Story and character oriented games like Heavy Rain and Uncharted etc. are absolutely loaded with uncanny valley moments by comparison. It's one of the biggest weak spots of current generation games and I think L.A. Noire is the benchmark that will make gamers less accepting of the old "frozen face" standard. The tech isn't perfect, but it's far better.
Uncharted's characters are still reasonably stylised, so it's more of a caricature. My main gripe with LA Noire is the transplanting of 100% human expression and movement on a fairly primitive CGI face. Not bad, just ... odd
Er, what? Do a Google image search for character models for these two games...there isn't anything more significantly stylized about the characters in Uncharted vs. L.A. Noire. The difference is that games like Uncharted and Heavy Rain use the key frame approach. Characters have a variety of expressions, but they tend to have limited transitions between them and the expressions themselves tend to be frozen in place for awkward periods of time.
Got my copy today. Seems very good. Excellent quality so far. The face tech looks really good and fits well with the detective work and interrogations.
Anyone remember playing Resi 2 and 3? Remember the facial animations on those games? Oh wait, there weren't any! They just moved their low res heads back and forth... like so: Skip to 5:50. What an age we live in now eh?
Testing copy URL at current time.. EDIT: Doesn't work, how annoying, would have made it easier to post links to videos where you only wanted people to see a certain part, maybe the mods could look into it. I have a money off voucher for L.A. Noire but I really don't fancy it. Anyone here played it yet and if you have is it worth it?
I've played through to the beginning of the first Homicide department case, and I think it's quite good. I've enjoyed it just as much as games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Red Dead Redemption. Pretty addictive. Granted, I did have an interest in the noir genre of film/books already, but it goes beyond that. I think the investigation/interrogation angle is fun and has some challenge to it without being frustrating, and the deeper you go into the game, the more you appreciate how significantly the facial tech improves a heavily story oriented experience.
Just finished the last of the Homicide assignments, and have been reassigned to Vice in Wilshire. Homicide was really enjoyable, and I managed to finish one of the cases with a perfect score for interrogation. Homicide typically keeps you within the Southeast portion of the map, so unless you spend alot of time exploring (which I didn't), the Wilshire and Hollywood area seems completely fresh. This has definitely turned out to be one of my favorite games of this generation.
I've really enjoyed what I've played of L.A. Noire. There is plenty of incentive to replay cases, and the world looks great. I've also been very impressed with the sound quality. I'm getting 7.1 LPCM (missing in GTA and RDR), and the quality of the effects is very high. They went out of their way to make sure the cars looked and sounded great. Perhaps the only significant complaint is that they game seems to be rather easy. I tend to prefer games to be a bit on the difficult side of the spectrum. I may make some adjustments in the settings to see if I can increase the difficulty a bit. There have been a couple of cases in which, after gathering evidence against both, I was unsure of which of two suspects was the perpetrator until the final interrogations, a scenerio I really enjoyed. I hope to see an increase in the challenge later in the game.
From what I've seen the cars seem to handle like they're in a cartoon. Very GTA San Andreas. That's the only negative point I have to make about this game.
I noticed that in the commercials. The character animations look very realistic, but next to the low res backgrounds it looks really strange and fake.
Well, if you think there are moments in L.A. Noire that look odd (and there are), then there's no way you could think that this type of thing doesn't look several times worse: The character faces/expressions are literally frozen in place like Ken/Barbie dolls. It's one of the huge weaknesses of current gen games, and L.A. Noire is ultimately a big step in the right direction for games that aspire to storytelling.
I think LA Noire's problem is that it's freeroaming. If it was a more linear game, they could squeeze better textures and lighting out of the engine and have realistic expressions with realistic textures. The faces in LA Noire seem a bit like this;
And you seem to be basing this comment entirely on having watched a couple of trailers. My experience with the game is that the graphic and textural detail is just fine, and the in-game faces aren't even close to your Doctor Who exaggeration. The fact remains that the Barbie/Ken doll effect has basically been the status quo in this generation prior to L.A. Noire, and once you've really experienced the difference...the type of things you see going on in Mass Effect and Uncharted cut scenes seem shockingly primitive in comparison. It's progress, and it's a good thing.
Chi doesn't like change. I've heard he still thinks polygons are a myth and all we see today are a load of high res sprites.
I haven't actually complained about the tech, I am very impressed with it. It's just that the current generation of consoles aren't powerful enough to make it look convincing. What needs work on nowadays is proper cloth simulation so that the characters look believable as a whole. I found this quote in reference to something a while back.
I guess it depends on how convincing you really expect it to be. I didn't expect it to fool me into thinking I was watching an actual film with real people. I expected it to make current gen character models seem less like high polygon count department store mannequins, and deliver a more convincing cinematic experience (for a video game) as a result.
The facial animations look great to me. They can convey emotion during the interviews and play an actual role in the gameplay. They look very good for a current generation game. That's about as much as I expected from it.
I have a question regarding the facial animations. I know you're supposed to read people's expressions to tell if they're lying to you but all the expressions seem overacted, so it seems like if the expressions are to be believed it'll be really easy to tell if someone's lying, unless they've put a load of red herrings in there. How reliable are the looks you get from people?