I know L.A. Noire isn't exactly a Rockstar game. It's by Sydney-based developer Team Bondi, who started the project before Rockstar was even attached as a co-developer/publisher. Still, the final product has Rockstar's fingerprints all over it, most notably in the driving mechanics which seem entirely lifted from Grand Theft Auto, and don't really sit well with the game's other elements, such as the investigating and cross-questioning.
I find the driving in
L.A. Noire a major distraction from the core detective-based gameplay, a hold-over from
GTA that doesn't seem particularily well-justified by the game's design. Ironically, the driving in
Deadly Premonition, which was widely lambasted for being boring and tedious, made a lot more sense in the context of that game's over-arching design.
Deadly Premonition is a complete world simulation, whereas
L.A. Noire is a fractured, half-hearted one.
The driving makes sense in
Deadly Premonition because the game is presented as a world, not a narrative. York has to get up, get dressed, have breakfast, drive to the crime scene, go get coffee, etc. and this level of fidelity makes the driving feel like a necessary part of its "day in the life" approach. Phelps by contrast never exists so completely in the 1947 Los Angeles Team Bondi so painstakingly built. He comes into existence in fits and starts, sometimes in the middle of a foot chase. Chapters begin with Phelps appearing in mid-situation, like you're watching a TV show. Why does that massive, seamless world even exist if some omnisicent narrator is just going to teleport you around it at will?
I'm not saying every game has to simulate life in all its mundanity. However, if you're not making a world simulation, you shouldn't bloat your game with world-sim features, like a
GTA-style open city complete with pedestrians, cars, functioning stop signals, etc. I doubt anyone would have complained if
L.A. Noire had simply cut between locations. Would past detective games like
Snatcher,
Policenauts,
Blade Runner, or even
Phoenix Wright have been improved by tedious world navigation?
In those games you just choose where you want to go from a list, and then you're there. This makes perfect sense because those games are about being a detective, not a driving-school student... which is what Rockstar's sloppy, built-for-mayhem driving mechancs make you feel like. (It matters a lot in
Deadly Premonition that driving on the road like a normal driver is relatively easy - like it is in real life - whereas in
L.A. Noire it's as difficult as it is in every other Rockstar game.)
What's bizarre about
L.A. Noire and the hype/criticism surrounding it is how its being presented/discussed as if it were somehow original, when in fact it's just an extremely expensive, bloated, somewhat confused version of what many games have done before. It's hardly the first detective game (the ones I listed above are only just a few). All of its mechanics are swipped from better games. Take for example the interrogation system, an intriguing if inferior version of the cross-examination mechanics from
Phoenix Wright. It took me forever to realize how
L.A. Noire's cross-questioning worked, mostly because its on-screen UI suffers from mixed metaphors.
Your three possible responses - Truth, Doubt, and Lie - are utterly confusing. Only one of them (Doubt) is a player action. I had to read the instruction manual before I realized that "Lie" isn't something you can do. The actual action is "Accuse", which you do if you think they are lying. Likewise "Truth" really means "Believe" as in "Believe what they just said". How such a mixed up UI got through focus testing I can't imagine, since I find it hard to believe many people figured it out without being told by a Team Bondi QA person what the hell those buttons actually meant.
It also took me several interrogations to realize that you have a fourth option, not shown on-screen, "Present Evidence", which only appears if you choose "Lie" (which really means "Accuse"). Counter-intuitively, choosing the "Lie" option - which seems like the harshest option - is the only one you can back out of, since if you accuse them of lying but then decide you don't have the evidence you can backpedal out of the accusation. Why can't you do that with "Doubt"? It would be incredibly useful since the resulting dialogue often is not a measured expression of doubt but a random outburst from Phelps on an entirely new subject.
Has no one at Team Bondi played Phoenix Wright? That game came out years ago, has virtually the same statement analysis / present evidence mechanics, and presents them logically, elegantly, clearly in the first 5 minutes. This failure to learn from other games is bizarre, considering the audience L.A. Noire is going after, which is apparently much more mainstream than Phoenix Wright. I know more than one baby boomer who has finished every Phoenix Wright game - all five of them - and I can't imagine any of these people suffering through L.A. Noire's bewildering interface enough to realize it's the same game.
Only hardcore gamers have the patience for such nonsense, which further begs the question of what, exactly, is the point of spending so much time and money on photo-realistic performance-capture? Does Rockstar/Bondi actually think the mainstream audience such stunts are designed to snare would be able to parse their game? What kind of people spend all that money on breaking games out of their low-culture niche and then hide the solution to their byzantine game mechanics in the instruction manual?
UPDATE
I just heard you can skip the driving in L.A. Noire. I tried it out and sure enough if you hold (as opposed to tap) the 'get in car' button, Phelps will tell his partner to drive, at which point it simply skips to the destination. How players are supposed to figure this out I'm not sure, but it does make the game less tedious. It also makes it even more obvious that the open-world aspects are an entirely disposable legacy feature inherited from GTA.
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