As it swaggered onto consoles in 2011, LA Noire did so on a red carpet laid down by Tinseltown itself. This was a game that wanted to be a movie star, with a glamorous cinematic ambition that held a mirror up to its Hollywood setting. Seven years in the making, Rockstar's detective drama was one of the most expensive games ever created, with investment enough to fund a modest movie, and with a cast of 400 actors, every nuance of whose performances were captured by 32 cameras via the same MotionScan technology used in Avatar and The Lord of the Rings. It was as close to a movie as any video game had ever come.
The pitch was LA Confidential meets Grand Theft Auto. 'Proper' actors were cast, many of them stars of Mad Men – most notably, Aaron Staton playing protagonist Cole Phelps. Actors' performances were integral to the game's interrogation mechanic: every one, no matter how small, designed to be relatable, believable, unbelievable, as only humans can be. This headline feature relies on the player being able to tell a liar from, to paraphrase Christopher Walken's chilling mafioso in True Romance, 'pantomimes' of unwitting facial movements and nervous ticks. In theory, so realistic are the faces in LA Noire that it should be possible to spot the difference between a fibbing toerag and an honest John just by observing the actor's performance. In reality, despite all the expensive MotionScan tech behind it, it was often impossible to tell a guilty smirk from a Mona Lisa smile.
Stick 'em up
The mo-scanned interrogations were its headline feature, but the crime scene investigations that form the basis of each case are the superior element. These moments of almost plodding police work are framed in an intelligently designed detective metagame that doesn't rely on supernatural senses or a Bat-cowl, but instead involves getting your hands dirty with tactile forensic examination. Phelps is directed around each crime scene by musical cues, woven into the soundtrack, to potential clues. Picking up an item and manipulating it wasn't entirely new, but was given greater significance than simply turning a box the right way up in order to open it and reveal its contents, as in the Resident Evil games. The camera zooms in on a significant detail as Phelps rotates an item, providing a real sense of discovery as you turn up a vital lead.
Conversely, each scene is filled with pointless incidental junk that has no bearing on the case, but the thoroughness of leaving no stone unturned adds a banal counterpoint to the revelatory police work. It's ironic that something so relatively rote works so much better than the experimental, expensive idea that was meant to be the wind beneath LA Noire's wings.
Clues found here form the basis of interrogations. Suspects' faces mug, squint, and sneer exaggeratedly. Stare at them for long enough, though, and it becomes harder to tell whether that look to the left is because they're guilty or they're just thinking about what's for tea. As over-the-top as some of them are – often hilariously so – the subtleties of those digitised performances are often lost, and further muddled by confusing options.
During development, the original Truth, Doubt and Lie options had been tested as Coax, Force and Accuse, and in the 2017 remaster these became the similar Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse, supposedly making them more context-appropriate. Bad Cop is certainly more apt than Doubt, since it is intended to aggressively uncover further lines of questioning.
However, it often seems overly harsh – especially when you have no real reason to doubt a suspect's answer. An accusation will fall flat if you don't have evidence to back it up, yet Good Cop can also confusingly be the correct choice amid a litany of brazen lies. A suspect may appear to squint nervously or bite their lip, but while this is meant to indicate they are not telling the whole truth, it doesn't exactly frame them for anything unlawful either.
Get any of your choices wrong – which is unfortunately often – and a downbeat musical motif plays while the camera cuts to Phelps' perplexed face. It's an unforgiving system that leaves you short-stacked for solving the case, making save-scumming tempting.
Theoretically, if you've managed to gather every clue and chase down every lead, your notebook will be a cornucopia of evidence guaranteed to have your perp rolling his eyes. And, after a good hour or more of playing a particular case, that final interrogation at police HQ should form a powerful denouement to Phelps' solid, unwavering detective grind. And it does – when it makes sense.
In one case, Phelps is chasing a serial killer and under our grilling, a hobo admits to being a murderer. Yet when we Accuse, and present the bloodied rope we found in his possession (a sure match for our victim's strangulation marks), we've somehow called it wrong. In service of the narrative, we've solved the case because the hobo is found guilty, but our own police work now seems flawed, our time spent on the case made moot. It tells us something that even the game's star struggled to make the right choices. Staton revealed that when he finally got to play the game he'd read 5,000 pages of a script for, he was at no advantage when it came to sweating a confession out of a suspect. "I was actually really terrible at the game," he told GQ in 2017. "I sat down with my wife and played it, and she said, 'I can't believe you're not better at this.'"
