Peppered throughout with references to gangster movies, Mafia II looks to continue the reputation for well-written snappy dialogue, great voice acting and free-roaming gameplay built on a solid storyline and entertaining missions.
However, it's the living, breathing urban environment that will be the game's true star, and one that causes the most development headaches - especially with 'stiffness', according to the game's lead artist, Roman Hladik: "A city truly is a living, breathing organism. Cars have to drive around, ships have to sail on the river, people have to walk and perform their daily routines, birds have to fly in the sky.
The environment itself has to live with grass and trees moving in the wind, swirling trash on the pavement, sewers steaming Any 'stiffness' in the computer-generated art creates an unnatural feeling.
Mafia irs city feels alive, with thousands of different NPCs carrying on with daily routines, stopping to chat, doing the shopping, buying a hot dog, using a phone booth - and if you look up at the buildings at night you'll see the lights in rooms being turned on and off as people live their virtual lives.
The NPCs are also separated into various groups, such as rich and poor, so that you will not see an expensively dressed guy picking through the garbage. Clumsy bums aren't the only hazard when creating a city. In terms of pathfinding, the cars in the game are actually choosing their way randomly, although some specific vehicles are being pulled out of their normal random routines for specific tasks, like a taxi cab pausing by the walkway for a customer or a delivery truck stopping by a shop to allow workers to unload its cargo.
Mafia was unfairly but inevitably compared to Grand Theft Auto on its release - on the surface it appears to be a sandbox game, but is in fact more of a linear, story-driven experience in numerous locations that happen to be in a freeform city.
Instead we're trying to concentrate on delivering maximum quality on every single aspect our game. Which does not mean to say that the city is boring or that there will not be enough things to do. We've actually added a lot more side quests, events and locations, so if you want to go nuts, you definitely can.
Vavra believes that a balance of complete player freedom and narrative direction is the future for games such as Mafia II. We're trying to be somewhere in the middle. Enough freedom and replay value, but with a very strong movie experience in all the right places. Mafia II is due out early next year - we'll wear concrete boots and matching overcoats if 2K Czech fail to deliver a sophisticated Cosa Nostra classic set in a living city..
Faced With One the developers of the original Mafia , there's only one question any fan really wants to ask. So I asked it. Why was that bloody racing mission so stupidly difficult?
Daniel Vavra, lead designer at 2K Czech formerly the far less bleak sounding Illusion Softworks laughed and assured me that it was originally intended to be harder, and that only the endless nagging of his superiors prevented it becoming the most impossible-to-beat level in gaming history.
Putting old grudges to bed, we set aside the only blotch on Mafia's tenure as the PC's greatest, most well-i written free-roaming shooter, and move on to the matter at hand - its sequel. First, 2K Czech are keen to quash rumours - Mafia 2 is not a continuation of the previous game's story, nor is the main character related to the original protagonist in any way. Mafia 2 starts with a clean slate, and with that fact firmly stated, it's deemed appropriate to show off an early version of the game's introductory cutscene.
In it a locomotive pulls into a Grand Central-esque station. Out of this locomotive steps a neatly dressed soldier on leave - this is Vito, your character, who chose to enlist rather than serve time in prison having been arrested for a petty crime. He's home for a month following a spell in hospital, though the war is coming to an end anyway. As he leaves the station Vito is met by a husky gentleman in a trench coat and trilby - this is Vito's childhood friend and criminal counterpart, Joe.
Vito asks how Joe knew he'd be arriving, to which Joe replies, "I've got my contacts". If the game's title didn't tip you off, Joe's dubious nature certainly will - this is a game about bad men, questionable morality and having contacts. As they leave the station, two policemen eye them with presumably warranted suspicion.
Already it's apparent that, from its cinematic camera work to its superb voice acting, this is unmistakeably Mafia - infused, as ever, with Goodfellas and Godfather references.
You've got Vito, the clever one, and Joe, the ruthless one - your typical aspiring gangsters destined to become embroiled in a war between two rival families. There's loads of swearing, which is both funny and clever, complementing a tight script written by Vavra. He wrote the original game's script too, so you know it'll be good.
Flitting about 2K Czech's office like an inquisitive fact-moth, I happen upon the game's city designer, Pavel Cizek, who tells me about Mafia 2s game world. Girth fans will be pleased to hear that it's twice as big as Mafia's Lost Heaven, with two and a half square miles in which to roam.
