One review I read made what I thought was a great point about that: the open world nature of the game prevented the location box/invisible wall system from being used, which is something that frustrates me in every game I encounter it. Certainly portraying L.A. Noire as an open-world game shouldn’t have been a focus of the marketing, although coming from Rockstar I don’t know how that doesn’t happen.
I feel like the invisible wall thing was in full force with the search for evidence. Any normal investigation would turn up a plethora of stuff unrelated; the journal in the game automatically filters that out. Both the investigations and the interrogations were on rails, so it was odd that the world was open. If anything, in my opinion, the openness of the world emphasizes the linear nature of the game because it is so obvious that there was nothing there to do other than the story. That’s not an ‘open’ world, it’s an ‘empty’ world.
It’s sort of like if you went to a concert at a large venue and there were only 3 fans there. The absence of a crowd says as much about the performers as anything. Same performance in your living room, where you aren’t expecting a crowd, and you’ll focus on the music instead and not think once of the poor attendance.
It was more than just that for me. It was the way the game indicates that one of the two false choices is still more correct than the other, by a large margin. Say you’ve done well in the case up to the choice; If you choose Rooney or Ryan, you’ll get a good score and your boss praises you to high heaven. If you choose Moller or Varley, you’ll get three stars at most and your boss will have a screaming fit, even if you’ve discovered all the evidence that should make prosecution a breeze. I think this problem shows an attitude in LAN’s design that seriously bothered me throughout the entire game. You might not run into a Game Over by making incorrect decisions, but LAN will always, always let you know when you go off it’s internal script, even if it doesn’t make any difference in the end.
Take the conversations, for example. After every conversation, you’re presented with a clear score that tells you how many questions you got “right”. Should you get any wrong, the implication is that you missed out on things due to your subpar reading. However, some correct answers simply don’t reward you with anything. So why are two possible answers even considered “wrong” in such a case? There’s no particular reason, but LAN is still sure to let you know if you fail to interpret the game’s intention correctly.
Heavy Rain insisted that there was no correct way to play through the game. If you let all the protagonists die, you’d simply created a tragedy. For all the other issues with HR, this made me play with a more relaxed attitude, and I was ready to roll with the consequences of any mistakes. LAN’s constant scoring, on the other hand, left me feeling resentful every time I slipped up and wishing there was a less restrictive save system.
Your rating reflects the politics of the 1947 LAPD and the world at large. It isn’t so much about the publicity, it’s about enacting what your superiors thought would be proper choice. The rating isn’t just given by success with the game mechanics, it’s also reflective of how you are rated by your superiors in solving the case. Politics has something to say about the perception of your performance. In both cases, your bosses want the less socially-desirable person put away, the pedophile in the one (who practically begs to be charged or killed by his statements) and the anarchist in the other. In a similar vein the Communist in the White Shoe murder case is the one whom the bosses want charged. You can go a different path and buck the system but expect to pay the departmental cost.
In my game I charged Varney in the Gas Man and Rooney in the Golden Butterfly, as they both seemed the most guilty to me. I 5-starred the Golden Butterfly and 3-starred the Gas Man, despite having equal stats for both.
I had the exact opposite reaction to HR. Because people could die, I spent way too long analyzing and saving rather than guessing and playing. In LA Noire, you can do better or worse but still end up solving the case and muddling through. The game rewards you for what it considers the right response to the questions with an easier path to solving the case, while wrong answers make it more difficult. You might have to do an action scene challenge like a chase rather than getting a clue in dialogue, or have less evidence to challenge witnesses’ lies if you don’t get all the clues, making a “conviction” harder to achieve. L.A. Noire’s style is actually much more forgiving than HR but it seems the feedback system is such that people feel missing the answers is much worse than the game reflects.
I don’t have much to add, other then I really enjoyed the game and the story. Much like the original Assassin’s Creed (which I also really enjoyed), I look forward to where they can take this engine/style in future games.
As others mentioned, I didn’t much like shifting perspectives in the last chapter of the game - I think I would have preferred starting to switch back and forth earlier in the game. At the point where you switch to Kelso, I had so much invested in Cole that it really rubbed me the wrong way, and made it difficult to like his character.
I didn’t find a single record in my first play through, and I there were a couple cases I did spectactularly bad on (the two cases where you have to choose the suspect to charge), so I’ve got some achievement whoring to do. From what I can see online the DLC announced has you playing as Cole still, so I look forward to going back through that.
Regarding the sympathy-towards-the-Japanese comment that Phelps makes…
The game pretty much builds Phelps into an over-principled douche who gets everything about the war wrong and ends up hurting a lot of people in the process. His comment that is sympathetic towards the Japanese stands in stark contrast to the fact that he orders scores of innocent Japanese civilians burned alive. I don’t have a problem with his sympathetic comment at all – in fact, I think its misguidedness builds his character in the exact same direction and manner as the other poor decisions and ignorant comments that he makes during the war.
