There's less than a week until Rockstar Games and Team Bondi let loose their latest opus, L.A. Noire. Before you can go solving crimes as Cole Phelps in 1940s LA, you've got to decide which platform to buy the game on. We'll give you the inside track: you might want to go with the PS3 version of L.A. Noire. Team Bondi Head Brandon McNamara confirmed with 1UP this week that L.A. Noire was developed on PS3 first and then ported to Xbox 360.
That makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that L.A. Noire was originally a PlayStation 3 exclusive to be published by Sony Computer Entertainment America:
For this project, we led on PlayStation 3, and in a way I think that's what most people are doing. We found out that people were doing 360 and then trying to get stuff across to PS3 and were struggling with it.
There seems to be less of a struggle to go the other way, I think. You hear things that you have to put a lot of effort into on the PS3 and get it up and running pretty quickly on the 360. Then, like everyone else you have to scramble to get your framerate up.
McNamara used to lead Sony's Soho studio which developed successful PlayStation exclusives like The Getaway. When asked about the reasoning behind an Xbox 360 version of L.A. Noire, McNamara replied:
I think it was an obvious decision. We'd always been – apart from Psygnosis which was for Sony – we always made multiplatform stuff. But essentially, for some 10 years at Sony, we were an internal shop. We knew the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 stuff pretty well, and for us it was a change. But for Rockstar they'd done a lot of that.
Well, with a seven year development cycle, I'd say that you'd probably need to invest in an Xbox 360 version of the game to ensure you break even. Rockstar probably saw that risk-reward equation there too. Are you picking up L.A. Noire next week? If you haven’t decided yet, check out the L.A. Noire launch trailer below:
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