I just started playing this last night and actually managed to screw up the interrogation with Mr. Kalou, believe it or not. I quickly started the interrogation over, despite my initial intent to live with any poor decisions I made. Oh well!
I also got the Rockstar pass.
I messed up too because I wanted to try to do something different than Giant Bomb's quicklook. Luckily you can just...start the interrogation again, with him pretending like you haven't just spoken already.
I've look on the Playstation Store for LA Noire DLC twice now and can't find it. Is it up there somewhere? I can't see an entry for LA Noire at all, let alone DLC.
We see Cole at the end having ordered the burning of the hospital by accident. Courtney shoots him, right? Then Kelso leaves Cole to die, but somehow Cole escapes? Is that what happens?
We see Cole at the end having ordered the burning of the hospital by accident. Courtney shoots him, right? Then Kelso leaves Cole to die, but somehow Cole escapes? Is that what happens?
I just finished the game too. I think, in that scene,
Kelso orders his men to call for someone to help Cole before he leaves.
We see Cole at the end having ordered the burning of the hospital by accident. Courtney shoots him, right? Then Kelso leaves Cole to die, but somehow Cole escapes? Is that what happens?
I just finished the game too. I think, in that scene,
Kelso orders his men to call for someone to help Cole before he leaves.
Yeah, someone's even helping him walk out of the cave. He's not left for dead, they just wanted him hurt.
I'm so bored of this game. I really want to finish but it just feels like a chore. Nothing I do feels like it matters and it appears that the game is set up that way. I feel cheated.
We see Cole at the end having ordered the burning of the hospital by accident. Courtney shoots him, right? Then Kelso leaves Cole to die, but somehow Cole escapes? Is that what happens?
I just finished the game too. I think, in that scene,
Kelso orders his men to call for someone to help Cole before he leaves.
Yeah, someone's even helping him walk out of the cave. He's not left for dead, they just wanted him hurt.
-Even though I'm not trying for trophies, I felt the need to 5-star every case. Luckily, the later ones seemed to be easier to nail in one try. All the replays and free-roaming have added up to 35 hours.
-You'd think that an ex-Marine like Phelps could run faster. And balance beams were shitty in Uncharted, and they're just as bad here. All three of them.
-I was hoping that Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell in Mad Men) would show up! I would have expected a bigger role for him, but I'll take what I can get.
Major Story and Endgame
The Elsa thing caught me by surprise. Once I learned that Cole was married, I was fully expecting the wife to get caught up in things, like in
15 year old movie
Seven
so to me, this was preferable.
It took me a long time to warm up to Kelso, because we had mostly seen him through Phelps's eyes. (And his character on the current/final season of Friday Night Lights didn't help, either). But he redeemed himself with the whole Monroe mansion sequence. So great.
I honestly had forgotten about the early newspaper scenes with the firebug. I really wasn't expecting those scenes to tie in so directly.
EDIT: Rockstar put out an LA Noire short story collection last week. Generally well-known authors, with stories "inspired by" the game, or set in the game's world. It's a free ebook download, at majorebookdealers. I haven't read it yet, but... free!
I'm wondering do each street mission only have one ending? After the one when I kill someone I always wonder if there was some way to take them in alive.
I'm wondering do each street mission only have one ending? After the one when I kill someone I always wonder if there was some way to take them in alive.
If it's a "chase this guy then shoot him" mission, I shoot them in the legs to see if it makes a difference. I've had a few such missions end with Phelps calling for an ambulance rather than standing there in silence with yet another death on his conscience.
I think of Phelps as a bumbling do-gooder, trying his best to be a good cop but ultimately fucking up by killing suspects at random. And sometimes taking too long to deal with a bank robbery because he's trying to shoot everyone's hats off.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
I'm wondering do each street mission only have one ending? After the one when I kill someone I always wonder if there was some way to take them in alive.
If it's a "chase this guy then shoot him" mission, I shoot them in the legs to see if it makes a difference. I've had a few such missions end with Phelps calling for an ambulance rather than standing there in silence with yet another death on his conscience.
I think of Phelps as a bumbling do-gooder, trying his best to be a good cop but ultimately fucking up by killing suspects at random. And sometimes taking too long to deal with a bank robbery because he's trying to shoot everyone's hats off.
I just did my second street crime mission. It involved shooting two guys in a pawn shop, then confronting a guy with a hostage on the roof. I shot him in the head, but at the end Phelps merely reported that the suspect was down and to call for an ambulance. Weird.
So I bought this week of release but only just now got to play it yesterday. My fiance is a big Mad Men fan and so we were going to play through it together and this was our first opportunity to both sit down with it.
