Those who picked up Game Informer last spring were treated to a full-feature preview of L.A. Noire, a game for which years of development time and lofty goals have afforded it the kind of near-mythic status that can be both a blessing for marketing and a curse for critical reception. The GI article is now up on the web (via VG247), and combined with the new trailer that was revealed last week, we’ve learned just how ambitious this thing is.

The actors aren’t being motion-captured, they’re being recorded by an apparatus of 32 cameras that completely surrounds the set. With conventional motion-capture, animators must toil for days to provide facial expressions and body language to a character, even if their likeness was taken to provide the starting point. L.A. Noire’s technology skips that step by using recorded video of the actor’s expressions, and the multitude of camera angles provide the necessary 3D modeling right away.

The downside is that they have to actually film just about every scene the game will need like that, and developer Team Bondi needs the capacity to store 200 terabytes of data at their office in Australia. But the upside is the most true-to-life human faces I’ve seen in a game to date. Look at the trailer and note how Aaron Staton (who you might recognize as Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men) blinks more often than a stiff game character ever does, or how eyebrows twitch swiftly but subtly with emphasis on certain lines.

The facial verisimilitude isn’t just for show. The game is as much a police procedural as it is drive-and-shoot, and the investigative portions involve interrogations for which the player must use evidence and the human ability to read other human faces to sniff out suspicious testimony. Two thousand pages of dialogue (a typical movie runs about 200) ought to provide ample opportunity for players to read the tells on a fishy witness. For better or for worse, L.A. Noire has some high hopes attached to it heading into its release next spring, so the game had better do justice to the technology behind it.