L.A. Noire

"I came to notice that my way of making games may have been to seek for resonance. I didn't necessarily want to include story or not include story. Rather, I have been making games that I hope will resonate with players, I now think… It's something that has been interesting me greatly these days. Along with how games are unique for their interactive nature." – Shigeru Miyamoto in an Iwata Asks interview.

"This is an amazing result for 4 hard years and I'm proud of what we've achieved this far. The game is huge in size and scope and will be a real breakthrough. We have almost re-invented the adventure game whilst including the action elements that people expect in a modern game. Its these action elements that we really need to tighten up." – Brendan McNamara, director and writer of L.A. Noire, in a leaked e-mail obtained by gamesindustry.biz.

It's maybe bad form to lead off a review with two block quotes, but I think these two quotes essentially sum up my feelings on L.A. Noire, an interesting experiment that pretty much fails in all of the ways that a game is usually assessed. This is a game that substitutes game design for world design, plot for character development, and most damningly, "importance" over resonance. At the end of the day, what L.A. Noire represents is nothing less than the death of the video game. That might be a little bit melodramatic, but the point needs to be made that what L.A. Noire does needs to be stopped and quickly, and not just for in-game reasons.

When I first laid eyes on L.A. Noire while my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend played it, the game was actually quite enthralling. While obviously pretty derivative from not only the noire films that inspired it, but also the modern film analogue L.A. Confidential, this appeared to be a video game that finally understood how to tell a gripping story. The writing was pretty fantastic, at least on par with an HBO series, and the acting, something that hasn't really existed in any meaningful ways in video games, was captured with aplomb. Hiring a cast made up of a ton of Mad Men alumni certainly couldn't have hurt, and the motion capture technology used to portray the characters' acting was pretty amazing. Neatly avoiding the trap of the "uncanny valley," every face was so close to real that it almost sold me on the idea of video games finally being able to handle serious storytelling in a realistic setting. "You win, Rockstar," I thought to myself, "maybe cinematic gaming could be alright."

Part of my thought process almost certainly had to do with the sheer amount of money thrown onto the screen. Every single corner of this world seemed unbelievably fussed over. That elusive detail so often missing from many open worlds seemed to finally be here. In those moments, L.A. Noire validated everything that Rockstar was fumbling around with with their Grand Theft Autos and Red Dead Redemptions – a living, breathing world where chaos wasn't the only reward for playing the game. A game where you could follow a story and the open world only served to enhance it. In other words, L.A. Noire seemed to be delivering exactly what a game like Deadly Premonition had promised, only done with a sheen of polish and craft that SWERY couldn't hope to accomplish with his miniscule budget.

A month and a half passed, and I finally picked up the game for myself, and now I've come to a very different conclusion: L.A. Noire is the first game I've ever seen that is better watched than played.

All of that thoughtful, TV season-like plotting, all that amazing world-building, all that lifelike acting delivered with gravitas, got trashed as soon as I had a controller in my hand. This is a game in name only – everything about it's "game-ness" is treated as a placation or at worst, an obstacle to the story. Everything you do in the game would be better served by not only better implementation, but a different medium entirely. L.A. Noire has no right being a game.

Essentially, as Detective Cole Phelps, you investigate a series of murders in and around Los Angeles. What this boils down to are a number of gameplay "vignettes" that get repeated ad nauseum throughout the 20-hour runtime. Here's what you'll be doing in this game: 1. Investigating crime scenes. 2. Chasing down suspects in foot chases or car chases. 3. Shooting criminals. 4. Fistfighting criminals. 5. Driving to and from places in Los Angeles. and 6. Interviewing suspects and judging whether to trust them or not based on their facial tics. Now, if you'll allow me, I'd like to rip each of these elements a new asshole.

The common reference point for most reviewers when discussing this game's "investigation" mode is the Phoenix Wright series of games. There's a fundamental difference, though – whereas the Phoenix Wright games have a basic point-and-click, 2D adventure style system in place that is solid (if not altogether remarkable), L.A. Noire has attempted to transmute this into a realistic, 3D environment, and it simply does not work at all. There's no "investigation" to be found here – rather, you awkwardly walk around crime scenes, waiting for a chime to sound or your controller to vibrate, leading you to press a button to pick up an object and let your on screen avatar assess whether it's connected to the crime or not. If it's of value, it's automatically added to your collection of evidence, but if not, it's tossed aside. Beyond the fact that assessing the quality of evidence should really be left up to the player if this is to be an "interactive experience," the movement in 3D space is awkward and the gameplay mechanic Pavlovian. You're not really a detective, you're a dog, sniffing out clues. That's not interesting or thoughtful game design, and while it might be the only way this could have worked, it demonstrates that carrying out "the only thing that would work" in a flawed game design document is a terrible idea.

Next are the "action scenes" that McNamara refers to in his email. These are strained, forced, unnecessary, juvenile and altogether terrible in all ways, from thematic and plot related reasons to the simple mechanics involved. So many cases end with a foot chase, a car chase, or a shootout, and they're there because, hey! A "modern game" has to have it, and a modern Rockstar game especially! Who cares that the right-trigger is mapped to both shooting and running? Who cares that these sections destroy the pacing of the plot, the one thing the game has going for it? I just need to get my shooting on because that's what video games are, apparently! This is especially galling because of all the talk of bringing a "revolutionary" experience to video games, something that we haven't seen before. Miyamoto is interested in the unique opportunities from the "interactive nature" of video games, but McNamara treats video games like they're an inconvenience because he couldn't work in the medium he wanted to.

