Extra Punctuation: L.A. Noire Is a Bad Adventure Game
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
Yup, sounds even more like the underrated (though painfully buggy) Discworld Noir from back in 1999, right down to using the notebook/items interface for conversations and making connections. I vaguely recall a couple of the Frogware Sherlock Holmes games doing some riffs on the concept too.TheHappySquid said:
The timer/NPC patience aspect is... interesting. I would almost certainly hate it because I like to explore and tend to be OCD levels of thorough, especially in point & click or RPGs. Timers can be great for adding tension short-term, but I've played a few games with an overall timer and found it really infuriating; the only exception I can think of is Reccettear, and that was only because it expects you to fail and dumps you back to the start with all the stuff you've already accumulated. In the case of an investigation scenario, I think it'd be really difficult to pitch it so that the typical experience isn't to fail badly on first playthrough, then blast through the beginning on second playthrough and end up with hours to spare and a vague feeling of dissatisfaction at the end.
Still, I do bemoan how the point-and-click genre exists to this day. I'm of the opinion that most fans of the genre have become willingly blind to the fact that point-and-click games are ostensibly the most basic and stripped-down form of a computer game, and that the actual "game" part of the game isn't what they play these games for, it's the story.JMeganSnow said:
Save for a few examples where you could take different approaches to a problem (Bladerunner comes to mind), there exists no challenge to solving those puzzles again save for racking your memory for the solution (which is not the right type of challenge for a game) which is why I argue that 99% of the fun derived from an adventure game is the story unraveling.
That said, I would have liked to have seen how those stories would have played out in games of different genres. If the Longest Journey and Grim Fandango were turned into decent immersive-sim RPGs a la Deus Ex and Vampire: The Masquerade, I think I would have enjoyed them by magnitudes more than what they were like in their current forms. Sure the combat sucked in Dreamfall, but I think if Funcom actually put as much effort into designing it as they did writing the narrative, it wouldn't have turned out half-bad.
Speaking of timers in an adventure game, the less forgiving type to be sure, see Dark Seed. I have very fond memories of it, despite the difficulty.
I must be the only person who thought that L.A. Noire was just an extended tech demo.
The motiontracking it pretty groudbreaking stuff, imagine if Heavy Rain used something similar to that.
IF they decide to do a Heavy Rain 2 I pray to god they use this technology to their benefit and refine a few other things as well.
The motiontracking it pretty groudbreaking stuff, imagine if Heavy Rain used something similar to that.
IF they decide to do a Heavy Rain 2 I pray to god they use this technology to their benefit and refine a few other things as well.
A little off topic but I keep noticing how people keep saying how easy the investigation parts of this game are due to the chime and music. The thing is both can be turned off in the gameplay options so why not do that if it's too easy?
I've had similar thoughts about subsystems within games like that. Instead of there being one "golden path" through the conversation/interrogation/debate, you're working against both your and your opponent's composure. If they cause you to lose yours first, you blow the whole thing, or just walk away in a huff. If they lose theirs first, they sock you in the jaw, walk away in a huff, or whatever is appropriate to the context.Yahtzee Croshaw said:
In this way, the conversation works like verbal chess, rather than verbal Sudoku--your opponent is also trying to win, using the same techniques as you. You might choose to approach this conversation with logic or reason, you might choose aggression or intimidation, or you might try any of the many forms of basic persuasion... and each opponent responds differently to each.
So, if you decide to try to reason with an opponent and fail, he might think you don't know what you're talking about. With that loss of credibility, you'll need to try a different approach next time (rather than "grind a quest to get back your reputation"). If you try aggression and fail, maybe this guy's afraid of you and won't talk again... or maybe he calls the cops.
Maybe if you try aggression and succeed, you get the information you need now, but you have a hard time finding this guy later. Maybe if you succeed via persuasion, now you owe him a favor.
Yeah, it'd be a nightmare on the writing... but damn, wouldn't it be cool?
It's not 'motion tracking'. It's a digital scan of the actor's head at 30fps. Yes, that's right... every single frame of animation for every single head in the game is a brand new polygonal model AND texture. It's not so much groundbreaking as brute force.Zenode said:
The reason you won't see this technology in the vast majority of games is because it requires a streaming buffer of a staggering 12-15 MBytes per head in RAM to stream and decompress the mesh and texture data per frame (per head) into. So, for 3 characters, you need somewhere in the order of 45megs of RAM as your streaming and decompression buffer. Unless you design your entire engine and game from scratch around having a LOT less memory than most games use, this technology will be nothing but a headache and impractical. This is why you won't be seeing it in Heavy Rain 2.... Or Battlefield.... Or COD.... or.... or.....
