MAFIA III - Yo Coonass prepare ta learn 'bout family in N'awlins

[Multidirectional]

Yeah, everyone loved the racing mission in Mafia 1...

Guess what, I did. Git gud faggots.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Same here. After finishing the shooting segments the driving mission didn't felt so hard. I've finished at the second try and just forgotten about it. After years and seeing all those posts on the internet mentioning it I was surprised that so many people were angry about it. I was more frustrated by some lone gunman shooting me off than this race.

 

[Metro]

Mafia 2 was utter shit. Trash GTA clone... this won't be any better.

 

[adddeed]

Way too arcadey. Mafia 1 could've been a racing sim, that's how good the physics were.

fixed

Bro, i played Mafia 1 and 2 back to back not too long ago, the physics in Mafia 2 are top notch. Mafia 1 is superb as well, but the edge goes to the sequel.

 

[Multidirectional]

Mafia 2 was utter shit. Trash GTA clone... this won't be any better.

It wasn't a GTA clone, just much shittier popamolized version of Mafia 1. Even storytelling was a lot worse.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Ivan]

isn't this old as fuck?

 

[Abu Antar]

isn't this old as fuck?

I don't fucking know. I know the video is a few months old but I hadn't seen it before.

 

[Infinitron]

isn't this old as fuck?

I don't fucking know. I know the video is a few months old but I hadn't seen it before.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...utfamily-in-nawlins.74911/page-6#post-4282583

use search in thread for the youtube id

 

[AwesomeButton]

First new trailer in a while:


Looks great as a trailer for a movie, too bad the realistic acting will be interrupted by inane shooting scenes where you kill between 20 and 100 enemies in one sitting. I'm not making an argument for the walking sims but I think Mafia and Max Payne would have been just as good if not better, with half the amount of shooting.

Edit: this is the first time they announce the release date, isn't it?

 

[veevoir]

"One way road" - at least they are honest about railroaded linear story

 

[Carrion]

I'm not making an argument for the walking sims but I think Mafia and Max Payne would have been just as good if not better, with half the amount of shooting.

I disagree. The first Mafia only had a handful of shootouts, and the bodycount was relatively low for a game. It took a couple of hours before you even got to shoot a person, and that was in a small-scale gunfight with half-a-dozen enemies or so. Especially early in the game killing people was a last resort rather than something that was done regularly. Later on you did become the Don's hitman, of course, but violence was still not taken all that lightly in the game, as there was always a backlash of some sort when shit hit the fan — the newspapers stirring shit up, the family getting into all sorts of trouble by the politicians or the cops, Tommy struggling to come to terms with his own actions and becoming increasingly jaded etc. The shooting scenes were the definite highlights of the game and just rare enough so that they all felt exciting and memorable.

The sequel, on the other hand, fucked this aspect up and was filled with forgettable cover shooting with little sense of pacing. You were slaughtering dozens of cops almost right from the start without so much as batting an eye, and there were barely any consequences to any of that.

(Max Payne of course was a completely different game where shooting things in a spectacular fashion was the whole point.)

 

[Zdzisiu]

I'm not making an argument for the walking sims but I think Mafia and Max Payne would have been just as good if not better, with half the amount of shooting.

I disagree. The first Mafia only had a handful of shootouts, and the bodycount was relatively low for a game. It took a couple of hours before you even got to shoot a person, and that was in a small-scale gunfight with half-a-dozen enemies or so. Especially early in the game killing people was a last resort rather than something that was done regularly. Later on you did become the Don's hitman, of course, but violence was still not taken all that lightly in the game, as there was always a backlash of some sort when shit hit the fan — the newspapers stirring shit up, the family getting into all sorts of trouble by the politicians or the cops, Tommy struggling to come to terms with his own actions and becoming increasingly jaded etc. The shooting scenes were the definite highlights of the game and just rare enough so that they all felt exciting and memorable.

The sequel, on the other hand, fucked this aspect up and was filled with forgettable cover shooting with little sense of pacing. You were slaughtering dozens of cops almost right from the start without so much as batting an eye, and there were barely any consequences to any of that.

(Max Payne of course was a completely different game where shooting things in a spectacular fashion was the whole point.)

Yeah, it hit me pretty hard when I was playing Mafia 2 after finishing Mafia 1. In Mafia 2 there was this mission I remember pretty early on where you have to infiltrate some building to steal something, and shit hits the fan and you have to run away from the police but you end up straight up shooting some of them in cold blood. And then there is no story consequence to it. It just happened and nobody really gave a fuck, the story went on and even more bizzare and over the top displays of violence happened.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm not making an argument for the walking sims but I think Mafia and Max Payne would have been just as good if not better, with half the amount of shooting.

