Interview: Why Mafia The Old Country returns to the series’ roots

One of the most impressive trailers shown during this year’s The game Awards was for Mafia: The Old Country.

The first all-new Mafia game in nine years, The Old Country takes both the series and the story back to its roots by setting the game in Sicily in the early 20th century.

While Mafia 3 was generally well received, its setting in late ’60s New Orleans gave it a very different vibe than its predecessors, and while it had fans, others felt it didn’t quite match the mafia movie image it had. the name ‘Mafia’ generally conjures up. for some.

The same certainly can’t be said for The Old Country, which seems to take The Godfather II as its main inspiration and should have players practicing their best Pacino, Brando and De Niro impressions.

A few days before the game Awards began, VGC sat down with Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes and game director Alex Cox to check out the trailer and discuss the decision to take the series back to its roots. of the mafia.

As fun as the entire Mafia series is, I think the word ‘Mafia’ immediately conjures up images of The Godfather and the like for many people, and that may have been why some didn’t feel like Mafia 3 fit in tonally with the rest. of the series. Was this what led to the decision to go to Sicily for the fourth match?

Alex Cox – I don’t think it’s a reaction to Mafia 3 in any way. Each Mafia game explores a different era, say, of organized crime: the 1920s, 1930s, etc. I think we practically represent 50% of the 20th century.

For many different reasons, we wanted to go back to the beginning with Mafia: The Old Country. It’s a new engine. It’s a new era for the franchise. We thought it was really good to go back to the beginning.

And as with the other eras we’ve explored, we look at what the iconic vibe and feel of the era is. So, when we say Sicily of 1900, what is the image that comes to mind? What will the experience be like? That’s what we wanted to put on the screen.

Mafia 3 had its own version, Mafia 1 and 2 also have their own versions from their respective eras. So I think part of our brief, our creative direction, is to offer the fantasy of playing a mafia movie. So we look to that for inspiration, the materials at the time of the setting that we’ve chosen for each game, and we really do our best to deliver on that.

Nick Baynes – I think one of the things we always look at when we start a new game is how can we make something that’s different but familiar?

Because people like Mafia games, because they have a certain feel and vibe, and they all have their own tone, and obviously some of them are slightly different, but they all fit within that Mafia franchise.

So when we first sat down to decide how we wanted to approach and where we wanted to take the story, it really was those types of questions. What do we make that feels like it really fits intrinsically with the Mafia franchise, but also gives the player something new?

I think Sicily in this era really caught our attention, because it’s not just the beginning of the mafia, the real mafia, it’s the beginning of the entire franchise. So it’s like a new experience.

air-conditioning – I mean, that’s the thing, isn’t it, exactly that. Go to Europe, prepare the game and make a prequel, you know, with many different angles, which will make the difference from the other Mafia games, of course.

But you know, the Sicilian mafia underpins all these stories, it’s the kind of mythical backstory of all those mafia titles set in America.

Whether it’s in our games or other games or TV shows, movies or whatever, there’s always the “old country,” that name which is obviously a reference to how the gangsters in those media refer to the origin of their culture and their inheritance.

“I think Sicily at this time really caught our attention, because it’s not just the beginning of the mafia, the real mafia, it’s the beginning of the entire franchise. So it’s like a new experience.”

The first three games were set in big cities, and while Sicily obviously has its cities too, I guess the setting leads to a very different type of game, because I imagine it doesn’t have anything like the cities you have. You’d look at the other Mafia titles, it probably feels like a smaller scale in a sense?

air-conditioning – Yes, and this is something we really wanted as another big point of differentiation between, say, Mafia: The Old Country and Mafia Trilogy. Let’s group them all together, because they have a similar type of design. It was the stage.

Sicily at that time was largely – you know, obviously it has towns and cities and things like that – but it is predominantly a rural environment, with a mainly agricultural environment.

