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L.A. Noire once "five or six" discs

"It's the biggest map we've done."

Team Bondi's sleuthing shooter L.A. Noire originally filled up to six Xbox 360 discs.

Six Xbox 360 discs?

The game's period recreation of Los Angeles is apparently the biggest map of any Rockstar title to date. There's also 21 hours of performance capture.

"We've always been called stupidly ambitious," L.A. Noire's writer and director Brendan McNamara told Gamespot. "It took a lot of effort to get down to three discs - I think we were on four or five or six at one point - and to get it onto one Blu-ray."

How was the game shrunk down? McNamara simply hails "miraculous compression" techniques to cram all the content in. The Xbox 360 version ships on three DVDs.

We do know two types of investigation were cut from the L.A. Noire's finished build - reducing the number of mission types from six to four. Perhaps that helped, too?

Team Bondi is now considering their release as DLC.

Regardless, McNamara claims gamers still have a huge world to explore. "It's the biggest map that we've done and that Rockstar has done, so there's a lot of detail in there," he said.

L.A. Noire's first 15 minutes.

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