More Devs Should Follow LA Noire’s Brilliant Use Of Motion Capture

LA Noire, for the uninitiated, is an adventure game set in 1947 Los Angeles. There is some shooting, as well as a lot of investigation and evidence-gathering. But the other big part of the game involves interrogations. You, as good-guy cop Cole Phelps, are charged with questioning all sorts of characters, from suspects to witnesses to victims’ family members to fellow police officers. You have to use your instincts as a human - not as a gamer - to determine if they are lying.

To help you do this, the game uses motion-capture technology to accurately transfer the movements and mannerisms of the actors involved into the game world. If the character is nervously looking around, for example, you might be inclined to believe he’s lying. But if his wife has just been brutally murdered, maybe he’s just confused or overwhelmed. The actors employ almost an endless number of subtle mannerisms during the interrogations - twitches of the eyebrow, breathing heavily, pursed lips, etc. All of us, as social animals, are inclined to notice these things when engaged in conversation with real human beings. LA Noire taps into something significantly deeper than “Shoot that guy whenever his head pops out.”

In fact, the facial animation isn’t just there to look pretty. Without it, this game would be unplayable. It’s absolutely crucial to play the game. But it does look nice. I don’t know how they managed to make it so realistic without dipping into the uncanny valley. We’re used to hearing the argument that game developers just focus on graphics, ignoring gameplay. LA Noire simultaneously made the graphics - at least the facial animation part - a lot better looking than we’ve ever seen before and used it to make for totally new gameplay experiences. This is big.

We’re only just beginning to grasp how it will change the way we play games. For comparison’s sake, I put in Metal Gear Solid IV and Heavy Rain after finishing LA Noire, probably the two games with the best-looking character models in recent memory. Those two didn’t even come close. I felt like I was playing a PS1 game. I also downloaded the Infamous 2 demo, and the only thing I could focus on during the opening cutscene was how terrible the facial animation was. It looked cartoonishly bad to me, after spending so much time with LA Noire. Characters’ lips moved only roughly in sync with the words they were speaking.

One thing that always separated games from movies was that movies had real human actors on screen, portraying real human emotion. Games were able to emulate some of that with voice acting, but now that gap is finally closed. Developers have to take advantage of this technology for future games. I can’t wait to see what else they can do with it.