I cannot get through the first investigation without the game freezing on me (360 version). It doesn't matter if the game is installed or not, it still freezes before I can get through that alley. Disc doesn't appear to have any scratches. Apparently this is an issue a lot of other people have had too.
WTF game developers? I play games on a console instead of PC so I don't have to put up with this kind of crap. Now I've got to figure out if I should return the game, or hope they patch it in a reasonable amount of time.
If only you could control the windscreen wipers and turn signals on cars.
The game is stellar at simulating ACTUAL California driving conditions, right down to the people who turn left immediately in front of you at green lights.
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I'm wondering do each street mission only have one ending? After the one when I kill someone I always wonder if there was some way to take them in alive.
If it's a "chase this guy then shoot him" mission, I shoot them in the legs to see if it makes a difference. I've had a few such missions end with Phelps calling for an ambulance rather than standing there in silence with yet another death on his conscience.
I think of Phelps as a bumbling do-gooder, trying his best to be a good cop but ultimately fucking up by killing suspects at random. And sometimes taking too long to deal with a bank robbery because he's trying to shoot everyone's hats off.
I just did my second street crime mission. It involved shooting two guys in a pawn shop, then confronting a guy with a hostage on the roof. I shot him in the head, but at the end Phelps merely reported that the suspect was down and to call for an ambulance. Weird.
I've got 40/40. You can't bring them in any way than the mission would have otherwise resolved. You can't bring them in alive or bring them in dead, you just end the mission.
So, now that I've had time to properly ingest the game's conclusion...
Team Bondi succeeds brilliantly at re-creating a vision of post-war Los Angeles. The authentic dialogue leads the charge, but the set and costume design set the tone every bit as well as something like Mad Men. This world simply FEELS like the world my grandfather returned to after fighting in the Pacific Theatre.
But as a linear narrative experience? The game is a storytelling clusterfuck. There are a lot of great ideas to be played with, but they're rarely paced out or given proper emphasis. Here's what I'm talking about -
An Okinawa veteran joins the police force as penance for routinely fucking up in the war. His unearned reputation as a hero force him into the spotlight and robs him of a chance to heal from a horrid combo of survivor's guilt and PTSD. He finds solace in the arms of a German expatriate Jazz Singer who relies on morphine to combat her own past.
That up there is a great, great story. Unfortunately, nearly all of that is only discovered in the last three hours of the game. Cole's World War II past isn't just a part of his character- it is HIS character. When players say they feel gut punched by Cole suddenly having an affair, it's not because of amazing foreshadowing or "Dude, it's a noir. Stuff like that happens". What players are actually realizing is that we don't know Cole AT ALL.
If the writers were to, say, reveal that Cole is covering up his shaky WWII past earlier in the game, we would be much more committed in his plight. And therefore, the game could still have kept the reveal that Elsa and Cole were sleeping together, and then showing us that they are bonding over their mutual past horrors. But that isn't shown, its told to us. In a lengthy, exposition heavy scene between Elsa and Fontaine in the last hour of play.
Similarly, the newspaper cutscenes deflate tension and suspense. For instance, when I'm interviewing Kelso for the first time - I, the player, should be wondering if Kelso really is on it or if he's protecting his buddies. Instead, I'm thinking - well, duh, I just saw him threaten Mickey Cohen an hour ago in an unrelated cutscene. A single cutscene between Fontaine and the arsonist mere hours in the game completely destroys the latter arson investigation.
I love love love the way that Courtney Sheldon is used to link the morphine and the shoddy GI house scam. Its very intricate plotting, and has a nice elegance to it. But because the narrative has already vomited up pieces of information I can't be WITH Cole in the investigation, trying to put it together.
It is also beyond reason that Cole's big moment of recognition and redemption - him telling Roy to go to hell over the dead body of Courtney, is somehow in a damn newspaper scene. Why on earth did they not start that act with that scene, and have the newspaper show the Elsa/Fontaine conversation?
I guess that's what has me so bummed about LA Noire. It is a dense, dense storytelling experience with an intricate plot and a great sense of place. The mistakes it makes aren't difficult crazy necessary tradeoffs that exist in genre fiction. They are bumbling, obvious mistakes that anyone with even the slightest knowledge in narrative pacing could fix.
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HedgethornAssociate Professor of Historical Hobby HorsesIn the Lions' DenRegistered Userregular
So, now that I've had time to properly ingest the game's conclusion...
Team Bondi succeeds brilliantly at re-creating a vision of post-war Los Angeles. The authentic dialogue leads the charge, but the set and costume design set the tone every bit as well as something like Mad Men. This world simply FEELS like the world my grandfather returned to after fighting in the Pacific Theatre.
