L.A. Noire videogame has 2,000-page script, destroys uncanny valley?

Game Informer has an ace preview of Rockstar and Team Bondi’s stunning L.A. Noire, the first trailer of which was released last week – if you haven’t seen it, it’s pants-creamingly excellent.

The game has already attracted garlands of praise over its superior facial animation technology and lip-synching. In the Game Informer piece, director Brendan McNamara claims L.A. Noire crosses the uncanny valley, and while I still think it falls just short of that, it is a remarkable-looking game.

McNamara also says the title has a 2,000-page script (ten times the length of a script for a long movie), and is being developed using a specially built 200-terabyte capture studio in Australia. It’s all sounding like this could be the most filmic videogame ever:

“I’d been doing some research in the U.K. for a number of years on how you could do capture without markers. What we wanted to do was capture the exterior of people instead of the bones. What we have here is the final end of that process, where you put an actor in the chair and as we record it’s instantly turned into 3D. We think it’s pretty significant. The great thing about that is we think that the whole uncanny valley thing is out the window, because you can see people in the game and literally lip-read what they say. Even the [games] I look at now that are great, there’s something about [the characters] that makes me think of a goldfish.”

In case you can’t tell, I find this stuff pretty damn exciting. The idea that you can tell if characters in this detective thriller are lying just by watching their facial expressions is, dare I say it, genuinely groundbreaking for games. Oh Christ, hurry up Spring 2011!

[Via Game Informer]