What could an LA Noire sequel look like?

 What could an LA Noire sequel look like?

LA Noire made a bit of a impressive impact when it was realised and fans of the game have been clamouring for a sequel pretty much since they finished it. Sadly, while rumours have persisted over the years of a possible follow up, much like sequels to Bully nothing has ever materialised, and as of time of publishing, nothing has been heard of to suggest such a sequel would be made.

Following the story of disgraced World War II veteran turned Police Detective Cole Phelps, the game managed to merge themes and elements from detective serials, the Noire movie genre and all the trimmings of sex, greed and corruption, into an open world game 

But what would a sequel need in order to work?

1. A better game engine.

One of LA Noires many flaws was it's engine, a pure jack of all trades that worked well in some regards and in others were adequate, but barely. A look behind the scenes makes it clear how ambitious the project was, but was also mixed with a lot of backstage drama (to put it mildly) may have contributed towards the engine being not all it could be and not fully deliver on it's promises.

Assuming Rockstar does make a sequel, then the most obvious course of action is to use their custom built RAGE engine, which has been the beast powering hits like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2.

When I first started playing the game I was very much expecting the game to be running on some version of Rockstars GTA4 engine, but found pretty much straight away from the way Cold Phelps himself moved or the way the cars handled and buildings were rendered that this was not the case.

A better game engine would remove a LOT of the flaws of the original, in fact a proper Remaster or Remake of the original using the RAGE engine would be appreciated too, and would give Rockstar a chance to get to grips with the mechanics of such a game in order to make a proper sequel, and do it justice.

Just so long as they fix the general movement control issues that seems to have plagued their playable characters in almost all their RAGE engines, with the exception of Max Payne in Max Payne 3. In fairness, Red Dead 2 characters did move a lot better then their GTA5 counterparts did.

This should hopefully also help sort out one of the most peculiar issues with the gunplay in LA Noire. you couldn't shoot to disarm or injury, repeatedly pumping bullets into a perps hand for example would just kill them, for some reason, after which you would see the dead body being whisked away on a gurney while Phelps and partners looked on glumly, as if they wished they'd had to ability to shot to injure. This seems silly for all kinds of reasons and as such should be easily remedied given how accurate gunplay is in general in most Rockstar titles.

And driving. Don't get me started on the driving. Even the AI seemed to have a hard time with it.

2. Keep the setting in the 40's.

LA is the perfect setting for a detective story like this. It also adds certain limits that you can't quite get away with in a latter time period. Plus there is a romanticism with the 40's and the Noire Genre that fits so perfectly with one another that to set it in a different time zone might not feel right. The music, the lights, the sights, the sounds, okay, we can't get the smells, but that might be to everyone's advantage.

3. The right kind of Protagonist.

Phelps was a mixed bag of intelligence, refinement, good intentions and ambition, mixed with some severe anger issues, often witnessed in the way he would just explode during interviews. This could be a hint towards PTSD, especially given the horrors he witnessed and survived first hand during the war in Japan. Kelso the secondary antagonist who takes over from Cole in the later cases of the game, had similar issues but was much better adjusted.

And with Phelps being dead by the end of the game (spoilers) this does leave things open for Kelso to take over as full time detective. Thing is he's not a police officer but rather an insurance claims investigator later turned a member of the DA's office. Sure you could carry on with Kelso in that role, or even having turned into a classic PI, but that latter option would limit what you can do in the game somewhat.

A fresh start with a new character might be the better call, maybe a rookie cop who didn't get the chance to answer the call of war and therefore has a more naïve approach to things.

4. Better upgrades.

Phelps did show a bit of a fashion sense with various suits available to unlock, but this was about it. There was no way to choose what type of sidearm he bore, or even what kind of car he could drive all the time. It was either his partners car or a vehicle he requisitioned, but even then, more often that not after a cut scene it would default back to the partners car.

Now, whoever fills in Phelps shoes and hat in a sequel should have the option to upgrade his equipment, be that his gun, mixing parts of his suits, or even using his own car rather than a partners to solve the crime. In GTA5 we've seen a pretty impressive range of upgrades to both cars and guns and giving the player the choice to improve their own gear would certainly help. Perhaps, their pay could be performance based and after completing a case they can check their bank balance and see what they can afford to use on their work.

