LANOIREvision.com - Forum - L.A. NOIRE - The Detective Thriller

"Our demo started in the police department as Detective Phelps, voiced by Mad Men‘s Aaron Staton,
was given his new assignment. A woman was found dead in a park and it’s Aaron’s job to find out who
did it. Phelps and his partner walk outside to their car and head toward the park to investigate.
During the cutscene I was amazed by the new facial recognition engine Rockstar used to animate the
expressions and emotions of the characters, MotionScan. Unlike normal motion capture, this method
doesn’t use dots, but instead is filmed with many HD cameras placed all around the actor capturing
his every twitch and movement. There’s still a little bit of uncanny valley-level visuals going on
here and the bodies are still traditionally motion capped, but I was still very impressed with what
I saw and the A Scanner Darkly-reminiscent graphics give off a gorgeous, stylized look. MotionScan
isn’t just used to make the cutscenes look cool, it actually factors into the gameplay in a big
way. More on that in a bit.
When we arrived the body was splayed out in the park completely naked. I was surprised at Rockstar
for not holding back in it’s portrayal of a nude corpse. The moment wasn’t like in GTA when you see
an almost cartoonish pile of old ladies and hit them with a rocket launcher, the moment was
actually awkward and creepy. And let’s just say you could tell it was the 40’s. Cole squats over
the body and proceeds to investigate. This is when we got to see the game’s investigation feature.
Cole was able to lift and manipulate each of the corpse’s limbs and head to check it’s bruised and
bloodied body for clues. Then he scoured the scene picking up items from the ground to find any
sign of the killer’s whereabouts. Nearly every item was interactive, but Rockstar informed us they
actually had to tone down the number of items the player could pick up because testers were
wandering around crime scenes and examining hundreds of useless items and wasting lots of time."