LA Noire, Rockstar Games’ next major release, is now less than two weeks away and we’ve begun to get an idea of the immense scale of the game.
One of the developers of the game, Jeronimo Barrera, told Kotaku.com that in order to create the game Team Bondi and Rockstar envisaged, the Xbox 360 version of the game will come on three discs.
“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”
Eurogamer pointed out in comparison that Rockstar’s last major release, Red Dead Redemption, shipped on only a single X360 disc and having played RDR, it really does seem to say a lot about the shere size of the game.
However, Barrera stressed that they’d been mindful about the need for X360 owners to keep getting up and changing the discs, assuring them that they’d placed disc change points at natural breaks in the game.
“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”
Despite the already massive size of the game, the developer expanded a little on the amount of DLC owners of the game can expect.
“Throughout development, we created lots of great cases, the bulk of which were central to the main story of Cole Phelps and his rise through the ranks of the LAPD, alongside other cases that felt more like strong stand-alone episodes. This gave us a powerful main story, and left us with quality extra content that we wanted to put out as DLC, that would slot seamlessly into the existing game”
As previously mentioned, it has been confirmed that despite featuring on three X360 discs, the game will just about be able to fit on to a single Playstation 3 blu-ray disc.
In March of this year, Rockstar confirmed that, not taking into account DLC and side missions within the game, it’s estimated LA Noire will take between 25 to 30 hours to complete.
LA Noire will be released on May 17th in North America and May 20th in Europe, on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 platforms.
