14 DAY TRIAL // The developers at Team Bondi who are working on the upcoming L.A. Noire have stated that the video game, which is based around the structure of a thriller, has a working script of about 2,000 pages and that the team has been using a new method designed to cut down on the use of traditional facial capture technology.
By comparison the script for a normal feature film comes in at about 200 pages, meaning that you could cram ten of them inside the new L.A. Noire.
As for the way characters will look inL.A. Noire Brendan McNamacare, who is the game director, has told Game Informer as part of a bigger feature, that, “What we wanted to do was capture the exterior of people instead of the bones. What we have here is the final end of that process, where you put an actor in the chair and as we record it’s instantly turned into 3D. We think it’s pretty significant. The great thing about that is we think that the whole uncanny valley thing is out the window, because you can see people in the game and literally lip-read what they say.”
If the technology used in the actual game is the same as that seen in the recently released trailer the above statement about the lack of an uncanny valley is verifiable false.
The characters look very good and move pretty naturally but when they try to express an emotion, especially while also speaking, there's a clear gap to how a real life actor would look.
L.A. Noire has been in development at Team Bondi from around 2004 and at times the long development time has been seen as an indication that the game would never be released.
The trailer says that currently L.A. Noire is planned for a spring 2011 launch on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and on the PlayStation 3.