But as a linear narrative experience? The game is a storytelling clusterfuck. There are a lot of great ideas to be played with, but they're rarely paced out or given proper emphasis. Here's what I'm talking about -
An Okinawa veteran joins the police force as penance for routinely fucking up in the war. His unearned reputation as a hero force him into the spotlight and robs him of a chance to heal from a horrid combo of survivor's guilt and PTSD. He finds solace in the arms of a German expatriate Jazz Singer who relies on morphine to combat her own past.
That up there is a great, great story. Unfortunately, nearly all of that is only discovered in the last three hours of the game. Cole's World War II past isn't just a part of his character- it is HIS character. When players say they feel gut punched by Cole suddenly having an affair, it's not because of amazing foreshadowing or "Dude, it's a noir. Stuff like that happens". What players are actually realizing is that we don't know Cole AT ALL.
If the writers were to, say, reveal that Cole is covering up his shaky WWII past earlier in the game, we would be much more committed in his plight. And therefore, the game could still have kept the reveal that Elsa and Cole were sleeping together, and then showing us that they are bonding over their mutual past horrors. But that isn't shown, its told to us. In a lengthy, exposition heavy scene between Elsa and Fontaine in the last hour of play.
Similarly, the newspaper cutscenes deflate tension and suspense. For instance, when I'm interviewing Kelso for the first time - I, the player, should be wondering if Kelso really is on it or if he's protecting his buddies. Instead, I'm thinking - well, duh, I just saw him threaten Mickey Cohen an hour ago in an unrelated cutscene. A single cutscene between Fontaine and the arsonist mere hours in the game completely destroys the latter arson investigation.
I love love love the way that Courtney Sheldon is used to link the morphine and the shoddy GI house scam. Its very intricate plotting, and has a nice elegance to it. But because the narrative has already vomited up pieces of information I can't be WITH Cole in the investigation, trying to put it together.
It is also beyond reason that Cole's big moment of recognition and redemption - him telling Roy to go to hell over the dead body of Courtney, is somehow in a damn newspaper scene. Why on earth did they not start that act with that scene, and have the newspaper show the Elsa/Fontaine conversation?
I guess that's what has me so bummed about LA Noire. It is a dense, dense storytelling experience with an intricate plot and a great sense of place. The mistakes it makes aren't difficult crazy necessary tradeoffs that exist in genre fiction. They are bumbling, obvious mistakes that anyone with even the slightest knowledge in narrative pacing could fix.
Your last paragraph sums up my feelings perfectly.
Also, I think L.A. Noire is a prime example of how far video games have to go in learning how to tell a story well.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
edited June 2011
I pretty much played this game all day today. I'm currently in the middle of the Silk Stocking Murder. Enjoying it a lot!
Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
Advertising for this game probably cost around that much
Who even knows how much it cost actually developing the game for years and years, not to mention inventing an entire facial capture system from scratch
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
edited June 2011
I just finished The Studio Secretary Murder. I thought I was doing well until the interrogations at the end. Looks like a lot of people had trouble with at least one of the questions. I used intuition during one of them and it told me that 6.5% get the proper result after using intuition. I missed an apparently crucial piece of evidence!
finished this a couple hours ago and went through the thread reading the spoilers. I can't really add anything about the ending that hasnt already been said, other than
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
I love this game so much and am enjoying the absolute fuck out of it. It's one of my favourite open world style games, even though I'm not exactly sure how "open world" it really is. The best feature - that I love the most - is I can have my damn partner drive. That makes my life so much better it's not even funny. I can just be all "You know dood, just drive me wherever I want while I chill out drinking my coffee [IRL coffee that is] and mulling over the case". I actually wish sometimes it wouldn't skip, so I could just sit there and have a think about things in between locations.
But so much love for this game and what it tries (and mostly succeeds at to boot) to accomplish.
So, now that I've had time to properly ingest the game's conclusion...
Team Bondi succeeds brilliantly at re-creating a vision of post-war Los Angeles. The authentic dialogue leads the charge, but the set and costume design set the tone every bit as well as something like Mad Men. This world simply FEELS like the world my grandfather returned to after fighting in the Pacific Theatre.
But as a linear narrative experience? The game is a storytelling clusterfuck. There are a lot of great ideas to be played with, but they're rarely paced out or given proper emphasis. Here's what I'm talking about -
An Okinawa veteran joins the police force as penance for routinely fucking up in the war. His unearned reputation as a hero force him into the spotlight and robs him of a chance to heal from a horrid combo of survivor's guilt and PTSD. He finds solace in the arms of a German expatriate Jazz Singer who relies on morphine to combat her own past.