I finished the game last night and can’t disagree that it’s a bad game but a great story. I’m not even sure the cases count as a game. That said I would play any DLC since I liked the case work and could ignore the puppet master pulling my strings. Kelso was a much more likable person at the end and I expected him and Cole to form a partnership. So it goes.
Finished. First, it held my attention till the end, which is something a lot of games don’t, so that does count for a lot. I’m in overall agreement with Tom’s camp, only not as fervently. I.e., I didn’t hate the game elements, didn’t love the story–but there were definitely moments when I started swinging close to either extreme.
Missed a few cutscene newspapers, but don’t feel a need to slog through gameplay to find them. Only elected to skip a sequence once, in the tar pit maze, and that mostly by impatience and trying to find shortcuts that rationally I knew weren’t there; the entire structure of that last Homicide desk case had me wanting to slap the people responsible for it, from the pixelbitching round and round the map to match up landmarks to the repeated mazes and the scripted nonsense. I think the “highlight” with heavy sarcasm quotes of that for me was where you had to run about on a narrow platform to balance till your partner could “figure out a way to get you down.” Then after a minute or so of him figuring, he has the brainflash that, hey Phelps, you should let it get close to the other side and then jump! And that after I had to redo that bit because that’s what I tried to do myself immediately, but no, Partner John Standinmyway had to tell you to do it first. Just…I mean…for fuck’s sake. Like I said–flashes of getting near the “hate” end!
I didn’t mind the X-mashing factor of evidence searches inside rooms so much. One thing I did get near to hate again on was the times where you had to search inside ledgers and logbooks and such. Slooowly scroll forefinger. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Listen, Rockstar, I know for a fact that’s a pretty important name to notice. Why is it doing nothing? Taptaptap. Slight shift of finger. Taptaptap. For fuck’s sake. Slight shift of finger. Taptaptap. Sudden shocked exclamation from Phelps, “Whatshisnuts?!”
Actually, I understand the hate end of the axis more and more the further I remember all the bits along those lines. If I’d been pushing harder instead of just a case or two after the first night, I’d be right there with it.
On the other end of the scale, again, it kept my attention all the way to the end. Frequently the gameplay irritated me mostly by delaying the next unfolding neat bit of the movie. And I really appreciated that Phelps wasn’t a hypercompetent who gets a happy ending for no real reason; I love that a few bad people ended up dead but the system kept right on rolling.
Overall, I would happily describe it as the game Heavy Rain wanted to be but didn’t have the writing chops to pull off. Right down to having an Origammy Killer!
While I can’t help but agree with most of the flaws pointed out already in this thread, I think this without a doubt was the best experience I’ve had this year with a game. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the closest thing to my sort of “ideal” experience since The Last Express. I was a big fan of point-and-click adventures growing up so perhaps that’s why I can put up with very flawed or limited gameplay, so long as the story and characters work for me.
So I finished this, and it’s an increasingly rare achievement that a reasonably lengthy game holds my attention. I really enjoyed the story much more than the shooty/drivey bits (which are notably parts of the open world Rockstar experience that I usually dislike). Both the writing and mo-cap/facial animations were high water marks, and the research/period detail on display were also excellent.
I won’t be collecting anything else, and I probably won’t replay the game again since the actual gameplay wasn’t interesting enough (which is what YouTube is for, right?) but I enjoyed the overall experience and I hope the unavoidable sequels will fix the things that need fixing (really, just fill the world with more content beyond the cases… the side missions stopped being awful for two seconds when they featured callbacks and characters from the cases, but were otherwise skippable).
I enjoyed this game, but I’m really disappointed that I never got to be a detective. I felt like a beat cop, an interrogator and a crime scene investigator, but I never felt like an actual, bonafide gumshoe.
The detective stuff is just painfully easy and holds your hand at every intersection. It’s as deep as a kid’s paddling pool, too - it’s far too easy to simply float along, following the paper trail and moving from location to location without taking the case in. You’d only need to do your homework, and skim through the evidence, before grilling a suspect.
A couple of years ago, I played Wadjet Eye’s micro point and click The Shivah. In that game you really got to feel like a detective - had to write down clues (like, physically with a pen and paper), use a search engine to investigate people of interest and actually pay attention to the clues and evidence or you’d get stuck.
It’s relatively simple, but it felt like a brilliant proof-of-concept - evidence that you could create a game about being a detective without making it impossibly difficult or too open for interpretation.
I dreamed that one day I’d play a big-budget, triple A take on the game. In fact - I wanted the concept expanded even further.
While you have to search out names and events yourself, locations would be automatically added to your map. I wish I could jot down an important address, and then take a subway or cab to check it out. Wadjet Eye hardly has the time or budget to render an entire New York city, though.
