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Long-Delayed L.A. Noire Gets Trailer, Spring 2011 Release 54

It's been years since the announcement of L.A. Noire, an expansive murder mystery game set in 1940s Los Angeles. After several lengthy delays, Rockstar Games has now posted a trailer and confirmed that the game will release in Spring of 2011. One of the game's major undertakings is to step up the realism of the voice acting and the way characters' faces and bodies are animated, "allowing players to analyze every subtle nuance of an actor's performance in order to get to the truth." The trailer shows in-game footage (though not actual gameplay), and while it's always a good idea to take such displays with a grain of salt, the facial expressions do look pretty realistic.
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Long-Delayed L.A. Noire Gets Trailer, Spring 2011 Release

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    • The left hand map is from doom, IIRC.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you ignore the fact that it features a huge sandbox world many times the size of all combined doom levels, and isn't even an FPS, then your point stands! A++ would read again!

      • I hope you're right. However, "huge sandbox world" could just mean a big world that you have to drive through to get between the rigidly defined points of action.

    • Bingo. Shaping up to be a $60 movie. Left, wait, up, wait, right, wait... on noes a Dragon! [wikipedia.org]
    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by ildon ( 413912 )

      RTFA. This game isn't an FPS it's a sandbox game like GTA3. Everyone who modded this insightful instead of off topic is an idiot and should go back to reddit.

    • As a former DOOMaholic, I remember that old school map from DOOM [idsoftware.com]'s Episode 1 Map 6 (E1M6) [Central Processing] [wikia.com]. :D

      • by cjb110 ( 200521 )

        Thanks for that! I knew I recognized it as soon as I saw that 'squiggly' (well squiggly for doom) tunnel.

        But fuck knows why my brain decides that remembering map layouts of game I last played 16 odd years ago is a good idea! Maybe it's because your using most of your senses and non-repetitive muscle movements??

        • by antdude ( 79039 )

          Is it because you played too much DOOM like me? I was a DOOMaholic. I made mods, maps [zimage.com], visited ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idsoftware/doom.../ daily to download stuff, played a lot, etc. Here's even sadder. I still have DOOM 1 and 2 installed, but with Doomdays Engine [dengine.net] stuff. I haven't touched it for ages though.

          • by cjb110 ( 200521 )

            well no, that's the thing...yes I played it quite a bit, but not *that* much! didn't play

            Same as Wolfenstien I know all the secrets on the first few levels, but again not played that in years.

            But it gets released on a phone or latest console and I know exactly where to go:)

  • by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Friday November 12, 2010 @04:48AM (#34204954) Homepage Journal
    The faces do look real, but I am going to have to agree with the uncanny valley crowd here and say that they look creepy.....maybe it looks better on an hd tv than it does in the trailer, but damn those things were creepy.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by caius112 ( 1385067 )

      The faces do look real, but I am going to have to agree with the uncanny valley crowd here and say that they look creepy.....maybe it looks better on an hd tv than it does in the trailer, but damn those things were creepy.

      It's chiefly because of the terrible (or rather, nonexistent) lighting. Seriously, it looks like global lighting from a 2002 game. I hope it's because it's only an alpha.

      • by naz404 ( 1282810 )
        Also, they have absolutely horrendous eye-capture technology.

        Except for some cultures like the Japanese where they talk without making a lot of eye contact, a large part of facial expressions & mannerism is with the the eyes.

        Valve's Half-Life 2 was amazing because of this (well, they did bag the guy who worked on Gollum's animations...)

        That being said, Noire looks like it's full of creepy animated corpses because the eyes aren't alive. They keep staring in the distance instead of properly focus
        • Also, Rockstar needs to learn proper editing and pacing of cutscenes. They all kept dragging on painfully in GTA IV/Expansions, making them really irritating to watch and yet unskippable if you wanted to find out more about the story.

          Ugh, no lie. GTA IV was easily the worst game I've ever played for this. After GTA:SA it was like pushing hot knitting needles into my eyes. Played it anyway though.

    • Yeah, it's impressive in comparison to previous Rockstar games, maybe the best facial animation I've ever seen in a retail game. Still, there's something wrong with the eyes, and I can't quite put my finger on it. It's almost as if they're not connected to the rest of the expression, if that makes sense.