That up there is a great, great story. Unfortunately, nearly all of that is only discovered in the last three hours of the game. Cole's World War II past isn't just a part of his character- it is HIS character. When players say they feel gut punched by Cole suddenly having an affair, it's not because of amazing foreshadowing or "Dude, it's a noir. Stuff like that happens". What players are actually realizing is that we don't know Cole AT ALL.
If the writers were to, say, reveal that Cole is covering up his shaky WWII past earlier in the game, we would be much more committed in his plight. And therefore, the game could still have kept the reveal that Elsa and Cole were sleeping together, and then showing us that they are bonding over their mutual past horrors. But that isn't shown, its told to us. In a lengthy, exposition heavy scene between Elsa and Fontaine in the last hour of play.
Similarly, the newspaper cutscenes deflate tension and suspense. For instance, when I'm interviewing Kelso for the first time - I, the player, should be wondering if Kelso really is on it or if he's protecting his buddies. Instead, I'm thinking - well, duh, I just saw him threaten Mickey Cohen an hour ago in an unrelated cutscene. A single cutscene between Fontaine and the arsonist mere hours in the game completely destroys the latter arson investigation.
I love love love the way that Courtney Sheldon is used to link the morphine and the shoddy GI house scam. Its very intricate plotting, and has a nice elegance to it. But because the narrative has already vomited up pieces of information I can't be WITH Cole in the investigation, trying to put it together.
It is also beyond reason that Cole's big moment of recognition and redemption - him telling Roy to go to hell over the dead body of Courtney, is somehow in a damn newspaper scene. Why on earth did they not start that act with that scene, and have the newspaper show the Elsa/Fontaine conversation?
I guess that's what has me so bummed about LA Noire. It is a dense, dense storytelling experience with an intricate plot and a great sense of place. The mistakes it makes aren't difficult crazy necessary tradeoffs that exist in genre fiction. They are bumbling, obvious mistakes that anyone with even the slightest knowledge in narrative pacing could fix.
I agree with absolutely everything you just said. LA Noire felt to me like a really, really good first game. It reminded me in many ways of Assassin's Creed. They're both incredibly promising games that are badly, fatally flawed. I hold out hope that LA Noire 2: Noire Harder will improve on everything that needed improving, while embracing everything that worked, just like AC2 did.
My biggest gripe is the goddamned questioning mechanic. It's a goddamned fucking guessing game. Sometimes the people will stare me right in the goddamn face without blinking, but Truth is still the wrong goddamned answer. Oh, and my favorite part: the correct response is to accuse them of lying, but the part where they lie won't actually happen until after you accuse them of lying.
It was an incredibly frustrating game, and I'm fucking baffled by the near unanimous praise it's been getting.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
Without spoiling anything for me, I haven't finished the game yet by far - but could you elaborate on some of the flaws? I think I can guess some, but I would be interested to know what the general opinion is. I love the game either way and I badly hope for a sequel that adds onto and improves this games features.
I agree with questioning though, but often telling if someone is lying isn't about noticing their expression - it's about knowing what the information they gave to you is wrong. Sometimes there will be tells, but often that is associated with the "doubt" option and not the outright lying one. At least as far as I have got.
I agree with questioning though, but often telling if someone is lying isn't about noticing their expression - it's about knowing what the information they gave to you is wrong.
Which is why it's so god damned aggravating when they don't contradict your evidence until after you've accused them of lying.
I also hate the "it is one of these two dudes" interrogation room parts.
I just did the Arson case where...
You get both of the criminals into separate rooms and start questioning them. I had only missed one question up to this point. I decide to question the felon on the run first. Yep, there is no way to get some of these questions right unless I had talked to the other guy first. Too bad I didn't find this out until I went to the Marxist last. No problem.. I can go back and show him the new evidence, right? NOPE!
The questioning in this game feels as if I am using Google's "Feeling Lucky" button. Sometimes I get what I want, other times I get goatse. Want to make sure you didn't miss a single question that led to an entire star? Better start the case over.
I've just started playing this, and done the Fallen Idol, though the ending to it feels wrong. I got 4 stars though, so I can't have fucked up too much can I?
Also the end of that case just doesn't fit. The larger scale action just seems generally out of place.
Also, I've gotten scared of using the doubt option because Cole decides that the person he's interviewing murdered everyone ever, and he's not just leaning on them for information.
I've just started playing this, and done the Fallen Idol, though the ending to it feels wrong. I got 4 stars though, so I can't have fucked up too much can I?
