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Rockstar Games
Image from L.A. Noire

Rockstar Games last week released L.A. Noire, a hypnotic detective thriller developed by Australian studio Team Bondi. The videogame has been called groundbreaking for the facial-recognition technology used to create its characters, and the resulting psychological dimensions of gameplay. In witness questioning and interrogation sequences, the player, as young detective Cole Phelps, tries to ascertain the truths and lies in what he’s told. Because L.A. Noire’s cast of characters feature the recorded facial performances of its actors, rather than hand-animated abstractions of feeling, the gameplay carries the emotional ambiguity and weight of a cop show or film noir. We spoke via email with Jeronimo Barrera, VP of product development at Rockstar, about the process of building the game.

Speakeasy: The team used maps from the Works Progress Administration, archival photographs from newspapers, and aerial photos as reference material for the environment. Can the eight-square-mile section of Los Angeles recreated in the game be considered documentary or used as research material in its own right?

Jeronimo Barrera: We went to a great deal of effort in every area, from the details of the interiors of certain key buildings, licensing classic billboards, and recreating former landmarks, but it’s not a block-for-block recreation—we are trying to make something that feels real, not that replicates reality. We have to make some concessions to game design, alongside more pedestrian things like building licensing. A great example of the lighter side of the issues involved is the fact that in 1947, all the palm trees in L.A. were still roughly head-high. But when they were designed that way in the game, they had the opposite effect to being realistic—they actually distracted players from the experience, so we designed them at full height. We also designed the game to be slightly less smoggy than L.A. was at the time.

Past games from Rockstar have featured antiheroes as main characters. In this game, the protagonist is a cop. What level of moral ambiguity is written into the character and the game as a whole?

L.A. Noire is very different from our other games in a lot of ways, and one of them is that Cole Phelps is a by-the-book detective, and so the game is designed with that in mind. He can only draw his weapon when fired upon, or to fire a warning shot, for example. That said, it wouldn’t be noir if there wasn’t some complexity to the character, but that’s part of the story arc of the game. We have tried, in the past, to ensure that our anti-heroes have some redeeming qualities, and equally in this game we have tried to give Phelps a few weaknesses so he is far from the whiter-than-white hero he presents himself as at the start of the game.

Actors were recorded in an environment akin to a high-tech science-fiction setting. How were they directed to deliver believable, and relatable, performances while sitting alone in a chair and soundproof room?

The MotionScan room houses a rig of 32 high-definition 2D cameras that shoot an actor’s head—and only the head—from every angle, and actors would focus their performances on a main bank of cameras set in front of them. It was definitely an alien process at first, but we discovered a way to help humanize the process and help the actors emote just by placing a small print of the Mona Lisa in front of them to act toward and provide a sight line. Using an external monitor and microphone, Brendan McNamara, the game’s writer and director, would feed the actors their lines and direct individual performances.

Soon, the actors were accustomed to the rig and delivered incredible performances. It was practically a second home.

What limitations does the system have?

Right now, the system can only capture facial performances, but there’s a potential for it to capture a lot more in the future.

Do you feel that you’ve conquered the uncanny valley?

There’s always more work to be done, but the work in L.A. Noire is a huge leap forward—there has never been a greater level of emotion and realism in a videogame. What’s incredible about this is that we didn’t achieve this simply by using CG characters in non-interactive cutscenes. Every character in the game—some 400 in all—was created with this technology, and it is present in every scene, whether you’re talking to your partner during a shootout or searching a crime scene for clues.

The character bodies use existing motion-capture technology. There’s thus a disconnect between how their faces and their bodies have been realized. Is this an issue for the believability of the world?

For both facial and body animations we have used the best available technology. The facial tech is newer, but we feel this only brings it close to the level of motion capture. Faces were where the great leap in detail is really needed. For years, developers have been able design characters that move realistically. We used modern motion-capture techniques to obtain the information on the bodies, and then connected the heads to them. The difference is, motion capture assembles data on the skeleton of a character—MotionScan is the literal transfer of a real actor’s performance into the world of the game.

How explicit is the game’s connection between police procedurals and cinematic or literary noir?

The game is designed to play out a lot like a classic police procedural, but styled and themed in the traditions of noir. The game takes place across five “desks” of the LAPD—Patrol, Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson. Each desk consists of three to six self-contained cases, each with their own unique challenges. The game itself references classic noir and neo-noir both literally and obliquely, but the key thread here is that almost everyone you meet is hiding something—and the Cole Phelps we meet at the beginning of the game is a very different man than he is when you finally finish.

More on L.A. Noire:

Dropping Bodies Into Computer-Generated Films

Gamer As Gumshoe