Maybe go one step further and have them see their pay roll in, only for the tax man to take his cut making it a little harder to get some "nice things" to make his gun a bit faster or his car handle better before selling one to buy a better one further down the line?

5. Work on different desks.

There were other desks in development that allegedly had material prepared for them, but never implemented, if they were ever even programmed at all.

Patrol, was very much the tutorial levels. This was were the grunt work of learning the ropes came into play, and each played their part quite well, introducing different game play mechanics and early plot elements quite nicely.

The thing is, almost all of those game play elements could have been taken care off in just one case, the exception being the shootout at the bank heist gone wrong. At the same time, the patrol cases by necessity were rather short and did leave me feeling a bit underwhelmed with them all. I would have liked to have spent more time on the beat with the Patrol Desk being made more of it's own thing.

Maybe bringing it back and having the first case open much like the original, driving towards the scene of a crime and assisting with clearing up after a crime has been committed, but allowing you to get to grips with the interview system by talking to witnesses, suspects and other people of interest, and again setting up future plot points for later on. This could lead to other cases on Patrol which could lead to shootouts as part of their mission structure before you finally get the big promotion to another desk.

Now in the original game Phelps was promoted to Traffic, then Homicide, before being requested to Vice, then demoted to Arson. Two other desks were considered, Bunco (or Fraud) and Burglary, with there being some recorded dialogue in game suggesting Phelps was on the Burglary desk between his assignments in Traffic and Homicide. 

But why not use these two cut desks in the sequel? Both would make use of the same basic mechanics in the original, along with any improvements added to a sequel, they would give an insight into policework that the other departments barely touched on. Burglary would be the most likely of the two to be the first line of promotion after Patrol as Fraud would suggest a much more developed set of skills given the more clandestine elements of the nature of the work.

Fraud and Burglary might both allow other gameplay elements to be looked into, such as visiting contacts in some cases to get clues and information, bribing people for information and possibly using surveillance gear as they conduct stakeouts.

But from there, where wold Phelps, or his replacement go?

Given the locale of LA, Homicide and Vice would seem to be obvious choices to re-tread, and even Phelps felt that Homicide was The Desk to be on. But it would also depend on what the overall plot of the game would be this time around. Vice had to be included simply because of the morphine plotline in the game, with Arson included as it tied into the land and property fraud plot, while both Traffic and Homicide very much had their own separate plots.

But how about a missing persons plot line? The modern day LA police certainly has a dedicated department to missing persons, and if such a plot took place in an LA Noire sequel, then being on that desk would seem essential. Of course, there is no word on any sequel, so this is just a suggestion.

6. Have more variety and replay value in how to complete the cases.

The interview system for example had it's limits, three options, "Truth" "Doubt" and "Lie" later replaced with "Good Cop" "Bad Cop" and "Accuse" in the remaster, with Phelps being the barely contained rage machine if he got answers he didn't like. This could be built on further developed and depending on the terms used as options could get different results from different people.

"Truth" "Doubt" and "Lie" weren't even the original options perhaps going somewhere to explain why Phelps responses seem so heavy handed. But there's no need to limit to just three options. Perhaps going with the remasters options of  "Good Cop" "Bad Cop" and "Accuse" and keeping their previous usages, but adding some other options such as "Doubt" where you can't believe them, don't have evidence to accuse them but hope a more suggestive approach might work to loosen a tongue. There could also be options like "Trick" "Force" or "Threaten" to add more flavour to the settings, after all, one Irish Captain did suggest he was a fan of applying coercion to get a result.

This could mean that you might have a 1 in 4 chance of getting the right information with this version of the system, but if you choose one of the other options you might get something somewhat useful, or possibly a chance to ask a different question that's been unlocked down this route that might also get you the information you need.

Then there's the investigations themselves, the bread and butter of the originals gameplay. It might be handy for replay value to have some random elements added or removed to each case. Lets take the first case of the Traffic desk as an example, "The Drivers Seat".