I disagree. The first Mafia only had a handful of shootouts, and the bodycount was relatively low for a game. It took a couple of hours before you even got to shoot a person, and that was in a small-scale gunfight with half-a-dozen enemies or so. Especially early in the game killing people was a last resort rather than something that was done regularly. Later on you did become the Don's hitman, of course, but violence was still not taken all that lightly in the game, as there was always a backlash of some sort when shit hit the fan — the newspapers stirring shit up, the family getting into all sorts of trouble by the politicians or the cops, Tommy struggling to come to terms with his own actions and becoming increasingly jaded etc. The shooting scenes were the definite highlights of the game and just rare enough so that they all felt exciting and memorable.

The sequel, on the other hand, fucked this aspect up and was filled with forgettable cover shooting with little sense of pacing. You were slaughtering dozens of cops almost right from the start without so much as batting an eye, and there were barely any consequences to any of that.

(Max Payne of course was a completely different game where shooting things in a spectacular fashion was the whole point.)

Check your glasses, I think they are rosey. Just three examples of missions that irritated me in Mafia I: the airfield, the hotel, and the church mission. I killed platoons, companies of enemies. It felt especially silly in the hotel, where the shooting was happening on the rooftops, and after I had made a covert entry, caught that woman in the bath and spared her instead of killing her. A minute later I was wading through corpses.

For one thing, this is boring. (Max Payne/2/3 and the bullet time kills get boring too). A level with a few but intelligent human-like enemies is much more fun, and leaves you with cooler memories and stories than playing popamole with 50 mooks for 5-10 minutes on end. For another, it breaks the immersion and the feeling you are the main character in a good movie - characters look, talk and reason realistically, but at some point it all breaks down and you are playing quake again. By the time the shooting starts, I'm not in the mood for shooting at all. That's really an unintended consequence of the cinematic parts being good.

This bothered me as a kid when I was playing Mafia I, and today I find myself playing such games in spite of the shooting. GTA V is somewhat better in the beginning, until it escalates as well, and you may end up killing a lot more cops during heists, but GTA still carries some of that parody feel, so I can't get that irritated.

 

[tormund]

TPS gameplay WAS the core of MP1&2's appeal. MP3's focus on storytelling and cinematic cutscenes was the biggest flaw of that game.

 

[Excidium II]

It's funny cause the story in MP1 is way more interesting.

 

[sser]

I'm not making an argument for the walking sims but I think Mafia and Max Payne would have been just as good if not better, with half the amount of shooting.

I disagree. The first Mafia only had a handful of shootouts, and the bodycount was relatively low for a game. It took a couple of hours before you even got to shoot a person, and that was in a small-scale gunfight with half-a-dozen enemies or so. Especially early in the game killing people was a last resort rather than something that was done regularly. Later on you did become the Don's hitman, of course, but violence was still not taken all that lightly in the game, as there was always a backlash of some sort when shit hit the fan — the newspapers stirring shit up, the family getting into all sorts of trouble by the politicians or the cops, Tommy struggling to come to terms with his own actions and becoming increasingly jaded etc. The shooting scenes were the definite highlights of the game and just rare enough so that they all felt exciting and memorable.

The sequel, on the other hand, fucked this aspect up and was filled with forgettable cover shooting with little sense of pacing. You were slaughtering dozens of cops almost right from the start without so much as batting an eye, and there were barely any consequences to any of that.

(Max Payne of course was a completely different game where shooting things in a spectacular fashion was the whole point.)

Check your glasses, I think they are rosey. Just three examples of missions that irritated me in Mafia I: the airfield, the hotel, and the church mission. I killed platoons, companies of enemies. It felt especially silly in the hotel, where the shooting was happening on the rooftops, and after I had made a covert entry, caught that woman in the bath and spared her instead of killing her. A minute later I was wading through corpses.

For one thing, this is boring. (Max Payne/2/3 and the bullet time kills get boring too). A level with a few but intelligent human-like enemies is much more fun, and leaves you with cooler memories and stories than playing popamole with 50 mooks for 5-10 minutes on end. For another, it breaks the immersion and the feeling you are the main character in a good movie - characters look, talk and reason realistically, but at some point it all breaks down and you are playing quake again. By the time the shooting starts, I'm not in the mood for shooting at all. That's really an unintended consequence of the cinematic parts being good.

