My favorite video game is L.A. Noire and my favorite show is The Wire. In LA Noire, you have to explore an extremely realistic city, investigate very detailed crime scenes where you have to examine all kinds of evidence and clues and look in every nook and cranny for items that might be relevant to the case, and then interrogate suspects using a very elaborate system where you have to read their facial expressions and voice, compare their testimony with the clues and research you were able to dig up, and then figure out whether they’re telling the truth. It’s basically the most interesting and revolutionary game ever, which is why I cannot understand why no other game with the same system has been made in nearly a decade since LA Noire. The incredibly badass real-life 40s cars including sports roadsters and weird concept cars, is just the icing on the cake.
For a really long time, I have wished like hell that there was a game using this same kind of system, but set in a contemporary inner-city environment like Baltimore in The Wire, and utilizing modern technology like surveillance and wire taps and hidden cameras, and involving an extremely deep story that ranges from the most squalid ghetto environments to the corruption all the way at the top of the system. This would have to be really, really ambitious and it would have to be made by a company that had a lot of money. One of my ultimate fantasies in life is to eventually be rich enough where I can finance the production of this game. If I were Elon Musk, this game would exist, full stop. I don’t know how rich you have to be to finance the production of a game, or how many different investors you need to have, but maybe with Crowdsourcing, and a really good, coherent, vivid pitch of the game concept, I might be able to get some people on board with the idea.
Huh. I played LA Noire for like four hours or so, and got so frustrated by the long cut scenes and the arbitrary (to me) facial expression clues that I gave up. I didn’t realize the game had such big fans.
Looking at Wikipedia, it seems that my view was in the minority: it reviewed and sold well. Maybe my weakness in facial expression is at fault? Also I played the PC port, and I’ve hated every Rockstar game I’ve played as a PC port, so maybe that’s it.
I looooooved LA Noire. It was the closest I’ve ever been to feeling like I was in a procedural cop show. I’d love to see a gritty, modern version of it.
This was probably the fault of the following phenomenon, which was not uncommon among people who played it and which did, indeed, generate criticism similar to that which you yourself just offered:
The gameplay mechanism did not sufficiently clarify the importance of the distinction between “doubt” and “lie.” First of all, the choices themselves are confusingly named. “Lie” means “you are accusing them outright of lying.” You CAN ONLY ACCUSE THEM OF LYING IF YOU HAVE FOUND A SPECIFIC PIECE OF EVIDENCE, such as a clue or an alibi, that directly refutes whatever it is they are saying. If you do not KNOW for sure that you have, IN the “Notebook”, something that is direct proof that they are lying [and you can check the investigation notes during the interrogation, remember] , then you cannot use “lie.” You MUST use “doubt.” This is totally regardless of their facial expressions, tone of voice, or anything else involving the character animation and voice, which people tried to over-read. (And it’s arguably a flaw of the gameplay that it invites over-reading.)
If there were a game like The Wire it would repeatedly allow you to almost capture an opponent only to crash just before you him with the message “Error 0808: Bureaucratic interrupt”. It would then switch to another character and villain, and repeat over and over again. It would present complex characters that then get killed off or their stories sidelined just as they were getting really interesting, and then a random NPC walking down the street would get killed for no reason whatsoever, causing a memory overflow error. Finally, the game press would start to cover it in game but get confused at the complexity and so insist on focusing instead on a story that some reporter completely made up about a serial killer preying on NPC, only it would turn out to be the player faking their deaths in order to keep the game from crashing through malloc pointer defects. Through it all, there would be some asshole in the background constantly pushing the story along but then showing up in mid-scene drunk and with his pants down, right in your line of fire. The real villians (“The Albanians”) would get away. Idris Elba would provide narration.
You’d be better off basing a game on The Shield. At least there would be plenty of shootings and the occasional grenade attack. I was going to say “Plus Michael Chiklis is pretty free these days,” but I’d be completely wrong about that. Never mind, you can find some gravel-voiced bald guy to narrate and/or be a character model; they’re not in short supply.
Actually, I think a good tactic for this game to get made, would for it to have a social message - I mean, I think that would be a worthy cause for a game, but also just pragmatically I think it would generate controversy and buzz and therefore possible sales, if it dealt with racial issues like Black Lives Matter and the overuse of police brutality. You wouldn’t just be able to shoot everyone with no consequences - there would be gray areas, there would be times when if you shot a suspect who turned out to be totally harmless, the press would get involved and it would have severe repercussions. Also, there should be real-life legal rights issues that the police are bound by; there should be a realistic system of codified real-life criminal law programmed into the game, so that for instance a suspect could go free if it turned out that you searched his vehicle illegally, or did not follow the proper procedure while interrogating him, or whatever.