Daniel McMahon, one of the writers who worked on L.A. Noire, sat down with IGN to celebrate the game’s 15th anniversary, has revealed new details on Whore of the Orient, the spiritual successor to the 1940s detective title that was being developed by ex-Team Bondi staff.
For those out of the loop, Team Bondi’s assets were purchased by Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM) in August 2011, with staff given the option of joining KMM, with development of Whore of the Orient continuing after the team was absorbed into KMM Interactive Entertainment. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment was set to publish the game, and had a projected release window of 2015.
According to McMahon, Whore of the Orient would have taken place in 1930s Shanghai and focussed more on detail as opposed to overwhelming scale. The writer compared the shift between the games to that of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin’s Creed Unity, which replaced the open-world Caribbean and ship combat with a dense, crowd-heavy Paris.
Whore of the Orient would have seen players take on the role of a British detective, and unlike L.A. Noire, your crime-fighting efforts would have seen you working to stop them from happening in the first place, rather than solving the aftermath. The development team were working on a language system that would level up with XP as you progress, as obviously you’re playing a British citizen in a non-English speaking city. L.A. Noire’s conversation system was also set to be expanded with more branching paths.
Mahon also revealed how the interrogation system would have been expanded in Whore of the Orient, noting that it would offer a more dynamic approach with no single right answer.
If you hit the suspect just right, you would get the entire truth revealed to you. If you tried strategies in the middle, you might get an address or a name, and then you would have to go find more suspects and put more information together with.
Whore of the Orient was ultimately scrapped due to lack of funding and publishing issues, with McMahon stating that the project was about 15% complete when it was cancelled. Back in 2016, David Proud, who served as producer on the project, revealed on the GameHugs podcast that Whore of the Orient was pretty much dead and was unlikely to be revived.
[Source – IGN]