Also the end of that case just doesn't fit. The larger scale action just seems generally out of place.
Also, I've gotten scared of using the doubt option because Cole decides that the person he's interviewing murdered everyone ever, and he's not just leaning on them for information.
I am scared to use doubt around children. Phelps might just shoot them.
So, now that I've had time to properly ingest the game's conclusion...
Team Bondi succeeds brilliantly at re-creating a vision of post-war Los Angeles. The authentic dialogue leads the charge, but the set and costume design set the tone every bit as well as something like Mad Men. This world simply FEELS like the world my grandfather returned to after fighting in the Pacific Theatre.
But as a linear narrative experience? The game is a storytelling clusterfuck. There are a lot of great ideas to be played with, but they're rarely paced out or given proper emphasis. Here's what I'm talking about -
An Okinawa veteran joins the police force as penance for routinely fucking up in the war. His unearned reputation as a hero force him into the spotlight and robs him of a chance to heal from a horrid combo of survivor's guilt and PTSD. He finds solace in the arms of a German expatriate Jazz Singer who relies on morphine to combat her own past.
That up there is a great, great story. Unfortunately, nearly all of that is only discovered in the last three hours of the game. Cole's World War II past isn't just a part of his character- it is HIS character. When players say they feel gut punched by Cole suddenly having an affair, it's not because of amazing foreshadowing or "Dude, it's a noir. Stuff like that happens". What players are actually realizing is that we don't know Cole AT ALL.
If the writers were to, say, reveal that Cole is covering up his shaky WWII past earlier in the game, we would be much more committed in his plight. And therefore, the game could still have kept the reveal that Elsa and Cole were sleeping together, and then showing us that they are bonding over their mutual past horrors. But that isn't shown, its told to us. In a lengthy, exposition heavy scene between Elsa and Fontaine in the last hour of play.
Similarly, the newspaper cutscenes deflate tension and suspense. For instance, when I'm interviewing Kelso for the first time - I, the player, should be wondering if Kelso really is on it or if he's protecting his buddies. Instead, I'm thinking - well, duh, I just saw him threaten Mickey Cohen an hour ago in an unrelated cutscene. A single cutscene between Fontaine and the arsonist mere hours in the game completely destroys the latter arson investigation.
I love love love the way that Courtney Sheldon is used to link the morphine and the shoddy GI house scam. Its very intricate plotting, and has a nice elegance to it. But because the narrative has already vomited up pieces of information I can't be WITH Cole in the investigation, trying to put it together.
It is also beyond reason that Cole's big moment of recognition and redemption - him telling Roy to go to hell over the dead body of Courtney, is somehow in a damn newspaper scene. Why on earth did they not start that act with that scene, and have the newspaper show the Elsa/Fontaine conversation?
I guess that's what has me so bummed about LA Noire. It is a dense, dense storytelling experience with an intricate plot and a great sense of place. The mistakes it makes aren't difficult crazy necessary tradeoffs that exist in genre fiction. They are bumbling, obvious mistakes that anyone with even the slightest knowledge in narrative pacing could fix.
I agree with absolutely everything you just said. LA Noire felt to me like a really, really good first game. It reminded me in many ways of Assassin's Creed. They're both incredibly promising games that are badly, fatally flawed. I hold out hope that LA Noire 2: Noire Harder will improve on everything that needed improving, while embracing everything that worked, just like AC2 did.
My biggest gripe is the goddamned questioning mechanic. It's a goddamned fucking guessing game. Sometimes the people will stare me right in the goddamn face without blinking, but Truth is still the wrong goddamned answer. Oh, and my favorite part: the correct response is to accuse them of lying, but the part where they lie won't actually happen until after you accuse them of lying.
It was an incredibly frustrating game, and I'm fucking baffled by the near unanimous praise it's been getting.
I was getting all ready to write a big wall of text about what the game did right and wrong storytelling-wise but it looks like this thread mostly got to all my points first. Even though I thought this game was full of flaws, if they put out a sequel I would probably buy it in hopes that they'd correct them on the second go-round.
I do have a question though (ending spoilers):
The BD killer often referenced "Tex" when he wrote messages on his victims. Is this the same Tex that's setting the fires? Were he and the BD killer somehow related?
I agree with absolutely everything you just said. LA Noire felt to me like a really, really good first game. It reminded me in many ways of Assassin's Creed. They're both incredibly promising games that are badly, fatally flawed. I hold out hope that LA Noire 2: Noire Harder will improve on everything that needed improving, while embracing everything that worked, just like AC2 did.
