Certain the facial animation technology is amazing and the best I have ever seen. And they seem to be integrating it into the gameplay so that reading faces becomes a major part of the game. Difficult to pull off but if they are even moderately successful it could lead games to a whole new level of character development and storytelling.
Depends on how good the game is.
LA Noire is, apparently, basically “Grand Theft Auto: LA Confidential,” in that it’s yet another GTA on the heels of the various GTA games and the Red Dead games, which are just GTA: Old West. So the question is how well the gaming audience will warm up to another GTA game in this particular environment.
That they’re pulling out the stops in getting realistic facial movement is interesting but it seems unlikely to be that it will revolutionize video games, in the sense of dramatically altering the direction video games are going. We’ve been moving towards greater realism in graphics for some time now; this strike me as being an evolutionary step, not a revolution.
I think the really exciting part is the integration of the facial technology with the gameplay. From that clip it appears that players have to make decisions about who to trust based on facial expressions. I don’t know if that has ever been done before and if it works it could revolutionize story-based games.
Agreed. I have no problem enjoying the aesthetics of older games that don’t use this technology, but you can really see the emotions of the characters.
Well, it’s certyainly nice, Lantern… but that’s not revolutionary. That’s a gimmick. It mjgiht be a good gimmick, mind, but still a gimmick. It’s somewhat appropriate for some genres some of the time, but it’s hardly going to change gaming forever.
I suspect this technology is going to die rather quickly, as the potential for abuse is just way too high. Nobody wants to play a game that involves little more than watching characters talk, that’s why it never caught on despite FMV technology being more than up to the task and why everyone hated Final Fantasy 13 unless they were a brain-damaged JRPG fan. Certainly having excellent acting and facial animations is going to make a good game that much better. However, it’s one thing for Rockstar to do it with their ability to throw fantastic sums of money at a game’s development and quite another for a smaller studio to spend time and money on this technology instead of artists or beta testing. If it does catch on, it’ll be a short time before too much development cash is spent chasing down big name actors, which is going to worsen all of the problems that out-of-control development costs are already costing.
FMV isn’t up to the task, precisely because it limits you to little more than watching characters talk. Facial animations generated as a 3d object rather than a video allows for things like Half Life 2, where you are free to look around the room or just walk off and leave the NPC to follow you if you don’t want to sit and watch the facial animations.
You should probably review how this technology works and its implementation in LA Noire. It’s going to have the same limitations.
You are not watching the characters talk; you are interacting with them. Here is the IGN preview:
So the better you are at reading people the faster you will progress through the game. This is a whole new dimension of gameplay which I don’t think has ever been seen before and is certainly not possible with FMV.
What part of that isn’t possible with FMV? It’s not like the content is being generated procedurally. Everything is pre-recorded and pre-captured, just like FMV. It’s basically a 16 year update of In the 1st Degree.
Yes, kind of, no.
Yes, in that it offers the ability for a real crime/mystery game to be possible.
Kind of, because most games do just fine with regular, or no, cutscenes, so while it adds immersion, its not really revolutionary, nor even useful in all environments, since you need to be focused on the face of the speaker to make it worthwhile. Not common in fps games, or outside of cutscenes tbh.
And no, because not all that many companies will be able to afford such a huge bump in studio time.
I think the difference is a great deal more interactivity while asking questions. For example you can point to particular piece of evidence that you have already collected if you choose to disbelieve a suspect. It is also possible to interact with objects in the room while you are questioning a person; perhaps giving you vital information to pursue a line of questioning. And from a purely visual standpoint interacting with characters in the same game world that your character moves in is a lot more satisfying than watching a bunch of videos.
I should note that the game isn’t only going to be about questioning and puzzles. The usual GTA-style action elements will also be there.
No, it’s not. FMV can only display an animation from a pre-defined viewpoint, just like a movie only allows you to watch from the point of view of the camera. The viewer cannot decide on the fly that they want the camera to go there and look there, because the information simply doesn’t exist. This weakness does not exist for 3d graphics because while the animations are pre-recorded, they can be generated for viewing from any angle.
Which is utterly irrelevant for the basic nature of the technology. It’s all still pre-generated by art designers, only they’re working with 3d facial models instead of 2d art. For the viewer, the ability to move the screen slightly doesn’t ultimately make that much of a difference to the fact that all you’re doing is going, “that guy looks guilty” and “that guy looks honest.”
It does make a difference because you can explore the room for information which you can then use in the interrogation. Game Informer did acover story on the LA Noire which describes this:
And then a bit later:
So the dialogue may be pre-generated but the characters inhabit a fully interactive world.
Again, video games have been getting increasingly interactive for a long time. LA Noire uses more advanced technology than previous examples to generate facial expressions. That’s neat but it’s not revolutionary; the gameplay, as your’re describing it, is nothing new. The new part is merely the generation of facial expressions through motion capture.
I think we need to play the game before deciding if it’s the next revolution in video games. Revolutionary is a really strong term. You could even argue that we won’t have an answer to that for several years after the game’s release.
I would say the gameplay is pretty new. Which earlier game could have the kind of interaction described in the quotes in my previous post? I haven’t played the old FMV games but my understanding is the character interaction was basically watching a bunch of videos and choosing what question to ask. You are not really interacting with the character’s world like in LA Noire.
This game looks great! Seems like it was probably influenced by Heavy Rain, too, which is good to see.
Anyway regardless of how revolutionary the gameplay is, LA Noire will probably set new standards in terms of the immersiveness and realism of the setting. From the Game Informer preview:
I doubt it will revolutionize video games, but hopefully it leads to a revamp of the adventure game genre. Discworld Noir was brilliant, and having facial expressions rather than the main character thinking, “I could tell he was lying, but I needed to catch him out somehow.”
There are the Phoenix Wright games on the DS which scratch that itch, but the immersive world of LA Noire looks like it could be worth a look.