Rockstar, of course, does. Has done many times. When I played Shivah, I thought that one day a developer would go all the way. I imagined how I’d find a matchbook at a crimescene, and then write down the address. Then I’d pull out the map from the game’s box (when did Rockstar games stop coming with city maps? I miss those) and figure out where I need to drive or which subway to take.
Instead, LA Noire’s city o’ angels is a cardboard cut-out that serves as filler to pad out the crimescenes and suspects and different locations.
By making Phelps declare your next move at every turn, and by automatically writing every clue and every location and every person in your notebook, and by making “investigating” as hard as pressing X on a telephone, Noire just doesn’t work as a detective game.
I was really hoping that Noire would be that big budget, gorgeous 3D detective game with proper clues and investigations that I’ve been hoping for. Instead, it’s a game where you float around a crime scene until the music stops, shout at an old lady and then shoot like 12 guys.
So, I started reading this thread thinking, Hey, I already hate this game, and I just put in the second disc. Who cares about spoilers?
“So I pretty much hate LA Noire as a game.”
Nod, nod. Yeah, OK, I’m with you.
“…But I love it as a story”
Record scratch, brakes screeching, cars crashing
Wiggity-wiggity-whaaat??
Is the story really worth suffering through 10-15 more hours of this mess?
Well, that’s between you and the value of your time. But I would say, ultimately, that it isn’t worth the 20 hours. Go watch Chinatown and read a couple of Chandler novels.
-Tom
He actually drops a board across a gap - which is what you jump on to. Still not a great sequence (and why they take you back to that movie set again, when there are areas that are left more or less unexplored - Union Station which is huge, detailed, and you only go there if you let once chase sequence go to long - I do not know)
Interesting comments in this thread. I just got finished with the game, so here’s some of my thoughts:
- Early on, I decided that L.A. Noire wasn’t a crime simulation so much as it was a crime fiction simulation. Each desk is a season, each case an episode, with an over-riding story arc tying stuff together at the end. (The Joss Whedon model, in other words.) It’s a subtle difference, but I think it helped me get into the rhythm of the game a bit. So let’s say early on in a case, I’m going to a location without any real sense of urgency, and I get a call to stop a street crime. I take it, because maybe this episode ran a little short and the producers decided to shoehorn in an action scene.
This shift makes the action scenes make more sense, too, at least for me. Some car chases have to end with a dude getting t-boned by a trolley car because that’s good television!
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Much like Red Dead, I liked the actual game parts of L.A. Noire just fine, and clearly a lot more than Tom did. There’s a weird mix in L.A. Noire between gameplay, which feels at times very old-school adventurey, and that insane facial mo-cap technology that made the interrogation elements of the game super fun. I also really liked that you had to pay attention to details, and really think about the connections between the answers a perp gave and your evidence on hand. I made another decision early on to not replay a case if it went bad, and I loved that the game rolls with that.
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I hope that shifting between protagonists isn’t a new Rockstar cliche. I thought it worked well here, given the obvious L.A. Confidential vibe, and I thought it was brilliant in Red Dead, but I hope it doesn’t get used as a narrative crutch.
Finished the story a little earlier, and I feel mostly positive about the whole thing. I agree with most folks who enjoyed the overall story and characters – those were really what kept me driving forward. I cared about Cole and his fall from grace and struggle for redemption. I liked Kelso, who had slightly less patience and brains than Cole, but bulled his way through investigations in the manner of a Hammett hero.
But I don’t care much for the manner in which Cole falls out of favor. Maybe my modern morality is too much with me, but I have a hard time believing that the force would turn its back on a guy just for cheating on his wife. And I really don’t get the deal Roy makes, how in the world is a star detective cheating on his wife going to draw focus away from a corrupt vice squad that’s taking a cut of a prostitution ring’s profits? Those don’t seem like equal crimes, nor equal in interest to the press.
I too liked Cole’s losing it with Roy when Courtney’s body is discovered, that seemed very fitting. But even more than that, I loved the choice to have Cole’s eulogy being delivered by Roy, the guy who sold him up the river. To see him stand above the casket and call Roy a great detective and friend was really twisting the knife. Very noir.
But I haven’t talked about the game much! Though that seems fitting. It helped to read reviews before I played that led me to expect an adventure game. It’s way more of that genre than anything else, open world and occasional gunplay notwithstanding. Unfortunately the open world seemed more like a sterile funhouse, in the way Mafia 2’s felt. I prefer it to the option (i.e., not having an open world) but I didn’t like it nearly as much as GTA’s or Red Dead Redemption’s worlds. Just not much going on.
I do hope the sequel, and I’m assuming this game did well enough to earn one, will let us continue to play Kelso’s private dick in the manner of Jake Gittes. I’d keep coming back for that.