This bothered me as a kid when I was playing Mafia I, and today I find myself playing such games in spite of the shooting. GTA V is somewhat better in the beginning, until it escalates as well, and you may end up killing a lot more cops during heists, but GTA still carries some of that parody feel, so I can't get that irritated.

Right, but what's the measure? Realistically speaking if you kill a handful of men in Mafia you're already way beyond what most killers did during the actual era. Mafia's about a gangster storyline wreathed in the demands of interesting gameplay. So long as the narrative doesn't get too out in front, like Tomb Raider's did with the whining or Prototype did with the moral qualms in between utter destruction, then it's fine with me. I never got the feeling Mafia was letting the 'killing issue' get in its way. IIRC, it actually handles it in one of the first missions you do where you get into a car chase with two dudes. What's his face literally says, "Better get used to it" after shooting them.

 

[Carrion]

Check your glasses, I think they are rosey. Just three examples of missions that irritated me in Mafia I: the airfield, the hotel, and the church mission.

It's not that long since I last replayed the game.

The hotel and the church are actually quite good an example on how Mafia 1 does things: They are a culmination of the first couple of years of the game, where Tommy pretty much turns from an ordinary guy into a cold-blooded killer (although not cold-blooded enough to kill an unarmed woman). The whole thing with all the killing is seen as a fiasco (actually starting from the previous mission, where your non-lethal approach fails and things get messy), which results in the police coming down hard on organized crime and causing massive problems for Salieri. It also causes Tommy to reflect quite heavily on his life, and he also struggles more and more to keep his personal life and his job separate, as seen in the following cutscene. It's not something that the characters just shrug off, and detective Norman can barely believe his ears when Tommy tells him what he did and how he got away with it.

It is a game, of course, and its gameplay consists of two things: driving around and shooting people in the face. Quite obviously its bodycount isn't anywhere close to realistic, nor is it supposed to be, but Mafia arguably takes violence more seriously than almost any game that revolves around killing things. Not that they couldn't have taken it even further, but the truth is that the shooting bits pretty much carry the whole game, and they're already rather sparse as it is.

For another, it breaks the immersion and the feeling you are the main character in a good movie - characters look, talk and reason realistically, but at some point it all breaks down and you are playing quake again.

Why on earth would you want to feel like you're in a movie?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Ok, thanks for not trying to argue that Mafia I somehow is light on the killing of unrealistic (in my opinion unneeded) amounts of enemies.

Why on earth would you want to feel like you're in a movie?

characters look, talk and reason realistically

Do I have to spell it out? Because they play a movie for you and then they let you point the crosshair and click the mouse button. I find that a lot less fun than watching the non-interactive parts.

In fact I'd rather not feel like I'm in a movie, as in lacking any interactivity during a mission, apart from shooting. I liked Quantum Break's dilemmas which changed the plot. I think that in the same way, a shorter game with less combat, more reactivity in the place of filler combat would work better for a Mafia game.

 

[Carrion]

In fact I'd rather not feel like I'm in a movie, as in lacking any interactivity during a mission, apart from shooting. I liked Quantum Break's dilemmas which changed the plot. I think that in the same way, a shorter game with less combat, more reactivity in the place of filler combat would work better for a Mafia game.

No argument there. With Max Payne I'll have to disagree (it's a game about shooting and only about shooting), but Mafia was a bit of a mechanical failure as a whole, since it insisted on having an open world which mostly just helped pad out the game and served as a backdrop for getting from point A to point B. The sequel marginally improved upon this by adding a bit more stuff to do in the city, but it was still largely wasted because of the linear mission-based structure, and because there just wasn't any point to do anything aside from the missions in the first place. With the cutscene-based storytelling it might've been interesting to see a slightly different approach to the actual gameplay in both games, adding new elements to it other than just driving and shooting: a greater level of interaction with the game world and the NPCs, perhaps a more open-ended mission design with some adventure game elements, a more creative use of vehicles, maybe even a proper stealth system... That kind of stuff wouldn't have been at all out of place in those games, since they obviously wanted to show different sides of the mob life instead of being just action or driving games. Still, for me the biggest discrepancy of those games is the clash between the "open world" and the super-linear storytelling, rather than the amount of combat, which only really gets jarring in the second game (which has a terrible combat system anyway).

