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L.A. Noire wants you to see the lie written all over the suspect’s face

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.