8 Video Games That Wasted Genius Ideas

Sigh. L.A. Noire could have been a classic. It should have been a classic. A hard-boiled crime epic that felt like a playable Chinatown, utilising groundbreaking facial capture technology to show every tiny subtlety in an actor's performance: Team Bondi and Rockstar had it in the bag.

The problem was that despite all of the game's strengths; the excellent world-building and writing, the stellar performances, the genuinely innovative investigative mechanics, the developers completely dropped the ball when it came to the most important aspect of L.A. Noire: the questioning of suspects and witnesses.

During these segments, the player can ask questions of other characters based on evidence they have collected. After the character responds, the player is given the choices of "Truth/Doubt/Lie".

This is confusing because A) the difference between the use of Doubt and Lie isn't at all obvious, and B) choosing Doubt frequently results in protagonist Cole Phelps shouting down the interviewee and accusing them of all the world's genocides rather than, say, gently assert that he's unconvinced.

Even worse was the fact that when L.A. Noire Remastered was released in 2017, "Truth/Doubt/Lie" was replaced with "Good Cop/Bad Cop/Accuse". This added yet more ambiguity and insinuated that there were no right or wrong answers when questioning, resulting in even more fumbled cases than before.

Nice one Rockstar, you were given an opportunity to fix things and you bollocksed it up even more.