L.A. Noire needed to be an open-world game. Why? Because Rockstar was producing it. That's basically the best reason I could come up with, as that gorgeous rendition of Los Angeles in the 1940s is completely squandered by the development team having absolutely no idea what to do with these extended driving sequences. I suppose it's an attempt at "immersiveness," making the player feel like they're living in a detective's shoes, but this is fundamentally at odds with every other aspect of the game's design. Every other aspect is meant to evoke the feeling of a serial drama, but the driving sequences effectively kill all that pacing. It's entertaining enough driving around just to see such a faithful simulacrum of an interesting locale, but that locale is eventually, too, revealed as a dead facade. There's no life in this city except in the areas that you're supposed to go to. There's no reward to exploring, no reason to fumble around in this 3D space that seems so expansive yet offers so very little. I'm not proposing that L.A. Noire would be better served by allowing for "true freedom," but that's kind of what is seemingly promised by these sections – a reprieve from the linearity of the main storyline. It's not really there, though, making this element, like so many others, seem like it was included only so that L.A. Noire wouldn't be the first film generated using game console hardware.

The final element, and the only one that kind of works, and the only one that might compel somebody to play through this game, are the interrogation sequences. Essentially, you watch as Cole grills witnesses and people associated with the crime, and then judging their reactions, you decide whether they're telling the truth, lying (which requires evidence to prove) or whether you doubt what they're saying. Choosing the right response will get you further in your investigation, but choosing wrong gets your subjects to clam up. This wouldn't work without the facial animation technology on display, and it really wouldn't work if you got to try and try again, which thankfully the game doesn't allow you to do – you have to live with your snap decisions, which actually keeps in line, I think, with the job responsibility of a 1940s-era detective. Now, there are problems (as always): the facial responses are systemized in such a way that the way that one person reacts is basically the way that all people react in these situations, and in the early going, judging a person's face is all too easy, as they telegraph their thoughts completely. With that being said, these sections aren't particularly interactive – you're not asking the questions, after all – but they're at least interesting.

And even that easy-to-watch, TV-like plotting and storytelling has its issues. L.A. Noire might feint at the kind of mature storytelling seen in things like, say, Mad Men, but it's far too beholden to its influences to break outside of any genre conventions. Instead, it's often limited by them, meaning that Team Bondi was allowed to get away with far too much casual racism and sexism. Sure, it might have been a product of the era, but the fact that the game has almost no compelling female characters, essentially treating them as victims and criminals exclusively, is problematic. This is a game about white men as the hero characters, and you need to identify with them or you're not going to get much out of the game, and that's a problem.

But more importantly, L.A. Noire never makes a case for why it should be a video game. All of its game parts are uninteresting, so why not make this into a TV show? That's clearly the avenue that would have been best, and maybe some of its plot holes and sometimes-weak characterization would have been cleaned up by producers who are more accustomed to telling good stories. It's clear, though, that L.A. Noire is too derivative to be able to gain any traction on television – this kind of derivativeness of film tropes is only really rewarded in video games, and for my tastes, L.A. Noire isn't as interesting as similarly noire-influenced games like Grim Fandango or Hotel Dusk. It exists in this in between land of impeccable world design and art design that exists only as a facade, something to which the developers can hang their hats and say, "this has meaning, take us seriously."

I've talked about this game as if it was in a vacuum for long enough though, because there's a far more pressing reason why L.A. Noire needs to be consigned to the wastebasket of history. Those seven (seven!) long years of development, spent on creating an exquisite world with little of substance behind it, were characterized by horrific abuses of power by McNamara, essentially relying on slave labour to pump out his game. You can read more about it in the link I provided up top, but it's hard to consider a game a success when it has relied on such shoddy business practices to accomplish. And for what? So that they could make a mediocre game?

The question I'm left with is, to what degree is the cycle of development for an HD blockbuster with millions of dollars behind it an entropic enterprise? If developers have to spend so many millions of dollars to attain the polish of a game like this, while simultaneously underpaying, overworking and abusing the people behind it, and then to have it come out and not even grasp the basic fundamentals of game design, isn't that a problem? Doesn't that mean that something needs to change – that this type of game design and development is fundamentally flawed? Now, there are success stories where the development teams aren't crushed by the game's development, but if these are the lengths that developers have to go to simply to deliver these "important, innovative" experiences, then there's something very rotten in the state of Denmark. We're losing good gameplay design, to be sure, ever so slowly, but we're also losing something much more important – resonance. The kind of resonance that can only be accomplished in video games when the gameplay itself has something to say. L.A. Noire doesn't have that, so you shouldn't get it. And until Rockstar can prove that they can make a game with some aspect of good game design, and that they aren't going to mistreat their workers, then they can consider this my last purchase for a game of theirs. Now, more than ever, it's become clear to me that entertainment workers, just like any other profession, need unions, and the needs of fanboy gamers who demand games of this type need to be placated a whole lot less.