(And this is also why some consoles overheated... if your console doesn't have good airflow or has dust clogging up the air vents, the sheer amount of work the disk was doing ALL THE TIME just made the whole inside of the console case too hot and one component or other would then fail)
Colour me confused, guys. I don't want to be "that" one idiot who spouts crap like "WELL YAHTZEE'S NOT A REAL REVIEWER ANYWAYZ" after one little complaint of his, but is it just me, or does he seem to be especially critical of L.A. Noire for not much reason? I mean, I don't understand the point below:
The other interpretation I took from the above quote is that if the game didn't use a different setting (whilst still being investigative in its gameplay), then it should have found a way to bring a new twist to a 1940s noir setting, but that doesn't make much sense, either. Film noir -- like any genre -- has its own tropes that separates it from everything else, just as big explosions and unicorns separate action and fantasy. Why, then, would it be such a crime for Team Bondi to utilize the very concepts that make classic noir what it is? Detectives, femme fatales, fedoras, excessive smoking -- I fail to see how it's any more "cliched" than its source material.
Additionally, I'm more curious as to how, exactly, someone would go about shaking up the formula of a noir movie in the 40s (Yahtzee conveniently never elaborates on that point, it seems). Make all of the serial killers raptors? Make Phelps and Galloway take out the B.D. killer with fucking Tesla Cannons? What do you want?
This went on longer than intended. I'm neither attacking Yahtzee nor defending L.A. Noire, but it just feels as though I'm missing something here. If I am, I'd be glad if somebody would be patient enough to elaborate.
Having never seen L.A. Confidential, I have no idea just how heavily or lightly L.A. Noire borrows from that movie in particular, and I understand that it's not exactly challenging convention by having an investigative game set in a 1940s noir world and not, in Yahtzee's later example, Narnia, but literally countless pieces of media are guilty of that. (Of all the places a horror game could have been set, you chose a creepy abandoned town built on ancient Indian burial grounds? What the hell is your problem, Silent Hill 2?) It just seems like he's pointing out a flaw that, to a degree, a hell of a lot of things have, yet making L.A. Noire look especially bad for it. Ultimately, it seems a pointless and, to be honest, redundant thing to pick up on when any number of L.A. Noire's actual flaws could have been pointed out, like a finicky interrogation system or dodgy controls during shootouts.
The other interpretation I took from the above quote is that if the game didn't use a different setting (whilst still being investigative in its gameplay), then it should have found a way to bring a new twist to a 1940s noir setting, but that doesn't make much sense, either. Film noir -- like any genre -- has its own tropes that separates it from everything else, just as big explosions and unicorns separate action and fantasy. Why, then, would it be such a crime for Team Bondi to utilize the very concepts that make classic noir what it is? Detectives, femme fatales, fedoras, excessive smoking -- I fail to see how it's any more "cliched" than its source material.
Additionally, I'm more curious as to how, exactly, someone would go about shaking up the formula of a noir movie in the 40s (Yahtzee conveniently never elaborates on that point, it seems). Make all of the serial killers raptors? Make Phelps and Galloway take out the B.D. killer with fucking Tesla Cannons? What do you want?
This went on longer than intended. I'm neither attacking Yahtzee nor defending L.A. Noire, but it just feels as though I'm missing something here. If I am, I'd be glad if somebody would be patient enough to elaborate.
LA Noire is probably worth more of an encouragement award than game of the year but still, it's an idea old enough to be new in a console generation overstuffed with cover based shooters and sequels.
Nothing else to add, except that I misread "Novelty Dinnerware PLC" on my initial scan of the article and thought "man, that sounds like the worst dlc EVER".
Nothing else to add, except that I misread "Novelty Dinnerware PLC" on my initial scan of the article and thought "man, that sounds like the worst dlc EVER".
You know, I'm surprised that while talking about Adventure Games (a genre name I don't like myself) there's been no mention of Ghost Trick yet. I thought it was really fun, only having so much time to change the past in odd semi-logical ways. That game might be a good one to look at.
It's still a form of motion tracking (tracking the muscle movements in the face), and the tech is even called MotionScan, you just explained how it was rendered out?DiamanteGeeza said:
This is the first time this technology has ever been used in gaming, whose to say it cannot be refined and made easier to develop. Look at CGI in film, it was an expensive process, but after a few films brought it into the mainstream (Star Wars: Ep 1 comes to mind), it became extremely popular and now it's used in pretty much every blockbuster movie. It may be time consuming and hardware melting now, but it more than likely in the future will be streamlined and made easier for developers to use in future games which require realistic facial features.
You know with all this hoo-ha about LA Confidential people seem to forget that pretty much all the other Rock Stare games seem to be Scar Face (or some other mobster movie) worship. That barely gets a mention.
Anyway, I think this is the first game they have made that I actually liked.
Anyway, I think this is the first game they have made that I actually liked.
Yeah me too, I see a lot of potential for this. Also I'd like to say that; While it is true that L.A does nothing new, I've never really played adventure games before (Being born in 92' and all) so I was able to really enjoy L.A as it was a new experience. Also I think that at least it's "not adding anything" in a relatively underpopulated genre. *Unlike other genres which are crammed full of identical re-releases*Kahunaburger said: