Extra Punctuation: L.A. Noire Is a Bad Adventure Game
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
As I found myself reading and agreeing with the points made in the article I realised that I was automatically reading it with Yahtzee's voice.
As soon as you mentioned Time Limits, my mind immediately went to Dead Rising. Or rather, both of them. Those games did Time Limits very well, in my opinion. Not perfect, no (as you pointed out in your review) but well enough. I would enjoy an adventure game that employed a similar mechanic.
Also, if this does cause adventure games to make a resurgence, I do hope they can work more sensible logic into some of the puzzles, instead of just poking around with every item in your bag until you randomly find the one that works. Perhaps the time limits will take care of that.
Oh, and a very minor nit-pick:
A trope, done badly, is a cliché.
Also, if this does cause adventure games to make a resurgence, I do hope they can work more sensible logic into some of the puzzles, instead of just poking around with every item in your bag until you randomly find the one that works. Perhaps the time limits will take care of that.
Oh, and a very minor nit-pick:
That would be a trope. Things like an the Wise Old Master or the whole "it was all just a dream" angle, or the big red devil with horns and goat legs are tropes, that act as a point of reassurance or familiar territory. Something that doesn't need to be explained because the audience already knows.
A trope, done badly, is a cliché.
You're not obligated to talk to public investigators either.
The big flaw with the game design of Yahtzee's suggestion (although a lot of people get off on fake difficulty so many folks may prefer the game for this reason) is punitive replaying. You wouldn't end up just losing a few minutes as you reloaded the last checkpoint and retried a battle. You'd lose your entire gameplay experience. Your first playthrough you wouldn't even know how much more time you would need and how badly you had fucked up. You might play through from the start several times with hours of things to do before your time is up. This would quickly make most people say,
"Fuck it. I don't know what to do"
and either quit playing or look up a walkthrough.
The big flaw with the game design of Yahtzee's suggestion (although a lot of people get off on fake difficulty so many folks may prefer the game for this reason) is punitive replaying. You wouldn't end up just losing a few minutes as you reloaded the last checkpoint and retried a battle. You'd lose your entire gameplay experience. Your first playthrough you wouldn't even know how much more time you would need and how badly you had fucked up. You might play through from the start several times with hours of things to do before your time is up. This would quickly make most people say,
"Fuck it. I don't know what to do"
and either quit playing or look up a walkthrough.
I like the game idea, but instead of having a physical in game clock, perhaps you should have like a set number of actions you can take in one room. For instance, "1 hour" could be the time spent examining 6 pieces of evidence on a crime scene. That way, the investigative gameplay is all about prioritizing which part of evidence or which questions in an interrogation are the most important, while at the same time you're given enought room to actually weigh the options against one another.
L.A. Noire lacked actual deduction, or inference, that you'd expect from detective game. I would have preferred if you had to find witnesses yourself. Gather statements and from those deduce who the most likely suspects are, THEN interrogate them. This isn't required in LA Noire. You can simply walk around hitting A/X until the music stops. Get all the questions wrong and still progress without ever listening to a single word, or paying any attention to a single clue.
I've only played one game like that. Unsolved Crimes on DS. It's not a great game by any stretch but the game required you to deduce events and suspects based on crime scene evidence. For example; In one case broken glass is under the victim's body, which means the window was broken before their body was put there. In another two witnesses statements don't match up. You had to figure it out for yourself.
What really annoyed me about LA Noire was that I'd get evidence that conflicted with who I'd arrested [SPOILER for White Shoe Slaying case] You end up arresting a homeless man when one of the first pieces of evidence are the car tracks showing how the body was dumped. I know it's possible the homeless guy GOT a car somehow but I'm not even allowed to ask? That's just dumb design.
I've only played one game like that. Unsolved Crimes on DS. It's not a great game by any stretch but the game required you to deduce events and suspects based on crime scene evidence. For example; In one case broken glass is under the victim's body, which means the window was broken before their body was put there. In another two witnesses statements don't match up. You had to figure it out for yourself.
What really annoyed me about LA Noire was that I'd get evidence that conflicted with who I'd arrested [SPOILER for White Shoe Slaying case] You end up arresting a homeless man when one of the first pieces of evidence are the car tracks showing how the body was dumped. I know it's possible the homeless guy GOT a car somehow but I'm not even allowed to ask? That's just dumb design.
"It gives me this horrible feeling that gaming is just going to drift around in the same cycle for the rest of eternity, rather than continually evolving"
The whole point of LA Noire is that it's an old style of gaming that's had something added to it which is the facial capture hardware. I'm pretty sure that's literally the definition of gaming evolution. Doing something new entirely wouldn't be evolution, it would be a revolution...
The whole point of LA Noire is that it's an old style of gaming that's had something added to it which is the facial capture hardware. I'm pretty sure that's literally the definition of gaming evolution. Doing something new entirely wouldn't be evolution, it would be a revolution...
But it isn't tracking motion in any way, shape, or form. Tradional mocap does - it tracks the locations of markers, and that data is then applied to bones in the face/body to create the animation. The animation engine will then interpolate the marker data and apply it to the bones in the hierarchy, and that is how you get your animation.Zenode said:
L.A. Noire's method does none of that. It scans the actors head at 30fps and stores the complete model mesh and texture from that snapshot in time (just as if you 3D scanned a vase). It is a very hi-tech version of stop-motion animation, but captured in 3D and in real time. What I described was not just how it is rendered in-game, but also how the data is obtained. Motion is not tracked; a head is repeatedly digitally scanned lots of times per second, and that's it.
Having used this technology (I can tell that you haven't ;-), I can assure you that we will not be seeing widespread adoption of it on the current platforms because the memory footprint per character is simply too big to be practical, unless you design your entire engine and game around the fact that it has a lot less memory to use.
On the next generation of consoles? Possibly, if there is significantly more RAM (think 10x) than now, but there's also the bottleneck of data transmission speed - hopefully the next gens will all have HDDs as standard so that the huge quantities of model and texture stream data can be guaranteed to be cached, because Noire is pushing how many simultaneous streams of that size you can get off a DVD.....
But anyway, back to your original point - "It's still a form of motion tracking" - no, it isn't.
The first true PC game was Spacewar (1962); it's that game where two ships fly around a celestial body shooting at each other while trying to avoid getting sucked in by gravity. It was also the first famous game, the first influential game, the first game to be expanded or patched (the most well-known example being its true to life moving starfield background named "expensive planetarium," although the game's gravity and hyperspace mechanics and simulated angular momentum and space weather were not in the initial game either), the first game with options (any of those features could be turned off at the player's leisure), the first arcade game, the first game to be ported (to the arcade), the first game with a story, and also the first game based on a literary source (the Lensman series of science fiction novels by E. E. Smith). The first adventure game was Colossal Cave, which came out 14 years later. I'm not really a big fan of adventure games, but the only one of those games I can think of that doesn't fall prey to that genre's "mentally ill hobo" gameplay trappings is Mode (1996), which worked somewhat like the hypothetical game you described (looking for stuff is mostly pointless since the game is primarily driven by who you talk to and how well the conversations go, progress is less about creating new options and more about becoming better informed about which options to take, the game is about a mystery which you probably won't even notice if you don't know what to look for, and there's a very fixed time limit which draws closer with every choice you make).