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Law & Order: Criminal Intent - E3 2005 archived preview

In the Law & Order spin-off series Criminal Intent, Detective Robert Goren (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) has a reputation for being a little "off." His intense silences, disconcertingly accurate hunches, and uncanny understanding of the criminal mind set him apart from the more cut-and-dry detectives of the original series. This September, Legacy Interactive will bring the quirky Major Case squad detective and his unique investigative style to our PCs. Adventure Gamers sat down at E3 with Craig Brannon, Director of Product Development, to get an in-depth look at the upcoming game.

Although the cutscenes and character models are reminiscent of those in Justice Is Served (the last game in the L&O series), Criminal Intent is in third-person perspective—a first for a Law & Order title. This fits well with the spotlight on Detective Goren, who steals the show week after week. Rather than taking the role of anonymous partner, the player controls Goren himself. Goren's boss Captain Deakins (voiced by Jamey Sheridan) also appears in the game, but from what we saw during our demo, he spends much of his time at the office. Out in the field, Goren flies solo.

Unlike its predecessors, none of Criminal Intent takes place in the courtroom—it's pure investigation. The previous Law & Order titles have focused on one case per game, emulating an hour of television, but Criminal Intent has a broader scope, with three seemingly unrelated murders plus a "bonus case" that reveals how the first three are related. The player can work through the first three cases in any order and can even jump from one to another mid-investigation, but they must all be completed before the bonus case can be played.

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As any regular viewer can attest, Criminal Intent is just as much about psychology as it is criminology. The same is true of this game. When Goren interviews a suspect, he can take various emotional approaches, such as confrontational, straightforward, or deceptive. The player decides which of these to use for each question. Green and red meters show how well an interview is going. Take the right emotional approach and the green meter fills up as the witness imparts information. But if you ask the wrong types of questions—for example, by being confrontational with an eye-witness who has given you no reason to play hardball—the red meter will advance as he becomes increasingly reluctant to help. When the red meter fills up completely, the witness will refuse to cooperate. This means you have to start the interrogation over with a different style of questioning. Criminal Intent has about 60 locations, with approximately 50 witnesses and suspects to interview. The sheer volume suggests that picking and choosing among Goren's many faces will comprise a large portion of the gameplay.

Criminal Intent has three difficulty levels that subtly change the player's experience. For example, when you play in the easy mode, witnesses put up with more of the wrong types of questions. Goren also thinks out loud as he looks at items, giving the player clues. Unlike in the Law & Order games, which require you to pick skills at the beginning of the game and stick with them, Criminal Intent's difficulty level can be changed at any point. So if you're playing on a harder level and get stuck, you can bump the difficulty down temporarily, just to get through that rough patch.

Interface improvements made in Justice Is Served have carried over to this game, such as the organization of the inventory into witnesses, evidence, documents, and reports. But this time around, all game options (including the map, inventory, cell phone, and main menu) are accessed through a sleek-looking Nokia PDA. Apparently detectives on the Major Case squad get all the perks.

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Although we didn't see too many of Criminal Intent's puzzles during the demo, the ones we did see were similar to those in the L&O games. One involved piecing together torn scraps of paper, a convention that has been used extensively in previous titles. We also saw some standard fare inventory puzzles, such as taking a pair of wire cutters out of a dumpster, and using them on a later screen to cut a hole in a chain-link fence.

New to Criminal Intent is the criminal profiler, which has replaced the warrants that drove so many Law & Order players crazy. The criminal profiler is an interface that helps you evaluate evidence, determine its role in the crime, and learn what it means about the suspect. As evidence is gathered during the investigation and submitted to the profiler, a criminal profile is developed. Then you can submit suspects and see how closely they match the profile. In this way, the game helps you arrive at the suspect, without requiring as much guesswork as in the previous games. Once you have a good profile, just ask Deakins for a warrant and he'll get it for you—no need to go through all the red tape L&O's Lieutenant Van Buren requires. Brannon acknowledged that many players got stuck on the warrants in the original games, as shown by the frustrated posts made on Legacy Interactive's message boards. The criminal profiler is Legacy's attempt to simplify this process.

The only disappointing aspect of our meeting with Legacy was the news that there will be no new regular Law & Order games. But the developer has a good reason that leaves us optimistic about their future titles: they don't want to keep repackaging the same content. "Three was enough," Brannon told us. "If people are paying money for a game, it should be more than just a new story. There should be other gameplay advances as well." From what we saw at E3, Criminal Intent certainly meets this goal. I'm no Detective Goren, but something tells me that with its psychological slant, this game is going to appeal to a whole range of players, from fans of the show to adventure gamers looking for a good old-fashioned whodunit. Call it a hunch.

 

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