Arriving at the crime scene after a briefing from the Captain, Phelps and his partner find the coroner already checking the body and a number of evidence markers dotted around the area. After a brief cutscene, you are let free to roam the crime scene. Music will play slightly in the background as you walk around, investigating the corpse perhaps, or checking evidence markers or suspicious-looking marks on the ground.
As you approach a potential piece of evidence – there are red herrings scattered around as well – you’ll feel a slight rumble in the controller and hear a piano note and once you’ve found all the evidence in the area the music will fade out to let you know you’re all done here.
Remember how, earlier on, I said that L.A. Noire was relatively linear? Well there’s a surprising amount of work going on behind the scenes to make that happen and avoid backtracking, even if you miss a vital clue. For example, in this scene, I could’ve missed a clue that led me to a particular location. However, the game will then either generate another clue at another location to lead you in that direction, or a character will mention something connected during an interview that again leads you to that clue. A similar system works at the crime scenes themselves. If the game determines that you’re missing a vital clue, you’ll see police around the area putting down more evidence markers near items you probably need to check out, or perhaps your partner, the coroner, or someone else will call you over to look at something.
It’s remarkably fluid, and doesn’t take you out of the game if you miss something crucial – at the end of each case you are given a form of completion grade based on how well you investigated locations, how successful your interviews were and so on. You can go back at any point and replay a case from the main menu.
[drop]Searching the crime scene, Cole and Galloway find a name and address for the victim and head to search her home and interview the landlady. Investigating the apartment itself is similar to the crime scene but it’s in the interviews where L.A. Noire and MotionScan really shines.Rather than a dialogue system, similar to one you might find in Mass Effect, interrogations in L.A. Noire are based on your ability to read the interviewee’s face and body language. Of course, having the characters actually acted out and captured into the game via MotionScan gives you a lot more of a realistic performance but you’ll know roughly what to look for: nervous ticks and breaking eye contact are two of the biggest giveaways.
You are given three options when a character finishes what they say, you can choose to believe what they’re saying, subtly suggest that they might not be telling the whole picture (if you don’t have the evidence to back your hunch up), or straight-out accuse them of lying, at which point you’ll have to choose which bit of the evidence you’ve noted before proves them wrong. However, fear not, choosing the wrong option doesn’t mean game over. You might not manage to quite cross every potential suspect or miss some evidence but you’ll just be making your job tougher later on – it’s remarkably hard to actually fail a case.
The evidence gathered from the interview suggests that the victim and her husband were having a bit of a rough period, making him the prime suspect. From here, you might get a couple of potential locations to investigate, for example a bar and the victim’s husband’s home.
Whilst sometimes when there’s only one destination the game might fade straight to it, in this situation you decide where to head off to and then jump into a car – it’s up to you whether you want to drive or let your partner take over while you enjoy the drive and the conversation. Arriving at the husband’s home, Galloway bursts through the door and Cole finds himself thrown into a fistfight. The Rockstar rep told me that these moments of fast-paced action are usually short but sweet, breaking up the slower parts of the cases. Fighting itself is pretty simple: a button held to defend yourself, a button pressed to punch or counter. In not too long, the husband and his brother have been taken down and backup comes to arrest them.
The more successful you are in a case’s various events (finding all the clues at a crime scene, picking the correct options during an interview, for example), the more “insight” you’ll gain – L.A. Noire’s version of experience. As you rank up you’ll gain rewards, like shiny new suits, and “Intuition Points”. These points are akin to lifelines: you can only hold up to five at any time but they can help you out when you get stuck. You can spend these to temporarily reveal all clues dotted around a crime scene, or to eliminate one of the options during an interrogation.
The game won’t punish you for choosing to use the Intuition Points, and equally you can completely ignore the whole system if you so wish – it’s entirely a matter of how you want to play the game. I don’t want to ruin any more of the plot of The Silk Stocking Murder but a couple more interviews and a brief car chase through the streets of Los Angeles later and the resolution of the case leaves more questions unanswered for Phelps than before.
An incriminating piece of evidence is just found simply lying around and it is unclear whether the killer wanted to be found or if, in fact, the man the police have arrested is being framed for the attack. Equally, the personal connection between the arrested and the killed makes it seem more like a one-off crime, not the latest in a string of violent murders attributed to the Black Dahlia.
While each case is concluded in an episodic manner, strands from them run into other cases (which vary in length between about an hour and three, adding up to a total of about twenty-five to thirty hours without exploration, I was told) from the same desk and vice versa – a television show’s episode-series format is a good metaphor.
It’s clear from my time with the game that L.A. Noire is something very different and very new. Without MotionScan, it could easily have been the sort of shoot-and-drive cop game that we’ve seen many a time before. The addition of more intricate performances, allowing tasks like the interrogations, means there’s a lot more of a slower-paced and reasoned game to be found here. That’s not to say there’s not plenty going on; I saw plot strands specific to this individual case, some that run through the whole desk (like those related to the Black Dahlia) and even some that I’m told hint at the game’s wider ranging plot. L.A. Noire has been a long time coming but the attention to detail and the way the world moulds around the player’s decisions is remarkable.
This is definitely one to watch out for.
