A few years back, Rockstar announced L.A. Noire. Since then, we’ve heard a whole lot of nothing on Team Bondi’s open-world love letter to the film noir. Most people (myself included) probably just assumed that the whole thing had been dumped somewhere along the line. Turns out that the developers have been hard at work the whole time, and the first real details are beginning to pour out.

As you might expect from a game published by the Grand Theft Auto guys, L.A. Noire is an open-world action game set in 1947 Los Angeles. The entire city has been rendered from the ground-up to be as realistic as possible. The team has been working from film and photographs to replicate the City of Angels as it existed in the years after the second World War. Now, just because this is an open-world game, don’t expect a GTA clone. Noire’s protagonist, Cole Phelps, is worlds apart from Nico Bellic.

Cole, a beat cop who will progress from the traffic desk all the way to homicide, is out to clean up both the streets and his own corrupt police force. Of course, he has to deal with his own dark past, including a few naughty deeds during the war. As a police detective, you’ll have to solve cases and peg the right man. Oh, and this is my favorite part - the game will not make it easy for you. Unlike many games, you won’t come across glowing items sitting on pre-selected shelves. L.A. Noire’s crime scenes have been designed to look natural. In the example provided by Game Informer, a player might see a pair of glasses sitting near a suspicious stain. If you pick up these glasses, you can notice such details as the brand etched on the frame. As you look over these bits of information, they will be jotted in your notepad, which you’ll need to refer to often as you piece together the case.

Once you get a suspect into the station, you’ll have to interview them. Your dialogue options come from a similar system to that used in Mass Effect - tilt the stick in one direction to take on an accusatory stance, shift in another to butter them up. The developers have created some new facial motion-capturing tech to make this more realistic. The voice actors went through full make-up and were sat in booths with cameras covering every angle of their faces. As they delivered their dialogue, every one of their facial motions - from the twitch of an eye to an accidental smile - was recorded and digitized into the game’s animation. This is crucial to the gameplay - naturally, suspects will try to lie to you. You’ll have to keep a close eye on them to find those telltale signs, and then you’ll need to refute their testimony by pulling counter-evidence from your own notes.

It’s no secret that film noir is a passion of mine, so it thrills me to no end that details are finally beginning to leak out of Rockstar’s offices. The gameplay sounds incredible - everything from the realistic investigations to watching for minute facial tics appeals to my love of the adventure genre. If Team Bondi can pull this off, L.A. Noire will be a pretty sure contender for my game of whatever year it comes out in. This month’s issue of Game Informer promises more details, and should be hitting stands any day.

source: IGN