Today, Hangar 13 published a new developer diary detailing the making of Mafia: The Old Country. The developer revealed that it has partnered with Stormind Games, an Italian studio known for games like Remothered: Broken Porcelain, Batora: Lost Haven, and, more recently, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. Stormind is based in Sicily and helped Hangar 13 make Mafia: The Old Country as authentic as possible. Here are a few quotes from the video interview:
Salvo Fallica, Senior Project Manager at Stormind Games: Our priority has always been to ensure that everything in the game feels authentic.
Matthew Aitken, Lead Writer at Hangar 13: The details are absolutely key in keeping the immersion of the player.
Alex Cox, Game Director at Hangar 13: We need to make sure that the game is grounded in the real history of the Sicilian Mafia. Experts in their field are able to kind of help us contextualize things that we read in the stuff that we see on the screen with real lived experiences.
Steve Noakes, Art Director at Hangar 13: When it comes to something like the knives in the game, there's very little reference that's available for that. Right? And so really we had to dig very deep. We went into some tiny little backwater of a machine shop where this guy and his son were still crafting knives by hand, imbuing them with their particular regional styles, known for their thumbprints, if you like, of their particular approach to building knives. We just wouldn't really experienced that any other way.
Jakub Vavrik, Associate Art Director at Hangar 13: Previous Mafia games were more or less city heavy, and now we are moving to more organic wildlife setting of Sicily.
Alex Cox: A very realistic, high fidelity, authentic setting. It really feels like we're transporting you back to 1900 Sicily. That's what Mafia players really expect from one of our games. Players will form a relationship with Sicily over the course of this game.
Steve Noakes: The landscape is always a character in any Mafia game. I think that's especially true of this location and of this time period and setting.
Alex Cox: The promise is to play a classic mob movie. That's the game that you're going to play, allowing players to really imagine themselves back in that time and playing through the game as a Sicilian gangster. I hope players find it as exciting as we do
Mafia: The Old Country will launch on August 8 at $50. Unlike its predecessor, it's a strictly narrative-driven game. You can read the PC system requirements here.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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