I really hope they do an LA Noire 2, but if they did, it'll be at least three years. I expect Rockstar is operating on a yearly schedule, and would rotate GTA and Red Dead in before LAN, and would prefer a new francise before that.
This upsets me no end. No-one else will have the balls to make a game like LAN (thematically, which I loved, and conceptually, which I also loved).
My biggest gripe is the goddamned questioning mechanic. It's a goddamned fucking guessing game. Sometimes the people will stare me right in the goddamn face without blinking, but Truth is still the wrong goddamned answer. Oh, and my favorite part: the correct response is to accuse them of lying, but the part where they lie won't actually happen until after you accuse them of lying.
I think there are two things here that would improve it:
1. The player is shown that they are expected to get questions wrong.
2. Questions are not binary y/n answers.
At first, I was convinced that there were some questions that you simply couldn't get right, even if you had all the evidence. This was, I thought, part of the story. The wiley criminal was simply too smart to get caught on some line of interrogation. That there is always a right answer, and worse, some of these right answers are hidden behind implicit scene orderings, is annoying. I would prefer it if my original hunch really was the case, that you aren't made to feel like you should just restart the fucking chapter if you got a question wrong. The game should illustrate often and early that it's OK to get things wrong, and that's the way the game is set up. Not knowing whether there really was a right answer would take out a lot of the anxiety.
Taking this further, I'd like the binary y/n to go away entirely. Instead, your line of questioning is a sort of good cop/bad cop thing; you either help the witness open up by being nice, or you play hard ball and put them under stress. Different witnesses respond differently to a certain questioning style (indeed, Cole does this himself in some cases). Instead of a y/n feedback, you see the witness become more and more at ease/stressed. Once they are pushed too far, caught in one too many lies or whatever, then they break and give up some critical information. This way you're not simply playing this numbers game where you are trying to get all the answers right, you simply have to conduct a decent investigation.
One thing that played havoc with my gamer OCD was them immediately telling me how many questions I got incorrect at the end of every interrogation. Everything else in LA Noire pushes us away from this idea of a game as something to be completed and towards LAN as an experience to be savored.
So being told, hey asshole, you just got 1/5 questions right feels more like I'm playing Trivial Pursuit than a detective simulator.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
edited June 2011
Loaded the game up just now and I see it's downloading a new patch. On the PS3, at least. Anyone know what it does?
I don't know if someone has pointed this out already but anyway I noticed one of the pieces of music in the game sounded oddly familiar and it just struck me now what it is
Ok, I just got the game (for $25 at Toys R Us), haven't started it yet, but I'm seeing that the sale on the Rockstar DLC pass thing ends today. Looks to be at least 4 DLC cases (two out now, two soon, maybe more?) and some items/challenges/junk for $10.
Do we know what the price will be after today? If it's going from $10 to $12, that's not enough for me to buy the pass today - I'll wait to make sure I like the game enough to get DLC for it. But if it's jumping up to $20, I may pick it up sight unseen.
HedgethornAssociate Professor of Historical Hobby HorsesIn the Lions' DenRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
According to Cheap Ass Gamer, the Rockstar Pass will normally be $12. Also, each of the four DLC cases is $4 individually, so at most you're looking at $16 (provided you're not interested in three new suits for Phelps).
Ahh, good. Thanks. Saving a measly $2 isn't worth buying the DLC before even trying the game. I had seen a $20 price point flying around on some sites, but it's looking more like $20 is the price if you buy everything a la carte, $12 is the bundled price, and $10 is the discounted bundled price.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
edited June 2011
I finished the game about half an hour ago. Overall, I enjoyed it, but I agree with others that it seems like they really rushed the plot during the last part of the game.
Also, I think I missed a cutscene after the second to last "case" because I turned off the system right after finishing it. Guess I'll have to go back and check it out.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
edited June 2011
Surprised that no one bumped this thread! Why? Because the new DLC case is out.
Nicholson Electroplating. It's an arson case, which means more Biggs and that makes me happy. I liked Biggs. I'm still downloading it at the moment and not sure when I'll play it.
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I messed up too because I wanted to try to do something different than Giant Bomb's quicklook. Luckily you can just...start the interrogation again, with him pretending like you haven't just spoken already.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
I just finished the game too. I think, in that scene,
Hey, I have a blog! (Actually being updated again!)
3DS: 0860-3240-2604
Ah, alright, thanks guys!
-Even though I'm not trying for trophies, I felt the need to 5-star every case. Luckily, the later ones seemed to be easier to nail in one try. All the replays and free-roaming have added up to 35 hours.
