October 7 marks the release for the upcoming Mafia 3. It’s going to be an open-world game. When deciding which activities protagonist Lincoln Clay will participate in, the developers at Hangar 13 came up with their own inside joke about the open-world activities: No fishing.
No fishing means that you aren’t wasting time when you’re playing. Mafia 3 creative director Haden Blackman said:
…there’s an urgency to Lincoln’s quest and his mission, and we want to make sure that it didn’t feel weird and discordant that there were all these other activities that you could do in the game where you’re like, ‘Why would Lincoln be doing that when he’s trying to do these other things, and he knows he’s got a timeline to do it in before the world hits him back.’ That was our approach.”
There are a total of 10 districts in the game, in which you try to gain control of nine of them. You take over the districts by hurting their ability to earn or kick, playing with the idea that the mob’s power has everything to do with the upflow of cash. You take down the mobs by starting at the bottom and working your way up. Players can do multiple tasks in whatever order they want in order to take down the mob, which all takes place in the open-world.
Blackman said that the development team had to not second-guess themselves about what fans of Mafia and other open-world games want.
At the beginning of development, we sat down and we said, ‘What do we think open world fans are going to expect? What do we think that Mafia fans are going to expect?’ We put that into our franchise pillars in order to use that as our guiding lights and the things that would guide us throughout all of development, but then we just put that in the back of our minds and we said, ‘Okay, now we’ve just got to make the game that we want to make, and let’s move ahead.’
Mafia 3 will release tomorrow, October 7 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.