LA. Noire - Detective game - On This Day

Before GTA 5 became the most successful product in the entertainment industry, Rockstar Games struggled to launch games of a variety of themes and genres. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in the case of a game called L.A. Noire. Rockstar played the role of publisher in the project, which he took over from the then Sony Computer Entertainment, while the Australian studio Team Bondi worked on the game.

The project started to develop back in 2004 and by 2011 it had become one of the most expensive projects in the history of the video game industry. The primary reason for this was the advanced technology by which facial animations of the characters were inserted into the game. LA. Noire was conceived as a detective game in which observing the facial expressions of the characters was one of the mechanics of gameplay, and to make those faces look natural and "readable", the actors were filmed by 32 cameras, from all possible angles.

LA. Noire took us to Los Angeles in 1947, where we took on the role of Cole Phelps, a young police officer who quickly broke through the ranks, dealing with various cases of murder, robbery, traffic violations, fires, etc. All these cases were otherwise conceived according to real cases reported in the newspapers of the time. 

The game was primarily a detective adventure, but it contained the option of free travel around the city so that Los Angeles in the 1940s could be toured. But investigations were a staple, and on consoles (where L.A. Noire has originally launched) the search for clues was performed through reliance on controller vibrations. At the end of each case, the players were rated 1-5 depending on how well they handled the case.

LA. Noire picked up excellent marks, and his average on Metacritic was a high 89. In less than a year, the game was delivered in more than five million copies. Additional content (DLCs) followed which brought five additional missions/detective cases. Half a year after its first appearance on consoles, the game came on and on the PC. We got a kind of remaster in 2017 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, while the game on PC got a VR add-on called L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, which later appeared on PlayStation VR as well.

All these years the possibility has been mentioned that L.A. Noire gets a sequel, as the game went well in sales. However, in late 2011, Team Bondi was sold, and its former employees claimed that Rockstar did not pay them salaries worth several thousand Australian dollars. Briefly in development was a game called Whore of the Orient, which was to be the spiritual successor to L.A. Noire, but it was eventually canceled in 2016.