Battlefield Hardline, L.A. Noire, and the Willingness to Leave the Player Unfulfilled
I wrote about the single-player campaign of Battlefield Hardline for KQED Arts. In the days since finishing that game, I’ve been thinking a bit about L.A. Noire. That’s a very different game in which you play as a cop, but like Hardline, it finds a way of incorporating investigative police work into the action, and its narrative deals with corruption on the police force. And while L.A. Noire is a tremendously flawed game, I can’t help but think that in direct comparison to Hardline, its infinitely more successful in both areas.
In L.A. Noire, gathering evidence is an actual, physical process of looking around environments, of investigating. The game’s cases are maddeningly structured to sometimes give you the sense that you can actually “solve” them while in fact you can’t, the “right” answer is sometimes entirely out of your character’s grasp, but that’s not a flaw of the gameplay mechanics, it’s a flaw of the story they’re used in the service of. These sections take time, and they call for you to pay attention, to look around, to observe details, and sometimes to try to draw conclusions based on those details.

Hardline, by contrast, incorporates the concept of “evidence” as only the shallowest nod to the game’s “you’re a cop” premise. You have a magic gadget that senses when evidence is nearby and vibrates, and all you have to do (or not do, if you’d rather just ignore it), is hold a button down for a few seconds while looking at the object to “analyze” it. I laughed out loud when I earned a trophy called “Keep Digging, Detective” for all my dogged police work of holding down X. It couldn’t be more simplistic or less involving.

The more meaningful contrast between the two games, for me, is how they resolve their stories of police officers going up against corruption within the police force.
SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF HARDLINE FOLLOW
In Hardline’s final moments, Mendoza, once a helpless, bumbling pawn in the schemes of a corrupt police captain and later, when he refused to play along, a man framed for crimes he didn’t commit, takes his revenge against the man who used him and then threw him away. The game ends on a note of ambiguous excitement and potential. The bad guy is defeated but his evil empire remains, and now you’ve got the keys to it. The unfathomable wealth and the power. It’s a rewarding ending, in the sense that it makes you feel like Mendoza, and you, have been tangibly and meaningfully rewarded for your quest, not with the satisfaction of defeating corruption, but of harnessing the power of corruption for yourself. The game wants to leave you feeling good, feeling excited, feeling rewarded and powerful.
END SPOILERS
One thing I admired about L.A. Noire was its willingness to do none of those things. Your character, Cole Phelps, ultimately takes a stand against corruption in the LAPD. A narrative about a cop finding redemption and dismantling the vast machinery of corruption within the LAPD would have been absurd. That’s not what the game does. Instead, Phelps is ground to dust by that machinery of corruption, and in the end, the machine soldiers on. It doesn’t let you partake in a fantasy of being a noble hero who saves the day and brings vast systems of corruption to justice, but it does say that resistance to those systems of corruption is possible, though it may not succeed and it may come at a great cost.
I find a deeply unsatisfying ending like that of L.A. Noire so much more satisfying than the deeply satisfying ending of Battlefield Hardline.
Anyway, please check out my piece on Hardline for KQED Arts.
Notes
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