Hangar 13 has unveiled a new Mafia: The Old Country game

Along with the first cinematic trailer of Mafia: The Old Country game, its developers shared new details about the project, which will be released in 2025.

The Mafia series takes the leading place in the list of action games on its narrow-profile theme. The competition to it, but from the opposite camp of detectives could be made, perhaps, only by L.A. Noire, which is in the list of brands of the same publisher 2K Games.

However, the latter, having become incredibly successful, hitchhiked its team into bankruptcy, and its plans for a sequel about catching gangsters in old Shanghai came to an early halt, though the publisher still holds out hope for a sequel with other creators.

Hangar 13 Studios has also endured years of turbulence, changes in management, and the firing of many employees, but, having recovered, is ready for a more chambered continuation of the universe, which would properly be called a prequel to the first Mafia.

The action will take place in Sicily in the 1900s. The developers emphasize that movies and TV series could tell the audience what gangsters were doing in that region at that time.

There wasn’t much variety of activity: racketeering citrus farmers, producing olive oil and wine, fighting other rival gangs, and avenging violations of the Omerta, a code of silence and oath of allegiance to the Family.

The authors note that while there are references to other parts of the series, such as the city of San Celeste, all the characters will be new, so as not to upset the audience who will familiarize themselves with the game without having seen the previous parts, each of which has its own loyal fans – this is a notable feature of the Mafia series . For days and hours they are ready to argue why their choice is the best in the entire series.

The young protagonist’s name is Enzo Favara. He is a simple laborer in the countryside. Some as yet unsolved circumstances bring him into the family of Don Torrisi, a powerful criminal clan inspired by Cosa Nostra.

Enzo swears allegiance to the Don and takes up gangster justice for him and performs a variety of tasks, gradually mastering the craft of a bandit and transforming from a peasant into a mercenary of the clan, ready for any task.

Obviously, budgetary problems didn’t allow Hangar 13 to make the scale of the game similar to Mafia III, and they skillfully got out of it by changing the scenery, and at the same time made the project more linear and cinematic than before. In this sense, it will be very similar to the first part of the series, telling the story of one hero, who is unlikely to be the master of the whole city, but can try to deal with rival groups and rise in the criminal world.

The scenery in the series will transform significantly. The bustling streets of American metropolises or the surrounding rivers and roads will give way to the main city on the hill – San Celeste. It has everything you need for the early XX century and even a theater: life flows unhurriedly, mostly in the provinces – on the shores of Sicily fishermen, and the main employment is formed in the countryside, where they are engaged in subsistence farming in the format of villas, estates and small stores.

We can’t rule out some small villages to explore on the map, and between them the protagonist will move not only on retro cars from the 1900s, but even on horses. The creators are especially proud of the implementation of equestrian gameplay, and now it will be quite possible to organize a chase for an old car on horseback along a rural road. As in previous installments, chases in the story will be regular during the showdown with other gangs.

The arsenal available to the hero changes dramatically. Wagons with ammunition, automatic rifles and powerful rifles are a thing of the past. The main weapon of the local mobster is a stiletto, and here the authors went deep into the study of dagger fights of that time, making such fights in the format of almost duels, where instead of swords there are knives.

When you need more firepower, the hero will be able to use simple revolvers and powerful old shotguns, sawed-off shotguns, rifles, effective only at close range to the target as a significant help against the superior numbers of attacking enemies. The gameplay will not do without stealth tasks, when you need to get close to some victim in the city and eliminate it without attracting attention in the spirit of Hitman series.

The latter keeps all sorts of developers busy, and it seems that everyone is already resigned to the fact that its ideas will be borrowed, modified and replicated by competitors.

Enzo’s clanmates will also appear, and, as usual, the plot will scatter different characters here and there, laying the seeds of intrigue and betrayal for the future. So far, the authors have not specified whether the game will have different endings, or only one. Obviously, the nature of the chamber project was the key to shortening the creative cycle.

It was faster to design a countryside with fields and estates than to design a city with numerous streets. As before, the game world will be densely populated with virtual people: farmers, fishermen, city dwellers with their own plans and affairs until the player interferes in their measured life on the next task.

Curiously, it seems that the authors have so far abandoned even the idea of showing the major cities of Italy for exploration and missions, and the main place of action, in general, will make the provincial town and countryside with the coastline.

Although it can’t be ruled out that some separate mission will unfold in Rome on a separate map – or the enlargement of the scale was postponed for the prequel sequel in order to show where Don Salieri came from in the finale of the new series of games.

Back in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla successfully worked out the adventure region system with its own locations and maps that you could freely travel between.

Also the creators did not specify whether the player will have his own villa to arrange, but given the popularity of this feature in games of the genre, it can not be ruled out, especially since the creation of such an opportunity is clearly not the most time-consuming process, even if you equip it with all kinds of visual and not only improvements. This was realized even in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag purely for atmosphere, but it pleased the users.

It took several years to create Mafia: The Old Country. It is noteworthy that the authors deliberately removed the number 4 from the title, as if hinting that the spin-off will unfold in a slightly different way than the previous parts. The first thing the developers took a trip to Sicily and visited various museums, where they even signed a contract with a local firm that helped them to get into the essence of the history of the mafia of those times. They also hired their own consultants in America, trying to capture the atmosphere of that time as accurately as possible – more measured, less like an action movie.

Separately studied the issues of the car fleet, available in those times cars, their technical features in an attempt to realize the limited opportunities and difficult management of clumsy iron horses in times when ordinary horses were still popular, but began to yield to cars in speed and comfort of movement.

New fights in the game authors call tactical, as if hinting that duels on knives and attempts to silently penetrate the enemy territory will prevail over gunfights. By the way, this approach is implemented in the new action-quest Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where the hero always has few bullets, and he dies from a couple of accurate enemy blows, forcing you to improvise, sneak and hide.

The game will have a full-fledged beautiful soundtrack and realistic for the time sound effects. All the important roles of the characters were performed by real actors: as it is supposed to be done nowadays, playing not only by voice, but also by all the movements, their gestures in Motion Capture suits with sensors.

Mafia: The Old Country will be released on PC, Xbox X/S, PlayStation 5 in the summer of 2025, after which the authors plan to release several additions. It will be interesting to see if the new bias towards cinematic, linear and chamber frameworks of what is happening will benefit the history of the famous game series.

Text: GS News.