Loosely modelled on Manhattan, Mafia ITs city contains memorable landmarks such as a version of the Empire State Building, which, as it's visible throughout the city, acts as a useful navigation aid.
The camera dives into the city and rolls gently along sun-drenched tenements, as Cizek demonstrates the density of the roadside furniture. Fences, bins, back-streets, burnt out cars, individually modelled windows, lootable shop fronts, meticulously realised fire escapes - there's a hell of a lot of detail on offer, and most of it can lie mown down and destroyed.
Cizek flips the cityscape from day to night, to show how windows are randomly illuminated from the inside as imaginary folk move from room to room switching lights on and off. This might sound like the most ridiculous little thing, these glowing lights, but it's there to cement over any telling cracks in the game world's realism. The goal here is to create a city which supplements and supports the strong story aspects of the game. Through small details like these, 2K Czech plan to create the most believable living, breathing city we've ever seen.
To this often-touted end Mafia Il's pedestrians have had a disproportionate amount of thought put into them. As unbelievable as it sounds, any member of the populace will have an observable routine, such as leaving their home, hopping on a bus, getting off at a clothes shop, trying on and then paying for a suit, before finally returning home by bus again. Oblivion started it and some city-builders have similar systems, but Mafia II is going to new extremes.
If a driver collides with another car which occurs at random , both parties will exit their vehicles and exchange insurance details in an amicable fashion. Police will chase criminals if they spot a random crime in progress. The homeless will sleep rough and rummage in bins. Meanwhile, the previous game's strict speed limits are less enforced so police officers will turn a blind eye to somebody coasting at five miles per hour above the limit.
In fact, other drivers will likely be doing the same. What we're being promised is the next generation of urban environments in gaming as awful a phrase as that sounds , and if 2K Czech can pull it off it's destined to be a wonderful thing just to sit back and observe - believable in its subtlety and surprising in its complexity. Whether it be in the gentle rocking of individual train carriages as they clatter along the rails, the understated build-up of grit and muck on your car as you hurtle recklessly along a dirt track and the ability to wash it off , or simply the clothes and cars chosen to flawlessly recreate the '40s period - Mafia II will be a beautifully detailed game.
If my slack-jawed enthusiasm for the game's environments have confounded you - let me remind you that Mafia II is still a shooter, in which you're expected to kill many people.
Rest assured that the liberal care that 2K Czech have massaged into the game's city has made it as far as the action sections. And as if to prove this, I am shown a shootout in a brewery. As with the original game, everything will take place from a third-person standpoint, but Mafia II takes affairs slightly more over the shoulder.
Vito or at least the 2K Czech developer in control of him begins outside a door with a pair of comrades, before kicking the door down and alerting the occupants to the intrusion.
Brandishing a Tommy gun and firing from the hip, Vito manages to head shoot one of the goons, in the process reducing a cement column to a state of utter disrepair. As bullets fly, so do chunks of the surrounding interior - including tables, crates of bottles, railings and barrels. Mercifully, Mafia II will allow you to take cover behind objects with the tap of a button - Vito does so behind a sturdy looking piece of scenery, and as if to demonstrate the capabilities and advantages of a man under cover, fires off some shots above his encampment, shuffles along a bit, and then fires off some shots around the side.
As retaliatory fire ricochets and pings off every surface, Vito's mates desperately try to avoid having their faces shot off, while available cover peels away with every round fired. Heightened by the deafening noise and scattering debris, the stand-off becomes increasingly tense, with Vito and his cohorts working their way up two floors to leave the final enemy a slumped ragdoll, casually flung over a bench.
The man controlling Vito runs him through some physics-enabled cardboard boxes, by means of celebration, causing them to fly across the room. While it wasn't shown at the presentation, we're told hand-to-hand combat will also feature in Mafia II. When guns fail, objects like bottles can be used to attack your foes - initially as a means to bludgeon them and, once smashed, to give them a glassy stab. Keen to prove that such actions at least exist at this early stage of development, a bottle is swiftly smashed over the head of an innocent, cowering warehouse employee, who'd been hiding in a corner.
English and 7 more. View Steam Achievements Includes 67 Steam Achievements. Publisher: 2K. Franchise: Mafia. Share Embed. Read Critic Reviews. Add to Cart. View Community Hub. Epic Gangster Story: Inspired by iconic mafia drama, the compelling characters and cinematic presentation will pull players into the allure and impossible escape of life in the Mafia. Mature Content Description The developers describe the content like this: This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: General Mature Content.
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