Rockstar promised a big reveal on Team Bondi's L.A Noire in the March edition of Gameinformer, and it looks like someone was quite quick with the scan button as pictures of the magazine feature quickly spread around various gaming sites.
The interesting details revealed in the magazine are summarised below (from VGhartz), and if you're interested in the whole magazine feature (including a fair few new ingame pictures), click on through to gamegrep.com
- The largest and most detailed open world game to date, Team Bondi had done extensive research on 1940's LA in an aspiration for an almost 1:1 recreation of the how the city looked back then, looking at over 180000 pictures from the UCLA and UMC archives. From the old downtown up to Hollywood... even the roads are as back then, with car models made off of authentic 1940's cars
- Adds new adventure elements to the familiar drive and shoot gameplay model, essentially, according to the games' Producer Jeronimo Berreira, the game is "an adventure game that playes like a GTA". You'll have to do real police work - interrogation, piece together various evidence, and even idetify whether a person is lying to you or not by their facial expressions... which is made possible by Team Bondi's hard work in the field.The crimes in the game are also stylized to the time thanks to the research Team Bondi's Brendan McNamara has done on the subject.
- 300 people are involved in vocal and facial capture, everyone starting with the protagonist and ending with a random padestrian is fully voiced and animated... and the most famous person invloved? Ken Cosgrove from acclaimed TV show "Mad Men"
- Facial models in the game are indestinguishable from the real thing... there are no problems with lip syncing either (it's essentially perfect), and according to Team Bondi's Brendan McNamara, these features allow character interaction levels beyond those of Uncharted 2 or Mass Effect 2.
- As you progress in the game and in crime solving, your protagonist, Cole Phelps, will also progress in rank - from simple beat, street cop solving simple crimes, to a homicide detective, the most prestigious job in the department.
- It's not all investigation! You'll get to participate in plenty of shootouts, car chases, and witness explosions galore. However, for Team Bondi mixing the elements of open-world GTA gaming with first-class atmosphere and storytelling is very important