Rockstar Newswire

(Left: Game Informer's original L.A. Noire cover story from February; Right: Among the article's content, the sophisticated capture studio used to create the game's stunning facial animations.)

Earlier this year, Game Informer took an exclusive look at L.A. Noire with a massive cover story revealing lots of first details of the game.  With the launch of the game's first proper trailer, they've now published the original article in full at GameInformer.com - so if you missed it on shelves back in February, you can head on over and read it in its entirely now. 

While the game has moved on in leaps and bounds since then (look for lots of new information soon - including a whole new round of previews happening later this week), the story discusses the ambitions for the game, and gives insight to the revolutionary performance capture technology behind L.A. Noire's stunningly lifelike faces - that go beyond traditional motion capture to recreate an actor's true performances as you play throughout the entire game - without CGI, during gameplay, and not restricted to cutscenes.

"L.A. Noire represents a total break with conventional game development and animation.  Instead of recording dialogue, animating, and performing motion capture as separate steps of the process, Team Bondi (using technology developed by its sister company Depth Analysis) is capturing human performances just as a filmmaker would – except instead of generating movie footage, they come away with fully animated 3D models. It's a tremendously advanced process." - Game Informer

Read the full story at http://gameinformer.com/games/la_noire/b/xbox360/archive/2010/11/11/l-a-noire-preview.aspx.

Related:
Also check out Edge Magazine in the UK’s original cover story, recently posted online here: http://www.next-gen.biz/features/open-world-confidential-la-noire.