      Also, the animation of the body as a whole is still too stilted to look real. To be fair, I've never seen any game get that right. People are constantly in motion, making tons of small movements such as blin

    • I didn't find them particularily creepy but one thing I noticed the trailer didn't show is a CHANGE in anyone's facial expression. No one went from calm to angry - which always seems to be where graphics have lacked. I've never not been able to tell when a character was mad, or sad, or whatever, in Half Life 2, or Doom 3, or whatever other FPS out there lets you see the face. The problem is that characters rarely seem to change their mood and their expressions to go with it. And if they do, it never seems t

  • Why the 404? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/037241/Firefox-4-Regains-Speed-Mojo-With-No-2-Placing can not be found, though a few people seem to find it judging the the already posted comments, what is going on?

  • by aplusjimages ( 939458 ) on Friday November 12, 2010 @05:09AM (#34205010) Journal
    So how am I supposed to know if a game character is lying? I have to agree that the lighting is oddly non dramatic on the characters.
  • Seems like it would be tough, but I would love to have some sort of online detective story... Maybe where some players commit the crimes, while the others find them.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Took me a minute to twig what didn't quite look right about these - it's the hats, they don't cast shadows onto the faces. Considering the number of people in hats and focus on faces, this does seem quite a blunder. Sure self shadowing objects aren't the simplest of things to implement, however when striving for this level of realism, it's essential.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 12, 2010 @07:18AM (#34205452)

    I nearly ended up working for Team Bondi about 4 years ago. At the time, they had already been working for a few years, and didn't even have a working codebase they could show me, just lots of vague designs and promises. I wrote the place and the project off as just a way of milking money from investors, and went on my way to work elsewhere.
    Now if Rockstar have pushed them into making an actual game, based on the huge amount of background research they were talking about when I saw them, I could have been very wrong to write them off. I'd like to be proven wrong, if they've done what they were talking about back then, then it'll be the kind of game that shows that video games can indeed compete with other forms of art.
    I just hope they haven't churned out a quick shooter to try and prove they weren't another Duke Nukem Forever team.

  • The animation looks impressive. I wonder if games will become sophisticated enough to merit Oscar nominations.

    If Andy Serkis kan be nominated for an Oscar in Lord of the Rings for his performance as Smeagol/Gollum, surely the same can happen to voice/motion capture actors in games.

    Y

    • I wonder if games will become sophisticated enough to merit Oscar nominations.

      Not likely. The Oscars are for films, given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Television actors (even in "made for TV" movies) and theater actors don't get Oscars either.

      • Video games seem to be a serious competitor in the entertainment industry, it's not inconceivable that they could usurp movies. Who is behind the Oscars anyway? If it's the stuios, they'd have a vested interest in keeping the newcomers locked out, if it's an independent body they might want to get on board before it's too late. And I wonder what happens as the line between the two blurs still further. I'm thinking a movie that uses clever scripting to allow the audience to shape the experience somehow, so a
        • It would be a different awards ceremony. Television, books, stage drama, and recorded music area all major parts of the entertainment industry, and have their own awards. Sometimes these overlap (i.e. the Emmy awards), but the oscars are and will always be about movies, because they're awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even the technical Oscars, which have been given for things that are fundamental to video game production (Premultiplied alpha, for example), were given because t
  • ...Any sign of Half Life 2 Episode 3?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • How is the actual story and gameplay?

    • by BobMcD ( 601576 )

      Yeah, I had this same thought as well. I hadn't heard of the game until today, and while the trailer tells you about the setting and the cutscenes, it tells you absolutely nothing about how to play the game. Do you sit there and press 'X' to advance from one cutscene to the next, like a movie? Maybe with options, like one of those DVD games? The game is from Rockstar, so do you spend the time in between cutscenes stealing 40's era cars and beating up classy Betty Grable-style hookers? I'm confused.

      • To be honest, even if it boils down to a period GTA with prettier cutscenes I wouldn't be entirely disappointed. I'm surprised they haven't explored GTA in other settings (locale and time period) a little more, I'd love some European GTA titles (I know they did GTA London a long time ago, how about an update with the new engine).
  • No PC version? Rockstar won't be getting any of my money...

    • by delinear ( 991444 ) on Friday November 12, 2010 @11:07AM (#34207300)
      Well, let's see how this plays out. These days if a title is "exclusive" to a particular console, it just means it will be released for all other platforms three months later.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by imakemusic ( 1164993 )

      Well I couldn't play GTA:IV on my machine even on lowest settings, despite it meeting the requirements, so I wouldn't be in a hurry to buy another Rockstar game for PC anyway.

  • This game looks like it will be really, really amazing. Too bad they didn't release a video with gameplay, but I'm really looking forward to when it finally comes out

Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson

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