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LA Noire was the most important game to come to PS3. At least, that's how it felt when I first beheld it. I was already taken by the idea of a sleek detective murder mystery game before my brother showed me the disc box, and its "revolutionary new facial animation technology" sealed the deal.
At the time, it was. Interrogation scenes looked straight out of a film thanks to the MotionScan technology; a suspect's gaze might dart about shiftily if they were lying, or they'd make full, urgent eye contact if being honest. Others might suck their teeth or squint slightly if they were telling half-truths, which I recall being much trickier to spot, meaning the unexpectedly "aggressive" Doubt response was one of my favorites (until the 2017 re-release patched it out in favor of the more representational "Accuse").
15 years later, the painstaking toils of LA Noire's frame-by-frame animation of scanned-in human actors still impresses me. Watching clips back, suspects' supposedly "micro" expressions are much more obvious than I remember them being when I was 16. But if it weren't for LA Noire, would hyper-realism and motion-captured animation be the industry standard that it is today?
Optimistic, Cole
MotionScan was the video game equivalent of hand-drawn stop motion. Created specifically for LA Noire by Depth Analysis, developer Team Bondi's sister company, 32 HD cameras would record real-life actors' faces across a range of expressions and create full 3D likenesses. It served as the game's secret weapon from the start of its seven-year dev cycle, marking a bold new evolution in realistic facial animation.
Still, it was far from perfect. MotionScan could only be applied to the neck up, so the character models' bodies were animated separately. The sheer glut of data involved in the painstaking recording process also posed huge storage challenges. Our LA Noire review mentions how the Xbox 360 version had to be released on three discs, since the game's file size demands exceeded the eight-and-a-half gigabytes of a typical double-layer DVD. Meanwhile, unlucky PC players had to contend with six DVD-ROMs to install, while PS3 editions launched on a single Blu-Ray.
Oliver Bao, head of research and development for Depth Analysis at the time of LA Noire's 2011 release, shared in a YouTube interview with GameSpot that the system's total data collection stood at around a gigabyte per-second back in MotionScan's earlier days. The only solution was to "tune every single thing that we could to make it fit the data [storage] type that we had," according to Bao, which was more a necessity than a true fix. Only 21 hours of the 75 captured made it into the game, he confirmed, estimating that the total bank of archived footage amassed around 35TB in storage.
That alone makes MotionScan a labor-intensive prospect too expensive, time-consuming, and outright bloated to have earned mainstream traction with developers. But in many ways, I credit it for the widespread, sophisticated use of motion capture technologies in modern video games today. It made its case on the global stage – that incredible things are possible in the art of game development, and that hyper-realism was an achievable if fiddly goal.
Gumshoe blues
Whatever the game lacks in a serialized legacy, it makes up for in high-risk ambition.
Things were looking promising in the days leading up to LA Noire's May 2011 release. Depth Analysis had expressed interest in extending its partnership with Team Bondi, potentially working with other game developers in a support studio capacity. Depth Analysis seemed ready for whatever exciting future lay before it, with Bao commenting that the team knew there might be "better ways" to merge the realms of MotionScan and traditional animation if given the chance. "It's just a matter of a tradeoff between the cost and the time needed," he told GameSpot at the time.
Alas, it was not meant to be; Team Bondi's extreme crunch periods saw it shuttered in October 2011, a mere five months after launching LA Noire – its one and only title. Depth Analysis followed soon after, leaving MotionScan on the cutting room floor due to the system's financial and logistical demands proving untenable for developers to pick up. We never did get an LA Noire 2. As of 2026, publisher Rockstar still holds the rights to the IP.
It's a thoroughly miserable ending for such talented gamedevs. Yet somehow, a fittingly dramatic one. 15 years of graphical, technological, and creative leaps since the soapy detective yarn first rolled out the blood-red carpet, it's still the first game I think of when considering realism in video games. It feels like the Rockstar franchise that never was, despite all the promise it held at the turn of the 2010s.
But whatever the game lacks in a serialized legacy, it makes up for in high-risk ambition. Cole Phelps walked the streets of Los Angeles shouting at hospitalized children so that Astarion could run gleefully into Halsin's bear chest (not a typo). If you thought I'd get through this article without suggesting a Baldur's Gate 3 pipeline, I guess we were both wrong.
LA Noire is one of the best Rockstar games ever, but which of your other favorites make the cut?
