L.A. Noire
Team Bondi/Rockstar Games
Initial release: May 17, 2011 (USA)
Platform: Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, PC
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| screenshots c/o MobyGames |
L.A. Noire is a story of power and abuse. The ambitious police adventure from Australian developer Team Bondi serves up a combo platter of post-war Los Angeles lore, from the murder of Elizabeth Short (occurring off-screen, but hanging over much of the game) to Los Angeles' long history of corruption. No detail was spared in recreating 1940s Los Angeles from the ground up. And therein lies the problem... because L.A. Noire is a story of power and abuse. As in the game, so in the studio. A common story in the business, once mildly scandalous, now just another weekday in an industry in rapid decline. And they say write what you know.
The year is 1947. Cole Phelps is a hotshot cop who's spent a year on the beat and already the detective squads have an eye on him. Home from a war he doesn't want to talk about, he's conscientious, culturally sensitive, and by-the-book, making him something of a Modern Policeman in a city full of bulldogs. In less than a year he rises through the ranks, only to uncover a sinister conspiracy that ultimately destroys him. Welcome to Los Angeles.
On its surface, L.A. Noire looks and feels like a Rockstar game. Much of the game involves driving around the city; L.A. is a living, breathing entity, true to the Rockstar tradition. NPCs do their business, walking and driving around. But this is just a superficiality; actually, it's worse than that, because the driving, the car chases, the shooting, all get in the way of the game's real strength, the crime solving. If you've ever played Police Quest, this game will feel like a modern successor, making it one of the rare police procedural video games. You'll gather evidence, interview witnesses, make arrests, and occasionally have to chase down a suspect... or get involved in a firefight. It's the kind of thing where the paperwork alone for some of the actions you take would make a modern setting impossible, but in 1947 police work was a little more lax.
The most distinctive thing about L.A. Noire is of course its much-vaunted facial animations. Motion capture technology developed by a sister company was used to record actors' faces at a thousand frames per second. While the results were somewhat impressive at a glance (see these real-life actors with realistic expressions!) the more you look at it the worse it looks. The process of animating these faces was arduous for both animators and actors, the latter of whom had to stick their faces in a frame and were unable to move their heads while reading their lines. On the technical front, the process resulted in a major ballooning of the game's overall file size, because every single frame had to be rendered as its own model. Worse, the face textures by necessity had to be somewhat lower resolution, and the cameras used to capture actors' faces couldn't deal with depth like the inside of a person's mouth, so you'd get a shallow hole painted black instead of a real mouth. More than even Mass Effect, the whole really showed the limitations of the DVD format for video games by the end of the Aughts, requiring no less than three discs for the XBox 360. (I bought the PlayStation 3 version, as a PlayStation 3 was my graduation gift to myself the spring this game came out.) No wonder the technology never took off; as some wit on Reddit once pointed out, I don't really see Call of Duty needing this level of expression detail, do you?
Of course, the key reason for all this face capture work is for the most important feature of the gameplay, interviews. You'll sometimes be interviewing people (suspects, witnesses, and so on) and asking them a series of questions, with the idea that you'll need to read their faces to guess how to respond. If you're autistic, this is already a nightmare; on top of that, most of the people playing these bit parts are fucking terrible actors. Phelps' interrogation style is borderline psychopathic, with your options being polite and professional, raving maniac, and raving maniac with evidence. In-game, these are labeled "truth," "doubt," and "lie," respectively. Naturally, a lot of players struggled with not just the difficulty of reading people in a game that's all about reading people, but the incongruity of the responses compared to what the button labels suggested. It turns out that just before release, these labels were changed from the more accurate "coax," "force" and "accuse." Why it was changed is a mystery. (For what it's worth, later releases just went with "good cop," "bad cop," and "accuse.")
While the mostly-accurate recreation of 1940s Los Angeles and the amount of work in creating a semi-realistic expression system did pay off to some extent on a technical level, you've probably already guessed that a game with this much work behind it probably ran into some issues. The most obvious result of this is that much of the game had to be cut. An entire segment (Phelps working the Burglary desk) disappeared into the aether; just about all of the DLC consists of cases that weren't ready for prime time and had to be released after the fact. (Most of them aren't terribly important to the main storyline, though the final DLC case, "Nicholson Electroplating," does touch on the ongoing events that define the Arson desk story arc.) The structure of the game is such that there's a lot of stuff we don't see; it's necessarily episodic, with each chapter being a self-contained case. We don't see a lot of Phelps off-duty; it's not even mentioned that he has two daughters until his wife kicks him out for infidelity. (His wife, for that matter, has maybe five lines; she's as one-dimensional as it gets, just a background character.) Ultimately, I can't help but feel like this game would have been better as a television series. It's not like it didn't have the star power — a good chunk of the cast (including Phelps actor Aaron Staton) came over from the TV show Mad Men! Not to mention the many, many film references and homages that define much of the tone of the game: L.A. Confidential, The Third Man, Double Indemnity, Chinatown and more. More than any other game I've seen, L.A. Noire is a love letter to film noir.
But...
L.A. Noire is a story about power and abuse. A serial killer runs loose in the city because it would make the LAPD look bad to acknowledge he exists. Though he is ultimately tracked down and killed, his crimes (for which innocent men have been blamed) must never come to light because he's a relative to a powerful figure in the federal government. Even the very first case has the implication that the LAPD is dirty: Phelps as a young beat cop finds a little book with the names and gambling debts of several men on the force, including the detective who just had him search for a missing gun used in a murder. And, in an echo of both the General Motors streetcar conspiracy and America's long history of demolishing black neighborhoods to build interstate highways, a sinister collusion of local government, local business, and prominent citizens to get obscenely rich off of ripping off taxpayers by gaming eminent domain gets off almost scot-free. All this, brought to us by a studio doomed by its own hostile working conditions. Studio head Brendan McNamara had mismanaged the company and tens of millions of dollars, and treated the studio like his own personal fiefdom, a controlling, petty tyrant who screamed at his staff and subjected them to never-ending crunch. When all this came to light, it echoed the infamous EA_spouse incident as well as the "death march" crunch of Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption. Despite the critical and financial success of L.A. Noire, Team Bondi went out of business. What happened to McNamara? He got another job making bad ports of older Rockstar games.
There's an irony, there, isn't it? A game about bad men getting away with their crimes, developed over seven years of abuse and mismanagement by a power-tripping control freak who faced no serious damage to his career. Roman Polanski wishes he was that lucky. When these early stories about crunch hell first landed there was a lot of controversy and debate. They were considered scandalous; people vowed not to buy games released by Rockstar or EA or whoever. Now it's just Tuesday: not a week goes by where we don't hear about some game studio either being a nightmare to work at or suddenly getting killed by private equity or both, and we just shrug and keep scrolling, because whether or not we buy something no longer seems to factor into the success of whoever made it.
Forget it, Phelps, it's the video game industry.