Source: "We barely had any animators for such a long time, it was crazy. People have mentioned how the open world in L.A. Noire is wasted because the world is so boring. The reason was because no animators wanted to work at Team Bondi. There was no Lead Animator from January 2008 until the end of the game, and for large parts of production we only had one animator working on gameplay animations (any others were doing cinematic animations). This meant that there was no way to add life to the world. It's a perfect example of why staff retention is important, was ignored by the leads at Team Bondi, and the game suffered for it."

1 animator for gameplay, the rest for cutscenes. This explains the disconnect between the facial tech and awkward body animations.

The rest of the article focuses on the working conditions like lies about overtime pay, how Rockstar saved a lot of the management, and that Rockstar will never publish any future Team Bondi projects.

Sort of like the terribly unnecessary open world aspect of Mafia 2, so boring to drive around it, beautiful but oh so boring

Well that explains a lot. I still maintain that the game would've been much better if they'd scrapped the open world and put all of their resources into making a more polished, linear experience.

Sort of like the terribly unnecessary open world aspect of Mafia 2, so boring to drive around it, beautiful but oh so boring

@Venatio said:

Sort of like the terribly unnecessary open world aspect of Mafia 2, so boring to drive around it, beautiful but oh so boring

Hold on are you saying that mafia 2 is on the same level of la noire.

Yeah some of the animations in this game are pretty bad. Try looking at pedestrians walking from a distance. It looks like they were taken from a ps1 game. Well at least there is an explanation for these sorts of things in the game.

I agree that most of the open world parts of LA Noire are pretty unnecessary. But I did enjoy some of the car chases and suspect tailing/chasing. Not sure if those would have been possible without making at least some part of the open world.

@scarace360 said:

@Venatio said:

Sort of like the terribly unnecessary open world aspect of Mafia 2, so boring to drive around it, beautiful but oh so boring

Hold on are you saying that mafia 2 is on the same level of la noire.

I haven't played LA Noire yet so I wouldn't know  But they both have underutilized open worlds that are unecessary

Sad to see so much negativity coming out from within the studio. I like the game, but now I'm very disappointed with Team Bondi.

It added a lot to the atmosphere and the setting, even if there was nothing to do. I'm glad it was there.

This isn't telling me why it was wasted it's telling me why it wasn't better.

Open world was somewhat of a waste... i never really explored except to get film/landmarks/cars.
 
and yeah, very sad to see all the disconnect going on.

Wow, 1 animator, that's just effin crazy, whoever is the one behind the team management in this game should have absolutely nothing to do with making games at all...

 
I liked the open world for the one purpose that it let me play around, and letting me freely collect all cars, do street crimes, and discover landmarks. I loved the game, but i do have to agree the world was quite boring.