In this case Phelps investigates a car which seems to have been redecorated on the insides with the drivers blood. He finds enough clues to determine the identity and home of the owner and visit his wife. The case takes a couple of sleazy turns as it looks like the driver was estranged while living under the same roof and had plans to leave with a not so secret lover. His best friend could be tracked down to a bar and either trailed to his own apartment, or arrested after giving up the driver thanks to the line of questioning and opting to arrest him. After that it's a short chase before the driver is picked up and brought to justice.

All nice and easy to paly, but in some ways feels like a tutorial, and doesn't offer much replay value. But that could be sorted in a couple of ways.

One would be to simply move around the clues, or even change the clues in each location, be it the crime scene, the home and so on. It might be a different car, there might not be any blood and it might look like an abduction instead. Finding the drivers wallet might give a very different person to the original case, and going to his home might actually be in a totally different house with a very different wife. Clues found there might still suggest an affair but lead to a different bar with a different best friend, Maybe it's not even a friend but some hired goon whose offered to help the driver "disappear" and he too can either be arrested or trailed to find the driver safe and sound.

Only he then pulls out a gun, and with thanks to better gunplay, you might actually be able to shoot to disarm him or injury him rather then kill outright.

And there's still more that could be done to give more replay value. Each time you replay the case and get the same characters, each character could have different answers to each question, which might not give the same result as the answer you got the first time round. A character who was always lying on the first play through might be a paragon or truth on the second playthrough, or gives you reason to doubt their word on the next playthrough.

You could even mix it up further so that the cast of characters are mixed each time from those allotted to this case, so it could be a different husband and wife combination living at one or the other of the two houses, with a different best friend or hired goon at either of the two bars and so on.

This obviously wouldn't be easy to implement, but would lend a great deal of replay as you would never be sure which combination of people and places you were going to encounter for each case.

7. Get more inventive with the cases and investigations.

Now, I am not saying that the cases and investigations were not inventive, but sometimes I got the feeling that they had blown some of their more creative ideas earlier on, such as when during Patrol Phelps spots a firearm used in a murder is on the rooftop thanks to it's reflection in the glass of a window.

It's a clever bit of work on his part, and that of the team designing the case, showing off his observations skills and dogged determination to duty while his partner wants to slack off. And it's such a subtle bit of work that the game never quite pulls off as well again.

Most investigations are very much by the numbers, you go the scene of the crime, you look for clues which are usually quite easy to find with some being a bit harder, but you are always aware of the fact there's more clues to find simply from the subtle background music alone with a little jingle to show when you've found something that might be of interest.

It is a nice touch, and one I very much like, but I do think if this game had a difficulty setting, then the music being removed along with the tinkle might serve to make it a little less of a walk in the park.

Also some genuine red herrings that have nothing to do with the case but look like they could and might help throw you off wouldn't go amiss.

8. Keep the original soundtrack, and build on it more.

One of the best elements of the game was by far it's soundtrack, a great tribute to the sounds of the time, perfectly capturing the glitz and glamour of the time and the Hollywood setting. So bringing it all back would be perfect, you would just need to add some more along the same kind of lines to help flesh it out even more.

Which bring me onto the next point.

9. It's an open world, kind of. Act like it is.

One of the biggest drawbacks of LA Noire was the vast, almost perfect recreation of 1940's LA, bar one or two deliberate choices, but you had no way to let you character "live" there. Instead you just went from one case to another to another as they loaded up straight away. and when you were out and about you couldn't stop to buy a hotdog, grab a quick game of bowling, indulging in some firearms shopping or send Phelps off to the gym to work on his boxing or visiting a local shooting range.

In a time when most open world games were, and still are trying to give you everything the real world can do, this game wasn't trying to do that. It was all set dressing.

But what if you could play around in the open world a bit? Take a case only by either going to the police station or showing up at the scene of the crime? A bit like most other Rockstar games allow?

You could even take a few elements from Rockstar's other most forgotten offspring, Bully, and include gameplay like social interactions with passer-by's and colleagues, possibly trying to develop relationships in a similar way to Red Dead 2.