The Mafia series has long been a contemporary of franchises like GTA and Saints Row, but its focus has always been much more narrow than those sprawling games. From the very first Mafia game, the goal was to deliver a playable classic mob movie, making for a familiar pastiche of themes and characters. The first game was technically an open world in that you drove between mission hubs, but it was largely focused on its narrative. For its latest game, Mafia: The Old Country, 2K is similarly focused. GameSpot spoke with executive producer Devin Hitch and game director Alex Cox about the change in setting and a renewed focus on making combat feel intimate and personal.
The previous games have slowly become more modern, starting in the 1930s and then venturing into the 1940s and 1950s in Mafia 2 and finally the 1960s in Mafia 3. Aside from brief interstitial stories, they’ve also all taken place across a fictionalized United States. That makes this setting, 1900s Sicily, a significant change for the series, but one that won’t be unfamiliar to fans of organized-crime fiction.
“When we [begin a] project, as we usually do, we go back to the drawing board, we look at the ‘Mafia’ DNA,” Cox said. We go back to the project, the franchise pillars to figure out what would make for a new ‘Mafia’ game, what we want it to be different about this one. And in some ways, what we want about it to be the same. And when we look at Mafia, the Mafia series and what was done in the previous three games, they start to become this story of organized crime in the 20th century. Visiting different historical eras that are very iconic, very familiar to a mainstream audience. Players will have seen Godfather, ‘Goodfellas’, Untouchables, all of the kinds of movies that define very iconic eras in organized-crime history.”