L.A. Noire Kind of Sucks

There. I said it. The critical darling of the moment, the commercial success, the video game that looks more like a film than any other video game before it, L.A. Noire — it kind of sucks.

I’m not entirely alone in my assessment. Michael Thomsen at IGN posted a pretty thorough take-down of the game in his Contrarian Corner column.¹ I don’t agree with his disparagement of the film noir genre. If it’s littered with one too many (or one thousand too many) ineffective executions, that hardly undercuts the entire genre, and besides, all genres have their predictable tropes and standard conventions.

Yet Thomsen lays out a solid argument when he dissects the game’s mechanics.

Like an unsuspecting private dick, L.A. Noire is doomed before it even begins by virtue of Team Bondi and Rockstar’s most basic choice to set the game in an open world. The worst compromise comes with the investigation scenes where Cole Phelps walks around crime scenes looking for clues. These scenes require players to absorb a lot of visual information and filter out the irrelevant details. Yet there is no mechanic for looking. Players have camera control during these scenes, but it is an amended version of the car racing camera necessary for the driving scenes, the real mechanical heart of the game. Instead of seeing the world through Phelps’ eyes, these scenes have you watching from a distance as Phelps looks at things.

You can read the rest of the article if you want to get more details on how the mechanical schizophrenia of the game is its ultimate undoing. What Thomsen does not say, at least explicitly, is this.

A video game is only as good as its gaming mechanics. Each and every medium for artistic expression has its own unique quirks and functional requirements. Literature, even of the trashiest variety, has the capacity to include an enormous amount of internal monologue. Film, on the other hand, is more limited in this particular area. This is a simple fact of the different mediums; one is overtly visual while the other is more descriptive. You can tell the same story in both mediums, but you can’t exactly tell it the same way.

Video games have matured at a rapid clip over the past few decades, but the nature of the medium remains essentially the same as it did when we all played Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s about the gameplay mechanics. Get that wrong, and it won’t matter how jaw-dropping your graphics are, because in contrast to the medium of cinema, video games enthrall their audience through the interactivity of the experience. The best games meld the underlying gameplay with appropriate graphics, sound cues, textual elements, and other conventions we’re familiar with from movies, comic books, novels, and the like.

In the case of L.A. Noire, the basic mechanics of the game, the interactive heart of the experience, is flawed. The graphics are admittedly impressive. The motion-captured performances are sight to behold, and the technology will almost certainly be used in the future to enhance video games as an art form. But because the gameplay is flawed, the game fails.

Yes, I’m lamenting that video games spend too much time trying to create stellar graphics, mimicking the spectacle of film, and not enough time perfecting the interactive experience at the heart of the medium. It’s an argument as old as time, or at least as old as video games.² It’s been hashed and rehashed, including a rather poetic and introspective discussion by a relative non-gamer, Nicholas Baker in The New Yorker. Perhaps his piece is so good, because he doesn’t seem aware of the argument he’s tripping into.

I should also credit Slate for their year-end gaming club discussion, which pointed me in the direction of Baker’s piece.³ Perhaps nowhere has the argument been better argued, from all sides, but I find myself siding with the professional critic who wrote:

[Games] are generally the only media that require the consumer to physically participate in creating the experience. If the game isn’t fun or entertaining to actually play, the audience will simply put it down. And then nothing else matters.

In L.A. Noire, that is exactly what happened to me. I played, and I played, and at some point I realized the game felt more like a chore. I didn’t want to finish it. That’s when, despite being most of the way through the damned thing, I popped it out of my Playstation 3, drove to the nearest Gamestop, and exchanged it for Mass Effect 2.⁴

What made L.A. Noire so maddening was how poorly developed the basic mechanics were. The game has a simple setup: each case opens with a crime scene full of evidence, which point you in the direction of other places of interest, wherein you will find individuals that must be interrogated. At each scene, you’ll look around for clues that you will then use during your interrogations. For each question, you’ll be confronted with moments when you can accept a person’s statement as the truth or a lie. If you think they might be lying, but you’ve got no evidence to confront them, you can go with doubt. There is right and wrong answers, and depending on which choices you make, the way the case unfolds will change.

Except, no it won’t. The cases always end. You always get moved along until you’ve interviewed everyone and collected your evidence and make an arrest. You could literally get every single truth/doubt/lie choice wrong, miss buckets full of evidence, and you’re still going to get through the narrative.

While it’s unlikely you could get it so wrong, you’d be forgiven for frequently coming close. The motion-capture technology and subtle facial emotions are supposed to help clue you in, but they’re clumsily effected. At one point, I pulled up a walk-through of the game and replayed a case I’d done poorly on. It didn’t take me long to realize that half of this is pure lucky guessing, with no sound logic to speak of. Or as Thomsen wrote:

In other sequences, I found myself facing the truth/doubt/lie prompt after a statement that contained multiple parts and I felt at a loss as to which I was supposed to be evaluating. Inevitably, I’d make a choice thinking I was responding to one point and Phelps would suddenly start talking about another that I hadn’t wanted to address. Characters have a delightfully mysterious capacity to emote and show cues of nervousness, anger, doubt, shock, and fear, and yet the only way to interface with that nuance is the conversational sledgehammer of yes/no/maybe.

Thomsen also cites the way the camera is setup for an open world environment akin to Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, something that is entirely inappropriate for a game where you have nothing to do in that open world, but must instead look around crime scenes for tiny little clues amidst a cacophony of potential details. About a third of the way through, I turned to a friend and condensed the game to this:

“You walk around every square inch of a scene, waiting for your controller to rumble to let you know you’ve found a clue. Then you press X. Once you hear a music cue, you’re done. Then you go interview the person at the scene. You kind of guess if they’re telling the truth or lying or whatever, and then you press X (or square or triangle). Once you’ve asked all of the pre-selected questions, you move on to the next scene. Repeat. Eventually, you’re given the chance to make an arrest. You press X. Then it’s the next case. Repeat.”

I’ll admit. South Park did it better.

Never has a game gotten the video-game-as-movie model so wrong. In the words of Stan, “Who plays video games to listen to a bunch of characters talk and press the X button?” I sure as hell don’t.

I do, however, play video games to interact with the world. I do play video games to have some real control over the outcome of the game. I do play video games to feel some sense of accomplishment and reward at the end of a challenging series of tasks.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an essentially linear narrative that mimics the structure of a film. Uncharted, a series that’s about to release its third title later this year, has mastered the formula. There’s also nothing wrong with a storyline that branches based on the choices of the player, forcing you to accept the consequences of your actions and ultimately govern the way the story unfolds. Good examples of this include the aforementioned Mass Effect franchise, as well as the old Knights of the Old Republic games.⁵

L.A. Noire tries to be both, melding motion-capture cinema-level graphics with a branching storyline that shifts with the player’s choices. It deserves credit for the graphics, but it also deserves a massive heaping of criticism for its utter failure as a game with logical mechanics that engrosses the player.⁶