Wise Guy
For all that, LA Noire still perfectly captures the tone of a gritty noir detective drama thanks to its on-point script and those excellent crime scene investigations. Even the interrogation mechanic, for all its flaws, is a clever conceit that if nothing else succeeds in putting you directly into Phelps' wingtips and making you think like a real detective might. As a result, LA Noire feels quite unlike any game before or since.
Yet there are so many superfluous elements borrowed from other games that it feels as though the developer wasn't particularly confident in the game's identity. A painstaking reproduction of 1940s LA covers eight square miles – bigger than GTA 5's Liberty City. It's just populated enough to keep the illusion intact while you're driving through it, but it's almost entirely devoid of things to do, and most crimes and locations in the main story are within a few blocks of each other.
To give the developers the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was a deliberate way of keeping players immersed in the real grind of police work, designed to avoid drawing comparisons with the faster pace of GTA's vehicular mayhem. Aping GTA though, different models of car are available to drive (95 period-correct automobiles, in fact). A lovely detail, if a little pointless, since 'dispatch call' sidemissions can only be answered in police cars, while a luxurious licensed soundtrack of era-appropriate artists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee is drowned out when your siren's blaring.
There are collectibles, but these exist purely to reinforce the idea of LA Noire as an open-world game. It isn't, or at least it doesn't need to be, and these extraneous moments break the pace of the story.
In truth, it's a game that's simply big for the hell of it. But aside from pandering to 2011's expectations of video games, LA Noire felt a few years ahead of its time – or perhaps it's more accurate to say it was slightly at odds with its medium. The facial performances were exaggerated to signpost the way, and where movies intentionally play on the subjectivity of emotions, LA Noire's interrogation mechanic was too subtle (not to mention inaccurate) for players more used to glowing objectives and directional arrows.
LA Noire's troubled development saw a change of publisher after Sony dropped the project in 2005, citing costs far exceeding budget. Rockstar picked up the publishing rights, and the lengthy, ever more costly development process resumed. The relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar was strained, supposedly due to the latter's frustration with the Sydney studio's direction. It's hard to imagine what LA Noire would have looked like solely in the hands of the devs behind 2002 London gangster caper The Getaway, but undoubtedly Rockstar's huge influence, not to mention its cash, saved the project. By the end of its seven-year development, reports had surfaced regarding toxic working conditions at Team Bondi, and Rockstar was unequivocal about never again working with the team that could, in a different reality, have become Rockstar Sydney
As increasing graphic fidelity begins to offer more photorealism, LA Noire's interrogations could present a different proposition. Imagine what it might look like on next-gen consoles, or if the idea of using MotionScan and hundreds of actors had caught on. What if every NPC you meet was given that expressiveness, motivation and level of performance capture, stunningly rendered with next-gen visuals? We'd probably never even think about pointing a weapon at anyone again. And that's exactly the point: games and movies are never meant to be sympatico. Games need that separation from reality because they are intended to present an interactive fantasy.
Still, for the briefest moment only, the MotionScan performance capture provided a glimpse of a future in which videogames could be afforded the same level of artistic credibility as movies. One in which the two industries would tap-dance down Hollywood Boulevard together as games provided credible and lucrative work for actors of any stature, whose performances would be believably and realistically rendered.
The game even premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival to sold-out audiences, where writer and director Brendan McNamara said he hoped the game would be a "watershed moment", not least in terms of attracting a bigger audience to gaming. Indeed, the game's success suggested audiences' tastes could be sophisticated enough for a thoughtful, period-set detective game that might usher in a new age of gaming chic. Yet it spawned neither imitators nor a craze for detective games; nor did it lead to Robert De Niro lending his shrugs to a Godfather game or John Leguizamo getting motion-scanned for the next Luigi's Mansion.
Instead LA Noire remains a one-off curiosity, a lavish experiential experiment, and its star seems destined to fade like Norma Desmond's in classic Hollywood noir movie Sunset Boulevard; fondly remembered but from a bygone, almost golden age.
This L.A. Noire retrospective was first published in issue 349 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.