“Whether it’s in our games or other games or TV shows or movies or whatever, there’s always the ‘old country,’ that name which is obviously a reference to how the gangsters in those media refer to the origin of their culture and his inheritance. .”

This is where the mafia really emerged in the story, it was a reaction to… it started in the lemon groves and the farms and things like that in the Sicilian countryside, and we wanted that to be the setting of our game.

Obviously it makes it feel very different to those kind of bustling urban environments of the Mafia Trilogy, it’s a rural setting, so yeah, in the game we’re very much in cities and towns.

We’ve mentioned that the city of San Celeste is the main city of our game world, and yes, as expected, it’s not like bustling streets with traffic and cars and pedestrians and stuff like that, it’s horseback riding. through a more rural sort of setting, and I had to visualize it through the beautiful Sicilian countryside.

So yeah, it’s very different in that sense. While the core of the game is a mafia game in the way you’d probably expect, that part of the experience is very different.

When you say it’s a mafia game in the sense we’d expect, I realize it’s sold as a linear narrative game. Again, was it an intentional design to go back to the first two games?

As much as I personally enjoyed Mafia 3, I think some people were taken aback by the decision to split the game into regions and make it feel like a more open world. While for other series that would be considered a positive, it seems that mafia fans preferred the more narrative drive of the first two entries, so is The Old Country an attempt to refocus it on the story as a more established path?

air-conditioning – I don’t think it was a conscious decision as such, you know, because Mafia III was successful in its own right, and it was different to 1 and 2, it had a different structure.

The last game we made was Mafia: Definitive Edition, so the team making Mafia: The Old Country was the last Mafia game we released.

We love all the Mafia games, but the game was a success, we enjoyed working on it and yes, of course, a focus on narrative is certainly what we wanted to offer with Mafia: The Old Country.

Note: Yes, Alex said there how much the team worked on Mafia: Definitive Edition before this one. I mean, we have several people on the team who have worked since the first Mafia, when it came out on PC in 2002.

So this is kind of like… every game we make, obviously, we learn things from it, what works, what doesn’t work, what we like, what we want to try differently next time. I think one of the key things here was that we had a very clear story that we wanted to tell, so the game is based on that story.

So I think in that sense it’s very close to Mafia 1 and 2 in terms of… we know that Mafia fans also love linear stories, so yes, it was deliberate in terms of we’re telling a story and We’re laser focused on that, but I wouldn’t say it’s one thing or another in particular. It’s just based on years and years of experience creating these games and deciding what’s right for each story we tell.

You mentioned the new engine…

air-conditioning – Yes, we moved to Unreal Engine 5, so we rebuilt our game engine. We had to rebuild our game technology, of course, because we abandoned our old engine, which is what we built on the internal technology of previous Mafia games.

And yes, Unreal obviously opens up a lot of new possibilities for us, particularly visually. The game looks really amazing.

In many ways, as we were rebuilding the game, we wanted it to be quite familiar on the pad. So when you play, we want the game to be somewhat consistent with previous Mafia games and not be a huge distraction or diversion from what players expect to get out of a Mafia game.

But again, as we come back, in the process of rebuilding everything, it’s been an opportunity for us to update everything, to bring all those types of Mafia game systems up to the expectations of the current generation, let’s say.

And with Sicily as the setting now, I imagine the move to UE5 gives you the opportunity to go crazy with the landscapes in a way that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do in a more urbanized sort of city.

air-conditioning – Absolutely. Yes. You know, in a Mafia game set in a city, what we really want to sell is the hustle and bustle of the city. So whether it was New Bordeaux, Empire Bay or Lost Heaven, we really wanted to convey that vibe.

In Sicily, in Mafia: The Old Country, the atmosphere is very, very different. So beautiful landscapes, as you say, is exactly what we wanted to offer and Unreal really helped us in that regard. You know, we’re putting all those kinds of flashy new technologies that have been incorporated into Unreal 5 to good use.