-You'd think that an ex-Marine like Phelps could run faster. And balance beams were shitty in Uncharted, and they're just as bad here. All three of them.
-I was hoping that Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell in Mad Men) would show up! I would have expected a bigger role for him, but I'll take what I can get.
Major Story and Endgame
15 year old movie
It took me a long time to warm up to Kelso, because we had mostly seen him through Phelps's eyes. (And his character on the current/final season of Friday Night Lights didn't help, either). But he redeemed himself with the whole Monroe mansion sequence. So great.
I honestly had forgotten about the early newspaper scenes with the firebug. I really wasn't expecting those scenes to tie in so directly.
EDIT: Rockstar put out an LA Noire short story collection last week. Generally well-known authors, with stories "inspired by" the game, or set in the game's world. It's a free ebook download, at major ebook dealers. I haven't read it yet, but... free!
If it's a "chase this guy then shoot him" mission, I shoot them in the legs to see if it makes a difference. I've had a few such missions end with Phelps calling for an ambulance rather than standing there in silence with yet another death on his conscience.
I think of Phelps as a bumbling do-gooder, trying his best to be a good cop but ultimately fucking up by killing suspects at random. And sometimes taking too long to deal with a bank robbery because he's trying to shoot everyone's hats off.
I just did my second street crime mission. It involved shooting two guys in a pawn shop, then confronting a guy with a hostage on the roof. I shot him in the head, but at the end Phelps merely reported that the suspect was down and to call for an ambulance. Weird.
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I cannot get through the first investigation without the game freezing on me (360 version). It doesn't matter if the game is installed or not, it still freezes before I can get through that alley. Disc doesn't appear to have any scratches. Apparently this is an issue a lot of other people have had too.
WTF game developers? I play games on a console instead of PC so I don't have to put up with this kind of crap. Now I've got to figure out if I should return the game, or hope they patch it in a reasonable amount of time.
The game is stellar at simulating ACTUAL California driving conditions, right down to the people who turn left immediately in front of you at green lights.
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I've got 40/40. You can't bring them in any way than the mission would have otherwise resolved. You can't bring them in alive or bring them in dead, you just end the mission.
It's pretty dumb.
But as a linear narrative experience? The game is a storytelling clusterfuck. There are a lot of great ideas to be played with, but they're rarely paced out or given proper emphasis. Here's what I'm talking about -
An Okinawa veteran joins the police force as penance for routinely fucking up in the war. His unearned reputation as a hero force him into the spotlight and robs him of a chance to heal from a horrid combo of survivor's guilt and PTSD. He finds solace in the arms of a German expatriate Jazz Singer who relies on morphine to combat her own past.
That up there is a great, great story. Unfortunately, nearly all of that is only discovered in the last three hours of the game. Cole's World War II past isn't just a part of his character- it is HIS character. When players say they feel gut punched by Cole suddenly having an affair, it's not because of amazing foreshadowing or "Dude, it's a noir. Stuff like that happens". What players are actually realizing is that we don't know Cole AT ALL.
If the writers were to, say, reveal that Cole is covering up his shaky WWII past earlier in the game, we would be much more committed in his plight. And therefore, the game could still have kept the reveal that Elsa and Cole were sleeping together, and then showing us that they are bonding over their mutual past horrors. But that isn't shown, its told to us. In a lengthy, exposition heavy scene between Elsa and Fontaine in the last hour of play.
Similarly, the newspaper cutscenes deflate tension and suspense. For instance, when I'm interviewing Kelso for the first time - I, the player, should be wondering if Kelso really is on it or if he's protecting his buddies. Instead, I'm thinking - well, duh, I just saw him threaten Mickey Cohen an hour ago in an unrelated cutscene. A single cutscene between Fontaine and the arsonist mere hours in the game completely destroys the latter arson investigation.
I love love love the way that Courtney Sheldon is used to link the morphine and the shoddy GI house scam. Its very intricate plotting, and has a nice elegance to it. But because the narrative has already vomited up pieces of information I can't be WITH Cole in the investigation, trying to put it together.
It is also beyond reason that Cole's big moment of recognition and redemption - him telling Roy to go to hell over the dead body of Courtney, is somehow in a damn newspaper scene. Why on earth did they not start that act with that scene, and have the newspaper show the Elsa/Fontaine conversation?
I guess that's what has me so bummed about LA Noire. It is a dense, dense storytelling experience with an intricate plot and a great sense of place. The mistakes it makes aren't difficult crazy necessary tradeoffs that exist in genre fiction. They are bumbling, obvious mistakes that anyone with even the slightest knowledge in narrative pacing could fix.
