Those of you who have played L.A. Noire will no doubt have been left scratching your head as to why lead man Cole Phelps had a tendency to lose his shit whever you used the "doubt" response. Well, at long last the former head of developers Team Bondi, Brendan McNamara, has come out to explain exactly what went wrong.
Apparently when the game started in development, the three interrogation options available to players were coax, force and accuse, which seem a hell of a lot more appropriate than the options of truth, doubt and lie which were in the final title. The reason for the change? Because people are stupid apparently.
As the game's development forged ahead, continual testing showed that people didn't quite grasp the meaning or implications of coax, force and accuse. Apparently Bondi should have used people who weren't idiots when testing for problems.
"Are you going to coax an answer out of them, or are you going to jump in there and try and force an answer out of them - or do you just suddenly accuse them of lying straight up?" said McNamara. "Truth and Lie are pretty straightforward, right? But Doubt... what it changed it from was what your strategy was into what was the person's performance like? I don't think it made it bad, it just made Aaron appear slightly psycho on the Doubt button. That's my fault, not his.When people go, 'he turns into a maniac when you press Doubt' that's my fault, not his.
"There were stages when it was going through different points of QA people saying I don't get this or I don't get that. It's a trend in games, I wouldn't say they're dumbing them down. But they're slightly too easy. A lot of games are too hard. The Getaway was rock hard, ridiculously hard. But there were points where I wouldn't like as much handholding we did. But in the end that was the right process because a lot more people finished it."