L.A. Noire‘s release is only about a month away, and so ratings submissions are pushing through. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has posted their official rating, revealing a few interesting details in the process.
If you’ve been paying attention to L.A. Noire news over the past couple months, then you already know that the nature of the game is heavily focused on character dialogue during investigations. This entails anything from simple conversations to interrogation, and the dramatic plot line is perfect for a lot of cinematic sections to really drive home the drama and emotion. Thus it comes as no surprise that when the BBFC posted their rating for L.A. Noire today it earned an 18 rating, and will come packed with over five hours of cutscenes (312 minutes, to be precise). Besides the cutscenes, the report also mentions 3 hours and 15 minutes of supplementary gameplay footage indicating there will be a pretty decent chunk of the game that may be optional to view.
These numbers sound hefty, and makes sense when compared to other numbers released regarding the game’s length. You may remember a few months ago we reported there was 50 hours of dialogue, which is “equivalent to about two full seasons of a TV show.” A couple weeks later we also revealed that the main plot of the game will take 25-30 hours to play through, but optional side missions will also provide plenty of content. Adding all that together indicates that while we should see plenty of cutscenes to break up the action in L.A. Noire, its also likely a lot of conversation will occur while in control of your character and hunting down criminals. 8 hours of gameplay footage is great, but that’s only a fraction of the dialogue recorded for the game, so hopefully the rest of that dialogue is occurring during shoot outs, car chases, fights, and other action scenes to maintain the atmosphere and intensity of L.A. Noire‘s premise.
The BBFC report also mentions L.A. Noire “Contains very strong language, strong violence, sex references and nudity.” Considering that 1947 L.A. was one of the most dangerous times to live in the city, anything less would have been criminal. We’ll get a chance to fight for law and civility in L.A. Noire soon, since players will be stepping into Cole Phelp’s shoes on May 17th in North America, and Europe will follow shortly afterwards on May 20th. Are you looking forward to performing your own interrogations next month?
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