is owned by Rockstar afaik, so that particular property isn't in danger.

Having seen and read the good news about this game, I would assume the sale price of $25 is well worth it for the PC version on Steam?

Depends whether or not you care that it's using gameshield, and requires activation.

You must be great at friend/family get togethers.

"Hey Tgr, I got you this awesome new PC game!"

"GET THAT SHIT AWAY FROM ME!  NO ONE MUST KNOW MY SECRET IDENTITY!"  :tinfoil:

Yeah, that's not even remotely close to what I was getting at, and that's an asshat response. :oh_i_see:

I'm not sure the game is worth 25 dollars.  It was worth a rental, and is easily beatable over a weekend, containing basically no replay value.  25 is pushing it.

Also, appearantly the copy protection used causes performance  issues with the game. Easily fixed with the crack though.

 

Yeah, it's all that secret identity stealing code they stick in there. :oh_i_see:

Team Bondi rides again. With Brendan McNamara back in charge. (http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/30/la-noire-teams-whore-of-the-orient-headed-next-gen-published/)

The next game is currently called "Whore of the Orient".

When are "next generation" consoles supposed to be coming out?  I haven't heard a whole lot about them yet and they usually try to get the hype train going years ahead of time.

Fuck him in his earhole. That cocksucker got parachuted out of a bad situation and left behind a game with shitloads of promise and shittons of bad execution.

Wii U is supposed to launch by the end of this year, I don't think the next Playstation and XBox consoles have been officially announced, but EA seems to think they'll be dropping in 2013. (http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ea-s-gibeau-on-next-generation-game-consoles-xka~2l8YT0qVJSJSgVwnjA.html)

My money is on an E3 2013 announcement, with a holiday 2014 release for the new Playstation and Xbox.

I can see a new Xbox increment, given the hardware and general profitability.  Sony, on the other hand, has a fuckton of work to do before they will get people to adopt a new console.

Fake-edit to say that Sony was singled out in a webinar I attended today regarding IBM's upcoming security thingy, PowerSC.  Specifically how they lost a ton of money due to being lazy with their security patches.