Home Gaming Xbox 360 L.A Noire ships on 3 discs – Now that's value for money

Xbox 360 L.A Noire ships on 3 discs – Now that's value for money

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Xbox 360 fans around the world are having the last laugh as it was revealed today that L.A Noire would be releasing on – not one bulky Blu-ray – but three, count them, three DVDs.

If that’s not better value for money then I don’t know what is.

According to Rockstar’s Jeronimo Barrera , it’s just so gosh-darn huge (not a quote, and that’s what she said) that they knew early on that it would just barely fit onto a single layer 25GB Blu-ray and 3 DVDs for the Xbox 360 version.

“L.A. Noire was always going to be a massive game, from the size and detail of the world to the length of the cases, and of course, the sheer amount of MotionScan data required for the faces of over 400 actors in-game,”

“To tell the story and make the game we wanted to make, we knew that it was going to take an entire single layer Blu-ray disc and three Xbox discs.”

Rockstar also reckon that they made so much content that it had to start spilling over into DLC, and while I am usually opposed to this sort of pre-cooked DLC, I think this may deserve a pass:

“This gave us a powerful main story, and left us with quality extra content that we wanted to put out as DLC.”

We all know that L.A Noire was originally going to be a PS3 exclusive, and it seems like the Xbox 360 has to take a knock for getting it, but hey, Xbox 360 owners can definitely not complain, because it looks awesome.

As you can also see from the quote, it looks like the majority of storage is going to towards the revolutionary new technology being used to capture the facial animations of the characters (watch the video documentary here).

The facial expressions are not just for eye-candy though, interrogation and determining if the suspect is lying is a big part of the gameplay, and I think that it’s going to be well worth all the space in the world.

Disc-swapping really isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, well… as long as the developers aren’t morons. Mass Effect 2 on Xbox 360 had disc swapping, but it only happened once for most people in a +/- 50 hour period, so unless you were planning on looking like the sloth-guy from the movie Se7en, it shouldn’t be a problem.

On top of that, Rockstar say that due to the path of the game and the nature of the investigations, the disc-swapping won’t be an issue:

“Since the game is built around the concept of progressing through individual cases from desk to desk, players on Xbox will find disc-swapping is hassle-free. In fact, players will only need to swap discs twice at natural breaks between cases without interrupting the flow of the game.”

We tossed our very own Geoffrey Tim onto a cargo plane and had them throw him out over the UK so that he could write us a hands-on L.A Noire feature, and he was very impressed, calling it a “real police quest”.

The idea of a game that takes over 400 (many well known) actors and essentially mashes amazing titles like Heavy Rain, Police Quest and Mafia into one brilliant looking package is looking like a definite must-have for me.

Let’s not get hasty though, you never know… (remember the first Assassin’s Creed?) so let’s wait for the reviews.

L.A Noire releases on May 17 in the U.S. and May 20 for other regions.

Kotaku via 1UP

Last Updated: May 6, 2011

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