Your last paragraph sums up my feelings perfectly.
Also, I think L.A. Noire is a prime example of how far video games have to go in learning how to tell a story well.
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899k copies at 'bout sixy bucks a pop gives us about $53,940,000.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOjTNuuEVw
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Who even knows how much it cost actually developing the game for years and years, not to mention inventing an entire facial capture system from scratch
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
4-starred it anyway.
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But so much love for this game and what it tries (and mostly succeeds at to boot) to accomplish.
I agree with absolutely everything you just said. LA Noire felt to me like a really, really good first game. It reminded me in many ways of Assassin's Creed. They're both incredibly promising games that are badly, fatally flawed. I hold out hope that LA Noire 2: Noire Harder will improve on everything that needed improving, while embracing everything that worked, just like AC2 did.
My biggest gripe is the goddamned questioning mechanic. It's a goddamned fucking guessing game. Sometimes the people will stare me right in the goddamn face without blinking, but Truth is still the wrong goddamned answer. Oh, and my favorite part: the correct response is to accuse them of lying, but the part where they lie won't actually happen until after you accuse them of lying.
It was an incredibly frustrating game, and I'm fucking baffled by the near unanimous praise it's been getting.
I agree with questioning though, but often telling if someone is lying isn't about noticing their expression - it's about knowing what the information they gave to you is wrong. Sometimes there will be tells, but often that is associated with the "doubt" option and not the outright lying one. At least as far as I have got.
Which is why it's so god damned aggravating when they don't contradict your evidence until after you've accused them of lying.
I just did the Arson case where...
The questioning in this game feels as if I am using Google's "Feeling Lucky" button. Sometimes I get what I want, other times I get goatse. Want to make sure you didn't miss a single question that led to an entire star? Better start the case over.
Also the end of that case just doesn't fit. The larger scale action just seems generally out of place.
Also, I've gotten scared of using the doubt option because Cole decides that the person he's interviewing murdered everyone ever, and he's not just leaning on them for information.
I am scared to use doubt around children. Phelps might just shoot them.
I was getting all ready to write a big wall of text about what the game did right and wrong storytelling-wise but it looks like this thread mostly got to all my points first. Even though I thought this game was full of flaws, if they put out a sequel I would probably buy it in hopes that they'd correct them on the second go-round.
I do have a question though (ending spoilers):
I really hope they do an LA Noire 2, but if they did, it'll be at least three years. I expect Rockstar is operating on a yearly schedule, and would rotate GTA and Red Dead in before LAN, and would prefer a new francise before that.
This upsets me no end. No-one else will have the balls to make a game like LAN (thematically, which I loved, and conceptually, which I also loved).
I think there are two things here that would improve it:
1. The player is shown that they are expected to get questions wrong.
2. Questions are not binary y/n answers.
At first, I was convinced that there were some questions that you simply couldn't get right, even if you had all the evidence. This was, I thought, part of the story. The wiley criminal was simply too smart to get caught on some line of interrogation. That there is always a right answer, and worse, some of these right answers are hidden behind implicit scene orderings, is annoying. I would prefer it if my original hunch really was the case, that you aren't made to feel like you should just restart the fucking chapter if you got a question wrong. The game should illustrate often and early that it's OK to get things wrong, and that's the way the game is set up. Not knowing whether there really was a right answer would take out a lot of the anxiety.
Taking this further, I'd like the binary y/n to go away entirely. Instead, your line of questioning is a sort of good cop/bad cop thing; you either help the witness open up by being nice, or you play hard ball and put them under stress. Different witnesses respond differently to a certain questioning style (indeed, Cole does this himself in some cases). Instead of a y/n feedback, you see the witness become more and more at ease/stressed. Once they are pushed too far, caught in one too many lies or whatever, then they break and give up some critical information. This way you're not simply playing this numbers game where you are trying to get all the answers right, you simply have to conduct a decent investigation.
So being told, hey asshole, you just got 1/5 questions right feels more like I'm playing Trivial Pursuit than a detective simulator.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcvL7fdzkoA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4aK-YsPeU
XBL, Steam & Tribes: elmartino333
Do we know what the price will be after today? If it's going from $10 to $12, that's not enough for me to buy the pass today - I'll wait to make sure I like the game enough to get DLC for it. But if it's jumping up to $20, I may pick it up sight unseen.
Also, I think I missed a cutscene after the second to last "case" because I turned off the system right after finishing it. Guess I'll have to go back and check it out.
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Nicholson Electroplating. It's an arson case, which means more Biggs and that makes me happy. I liked Biggs. I'm still downloading it at the moment and not sure when I'll play it.
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