14 DAY TRIAL // The recent L.A. Noire title from Team Bondi and Rockstar was set to be much longer, according to its developer, but many cases and even a whole desk were cut due to space and time restraints.
L.A. Noire, the recent detective game from Australian developer Team Bondi and published by Rockstar was quite a big game, spanning more than 16 hours, in terms of gameplay, and three DVDs or one Blu-ray disc, in terms of space, for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, respectively.
But the game was intended to be even larger, with the co-founder of Team Bondi, Brendan McNamara, telling PSM3 magazine, via CVG, that 11 cases were left on the cutting room floor.
"We had a Bunko and Burglary desk - bunko is fraud and burglary is just people robbing houses and stuff - we had eleven full cases for that, which we wrote and did the design for to a certain extent - we even did the art for them too, but it just got to a point where we were never going to fit it on one Blu-ray," he said.
"It just becomes super prohibitive at that point. I think there might have been a better arc if we did do that - you get more of a chance to introduce different things - but in terms of the overall experience I think we did pretty well."
Besides adding lots of regular cases, the Team Bondi studio also intended for a special system to punish players that were failing cases, just like real police departments do. This was also scrapped, according to McNamara.
"There was a kind of system where if you failed a case your captain would scream at you and you'd go out and do hot car chases or smaller robberies and muggings and all that kind of stuff in the world," he revealed. "You'd have to do enough of them to get to a point where you get offered another case, but as I said that got cut because I thought it was too much of a distraction."
Eventually, many of these cases were turned into street crimes that the player can choose to pursue while dealing with actual cases, while the cut burglary desk is handled like a black hole during the story of Cole Phelps, the main protagonist.
Rockstar did say that new downloadable content might be made for L.A. Noire, so perhaps some of these cut cases will appear at a later time.