L.A. Noire is being developed by Team Bondi in collaboration with Rockstar Games, and will be released on 20th May for PS3 and Xbox 360. You can read our full coverage of the game here.
hannes_truce
May wanna check your release date… :-P
moshi
You beat me to it, it is right at the end of the Article though.
toutski
Looks epic. Can not wait.
dizappear
hope its not as long winded as Heavy Rain
JoshHood
Never thought I’d see the day people were complaining about a game being too long.
skibadee
hope its very long.
JoshHood
That’s what she said.
acridweasel
So who has their facts wrong, TSA or Rockstar?
The Black Dahlia was the nickname of Elizabeth Short, the victim who was found cut in half.
Forgivable if it’s Josh’s mistake, no bother.
But if Rockstar are calling the killer The Black Dahlia, that’s a pretty glaring oversight.
Still cannot wait for this though.
colossalblue
isn’t the killer commonly referred to as “The Black Dahlia Killer” though? I’m sure I saw Discovery Network programs about the mystery years ago that talked about the Black Dahlia as the killer, not just the victim.
JoshHood
In my time with the game, Rockstar referred to the murders that tie together the homicide desk as “The Black Dahlia Killer”, but it also appears in-game as “Black Dahlia” or “B.D.” as on the corpse found in The Silk Stocking Murder.
Also, quick note, whilst it’s a collaboration with Rockstar, it’s Team Bondi developing, not Rockstar themselves.
acridweasel
Perhaps now it has become the ‘Black Dahlia’ case/incident/whatever, but my understanding is that the press dubbed her The Black Dahlia.
So without the intervening 60 years to obscure the original origin of the name, I would have thought that it would be strange for either the real killer or a copycat to be identifying themselves as The Black Dahlia.
I expect if you had mentioned the name in the latter part of the 1940s, people would have associated it with the victim, rather than the case or the killer.
Obviously the full context of ‘B.D.’ in the game is not yet known so it may just be obfuscation.
Either way, I have not found myself invested so much in a game’s plot since Heavy Rain (hopefully there will not be so many holes in Noire’s…).
bully1990
A really good preview, I can’t wait for this game to come out. But I suppose I’ll have to!
OneShotWook
Good amount of info there but dare i ask was this the Ps3 or 360 version you had access to,if both how were the comparisons?
JoshHood
I played the the PS3 version the entire time. I was told by the Rockstar rep I was with that the game is identical across both consoles.
I didn’t want to talk too much in the hands-on about the technical side of things because by now the build I played must be about two months old, but there were no noticeable issues with pop-in, graphics, or anything like that.
OneShotWook
Great stuff thank you Josh.
Gotta admit as an old school DMA fan i’m more than a little envious of your trip to the studio,hope you bagged some freebies:).
JoshHood
Sadly not, but it was enough to be there. I totally nerded out.
BIGAL-1992
Can. Not. Wait.
skibadee
same as you mate.
DrNate86
This is looking fantastic, though I’m not sure I like how much help you get. I would prefer it to be like Heavy Rain, in that if you fuck up your investigation, you don’t find the killer at the end. As each episode is only short it wouldn’t be dooming your whole game if you missed something important at the beginning, just that small episode.
Crazy_Del
I’m with DrNate86 on this one. It would be awesome to finding clues and listening carefully to the characters. That will pull me in than any games.
LycanGav
Agreed, the level of help and tips that seems to have encountered is a little worrying, I’m really not keen on the way that most games this generation seem determined to hold your hand and ensure you have every chance to recover from a mistake. The game becomes less and less about skill and more about simply interacting with a movie-esque experience.
moshi
I shall be avoiding all help/hints, maybe there will be a option to turn it off.
JoshHood
You can turn off things like the rumble and noise at crime scenes, and of course you can still miss a clue when it reappears again. For example, in The Silk Stocking Murder, there’s a bar that opens up as a location if you ask the right question during an interrogation or by finding a particular piece of evidence at another scene. However, it’s entirely possible for you to miss both of those and not even go to that location, it just gives you less to go on later on.
LycanGav
Thanks for the reply, great to know the option is there to tone down the hand holding for those of us who expect games to have a certain level of challenge to them.
bunimomike
Same here, fella. Rare we see a title handled so deliberately, at the correct pace (read: not churned out for hyperactive children) and it sounds utterly fascinating for it. Count me in.
Bilbo_bobbins
not for me this, I just can’t get excited by it. Didn’t like Heavy Rain and Rockstar just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
acridweasel
Out of interest, can you put your finger on your issue with Heavy Rain?
The game mechanic? The (admittedly occasionally terrible) voice acting? The plot?
While quite similar in some respects, I see these as wildly different experiences. Aside from the techinical problems suffered by Heavy Rain, I’m always curious about what people do/don’t like about it.
Also, as Josh pointed out, this isn’t a Rockstar-developed game so it may be enough of a departure from their usual fare.
Foxhound_Solid
Will be getting this, just not a day one.
Manhunt 3 would be a day one, but this, when its around the £15/20 mark.
JoshHood
You’ll be waiting a long while then – GTAIV is still that in most stores.
Phil_E
Its good how they’ve just come out and said that the preorder bonuses will be sold later. No need to worry about where you’re buying it from :)
JoshHood
Yeah, I was really happy about that as well :D