That didn’t bother me, really. We still see politicians and actors brought low by sex scandals, and Cole is having an affair with a German woman shortly after the war. There are plenty of examples of important events being subjugated by prurient ones. I may have mistaken this, because you don’t see him much, but isn’t it the Chief of Police that’s looking for a scapegoat? If so, he could definitely encourage Cole’s disfavour to spread down the chain of command, which would be why the rank and file care.
I finished it, but can’t say I liked it overall. The story doesn’t really start until you get to Vice, at which point I’d got tired of the limited gameplay. In particular the Homicide desk is just interminable, giving you six pretty much identical cases, after the third of which you can be certain that the game is forcing you to arrest the wrong men. Apparently there were two desks cut from the game - thank god. A shot at Internal Affairs, say, might allow the story to develop the LAPD as corrupt a bit more, but I don’t think I could have played any more cases.
It’s a shame, as this would have been a really great ten hour game. Barring a few slips (I groaned aloud in the last case when Kelso literally says “Cole Phelps is one of the best detectives this city has ever had”, despite the six or seven wrong arrests, sex scandal and, in my case, the most car accidents of any human being ever), the writing is mostly quite good. I’m really interested in seeing where this performance capturing technology goes, too - again the game opens weakly with the awful Dr. Fontaine, but a number of the performances are nice. Limited by the incredibly broad “I’m lying, so I’m going to shift my eyes back and forth as if watching a tennis match, cross my arms and start a small fire in my trousers” stuff, but the actual acting impressed me. I’d love to see something like it in the Witcher 2.
I did love being the LAPD’s worst driver, though. The world is so static and lifeless, like still frames you’ve somehow been allowed to inhabit, that driving through it like a drunk madman, smashing into cars and taking a terrible revenge on the city’s lampposts never ceased to make me giggle. I’d definitely be interested in a sequel, assuming it did well enough to deserve one but not so well that they don’t dare make any changes.
Ross, your mention of bad driving reminds me of a laugh-out-loud moment I had playing the game. I was zipping along at high speed, like I do, passing a car on the left when a car turned into traffic and ran into me head on. This resulted in both our cars being completely trashed, engine blocks on fire, all that. But Cole just exclaims, ‘Not a care in the world!’
The Dept intentionally tried to get rid of Phelps so that he would not be able to expose their corruption. And I don’t think it anachronistic that an affair would be so disastrous for Phelps. This is right after the war, and the supposed hero is committing adultery with a German junkie. It’s not like people at the time thought well of Germans or junkies, and adultery was even illegal at the time.
Unlike many here, I thought this game was great. I thought the interview mechanic was awesome, and very different from anything I had ever played. I also thought searching for clues was interesting, and really liked that you could make it harder if you wanted by turning off the sensory hints.
I also liked the driving. GTA IV won me over when I was tooling around the city and Les Savy Fav came on the radio. LA Noire won me over when I was driving to a case and Hank Williams came on the radio. While I preferred the feel of cars in GTA IV, I thought the cars in LA Noire felt fine. Not great, but good enough. But I really like travel in games (I was sad when Tom said he camped so much in RDR, rather than taking a horse) so it is not so surprising that I like it here.
Dr. Fontaine was a fun villain. Overacted, sure, but man he could be skin-crawlingly creepy sometimes.
I did love the interrogation when he served as a lawyer-surrogate. I wish they had more of that back and forth, of the interrogator pulling Jedi mind tricks on the hapless perp (as seen in this “documentary” shot a few decades later) sometimes versus an attorney shutting down lines of questioning without evidence. Sure, it’s '47, fifteen years before Gideon, and apparently before the Fifth and Sixth Constitutional Amendments, but I would have appreciated a few more mix-ups in the interrogation room. On the other hand, I guess Team Bondi couldn’t win, because those suspects were giving me way too much lip. “Prove that I’m lying.” Hey, buddy, in this room you’re guilty until proven innocent.
Other thoughts:
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There was a line of dialogue revealing that shipping was the Phelps family business. No doubt they shipped across the Pacific with a certain aggressive Asiatic nation. No wonder Phelps was so sanguine about Pearl Harbor, a military base in an American non-state.
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1947 was also apparently before they invented fingerprinting and taking molds of tire tracks. If they had invented those techniques, the cases would have been easier to solve. On the other hand, if they had invented locks for doors back then, Phelps would have had a much tougher time commandeering parked cars.
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Why didn’t the men remove their hats in church? And who would let the mistress attend a memorial service?
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I replayed the tutorial missions after starting the game. The narration finally made sense. It was the beefy Arson partner talking about Phelps and Kelsoe. Kelsoe was introduced in the WWII flashbacks but it wasn’t until Arson I could tell the guys (besides Phelps) in the unit apart.