GTA 6 needs to steal this awesome mechanic from the cancelled LA Noire follow-up

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As the gaming world simmers with anticipation for the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 this November, another banger published by Rockstar Games recently celebrated a major milestone. This May marked the 15th anniversary of LA Noire, the captivating detective thriller that starred most of the supporting cast of Mad Men and gave the world the "press X to doubt" meme. In honor of the auspicious occasion, journalist Cade Onder spoke with writer Daniel McMahon, formerly of Team Bondi, which developed the 2011 game. The interview is a fascinating retrospective that also delves into the team's plans for a follow-up called Whore of the Orient. While this questionably named project was canceled early in development, it had a fascinating core mechanic that would translate incredibly well to GTA 6.

Whore of the Orient was set in Shanghai in the 1930s, and you'd play a British detective with the Shanghai Municipal Police. But there's one big problem: you don't speak Mandarin, which makes it pretty tough to interview witnesses, gather evidence, or do even the most basic kinds of police work. That's where things get interesting.

"We talked about systems that made you feel dislocated in that world," McMahon explained. "You don't speak Mandarin. You can't communicate with anybody. We talked about that, we specced that as a potential system, where you had to level up your language so that you could actually connect with any of the locals and do any meaningful investigation."

The idea for the mechanic stemmed from McMahon's extensive historical research about British expats working as police officers in China during the 1930s. "Over and over again, the historical material points to the fact that Shanghai Municipal Police officers were terribly disadvantaged by the fact that they could not speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Also, you know, with a colonial mindset, they didn't really care, and they expected Chinese people to speak English to them. But how are you supposed to operate as a police officer when you can't communicate with anyone around you?" McMahon said. "Our hope was that your character would be better than that, more engaged than that, more interested than that. And so we thought of language as your kind of XP system. The deeper you dig, the more language you learn, the better you're able to communicate, the more you're able to investigate rather than just whipping your gun out and killing everyone."

The whole video is a captivating watch if you're a fan of LA Noire, but the section about the language mechanic in Whore of the Orient starts around the 24:30 mark.

It's a really captivating idea. In the early hours, you'd probably only be able to pick out very basic nouns and verbs, and some whole sentences would likely be a mystery. But as your knowledge deepens, you'd be able to understand more subtleties and nuances in people's speech — like regional slang, formality, verb tenses, and so on. There are plenty of edutainment apps that aim to gamify real-life language learning, but there aren't many games where your character learns a language as part of their evolution and growth. The closest thing I can think of is Final Fantasy 10, where you collect up to 26 books that allow you to understand the Al Bhed language. But it's a very simple, artificially constructed language, where one letter of the English alphabet stands in for the other. By comparison, applying this concept to real-world languages and choice-based gameplay is a massive undertaking.

To be clear, there's no evidence whatsoever that GTA 6 has a gamified language system of any kind. Team Bondi stopped working with Rockstar Games after LA Noire, and Whore of the Orient was canceled back in 2013 when Warner Bros. pulled out of publishing the game. Even so, as a fictionalized version of Miami, roughly two-thirds of which is Spanish-speaking, Vice City would make a very cool testing ground for a language-based gameplay mechanic. Latin American, Caribbean, and European Spanish all have their own unique slang, wordplay, and turns of phrase. It would be really memorable — and true to the setting — if the game included optional relationships and missions you could only access if Jason and Lucia boned up on their Spanish a bit. It wouldn't have to feel like school or anything, more like an iteration on the camp relationships in Red Dead Redemption 2. Besides, it would be the perfect opportunity to introduce players to a dazzling new world of curse words and insults. And isn't that part of the fun of GTA, anyway?

Grand Theft Auto 6 comes to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on Nov. 19.