First you’ll scan a crime scene for clues that lead you to persons of interest. While interrogating these characters, you need to read their faces and decide whether to “Trust” them, “Doubt” them or “Lie.” Interrogations pay off with info on important locales or people and the success of each Q&A interval puts a player on a different investigative branch, making a case easier or harder to solve. While solving the Red Lipstick Murder, Phelps encountered sordid details that weren’t part of the case–intimations of attempted sodomy and possible cross-dressing just hang there, adding to the pulpy, moody vibe created by the game.
In a panel after the play session, the Tribeca Film Festival’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Gilmore talked with Rockstar art director Rob Nelson and international marketing director Simon Ramsey about the connections and differences between movies and games. Gilmore marveled at the verisimilitude of the MotionScan facial nuances, but talked about how the real-but-unreal graphical style impressed him as weird, but part of the experience.
The important thing to note about the way crime and punishment’s presented in L.A. Noire is that it’s not sensationalist. In a game where you play as a cop working robbery, vice and homicide cases, the violence that people do to each other occurs as a matter of course. As far as I’ve seen, Phelps never initiates the violence in L.A. Noire. He only responds to it, chasing when people run or punching when a suspect lunges at his partner. He’s a different kind of Rockstar Games’ protagonist: earnest and forthright, not cynical or snarky like Tommy Vercetti or Niko Bellic. And players gets little snippets of strangers’ lives and the secrets they hide.
I’ve been saying that L.A. Noire‘s going to be different from Rockstar’s previous titles and the showing at Tribeca highlighted something crucial: The Team Bondi production’s going to be watchable in a way that many video games aren’t. Performances must be carefully parsed, and you can have a wife, buddy or boyfriend weigh in on whether to trust a person of interest’s statements. So even though it’s technically single-player only, you might say that L.A. Noire qualifies as a “multiplayer” experience.
Players–and their partners–will be able to survey the seamy underbelly of postwar Los Angels when L.A. Noire launches for PS3 and Xbox 360 on May 17th.