 

[Haba]

Games should follow what (good) action movies do: memorable villains, unique scenes


Instead they keep doing what Rambo did, which gets old real fast.

 

[Cadmus]

In fact I'd rather not feel like I'm in a movie, as in lacking any interactivity during a mission, apart from shooting. I liked Quantum Break's dilemmas which changed the plot. I think that in the same way, a shorter game with less combat, more reactivity in the place of filler combat would work better for a Mafia game.

No argument there. With Max Payne I'll have to disagree (it's a game about shooting and only about shooting), but Mafia was a bit of a mechanical failure as a whole, since it insisted on having an open world which mostly just helped pad out the game and served as a backdrop for getting from point A to point B. The sequel marginally improved upon this by adding a bit more stuff to do in the city, but it was still largely wasted because of the linear mission-based structure, and because there just wasn't any point to do anything aside from the missions in the first place. With the cutscene-based storytelling it might've been interesting to see a slightly different approach to the actual gameplay in both games, adding new elements to it other than just driving and shooting: a greater level of interaction with the game world and the NPCs, perhaps a more open-ended mission design with some adventure game elements, a more creative use of vehicles, maybe even a proper stealth system... That kind of stuff wouldn't have been at all out of place in those games, since they obviously wanted to show different sides of the mob life instead of being just action or driving games. Still, for me the biggest discrepancy of those games is the clash between the "open world" and the super-linear storytelling, rather than the amount of combat, which only really gets jarring in the second game (which has a terrible combat system anyway).

dumbfuck, another one from the school of WHY MY OPEN WORLD DONT GOT MORE MINIGAMES OR CLICKY THINGS WHY IS IT THERE???

 

[Carrion]

dumbfuck, another one from the school of WHY MY OPEN WORLD DONT GOT MORE MINIGAMES OR CLICKY THINGS WHY IS IT THERE???

Yes, that is exactly what I said. Wanting for more alternative approaches and player freedom means that you want minigames.

I hate to break it to you, but even though I love Mafia, its open world is there for one reason and one reason only: to waste your time. They probably spent thousands of hours crafting this beautiful city and then couldn't figure out what to do with it. For most of the time you drive from one side of the city to another while trying to stay under the speed limit, and the only obstacle you may face is your own lack of patience. Everything else about the game is on rails, as generally there's only one place where you might want to go at any single time (except for Luca Bertoni's side missions, which give you more cars so that you may spend even more time driving around just under the speed limit). The city is itself is just a pointless, hollow shell that might as well not be there unless there's a car chase or something interesting going on.

There's one example of a good use of the open world in the game: in the last mission, you may choose to go and buy guns before things get serious (and you don't get a quest marker for it or anything). That, right there, is a simple but nice example of player freedom provided by an open world, and something that I would've loved to see more of. I guess one could also count the car chases, and the sequences where you need to lose the cops (the wanted system in the game is fucking great, by the way). For the most part, though, it's just a huge waste of a beautiful environment.

 

[AwesomeButton]

In my experience, you can either have a big open world full of filler, or a smaller world which feels more hand crafted. Skyrim had an open world and lots of useless filler, Witcher 3 was a rare example of an open world where every sidequests felt distinctive, and even fetch quests were well masked through the premise and writing. Of course, Witcher 3 had enough generic collectibles/chests/monster nests, for those who like this kind of thing.

Having a big open world in the form of a huge city though, as opposed to a medieval countryside with a couple of cities, asks for a much bigger density of meaningful content that has to feel hand crafted. That amounts to a lot more work, hence the minigames and challenges in GTAV.

I doubt Mafia III will pull the "big open world in a city" thing right, and fill it with side content that doesn't feel like grind, but I think that once you decide to make an open world inside a city, you're pretty much fucked.

I'm pretty curious how will CDPR pull off the big city in their cyberpunk game. I expect that like with W3, they'll just spend 5-6 years filling it up with hand-crafted content, but that's something very few companies can afford to do, purely financially, let alone creatively.

The big empty city I'm really, really sorry for is LA Noire's LA. I simply love the period and how authentic they tried to be in recreating the city, using aerial photos and all. It's so unfortunate they couldn't afford to spend more time and give it more life.

 

[Carrion]

You don't necessarily need to have that much content to make an open world worth it, just allow the player to do something with it. One way is to simply make the actual missions open so that there are a few different angles the player may choose to approach them from. For example, if the goal is to assassinate a guy giving a speech on an island, you surely can drop some hints about that abandoned prison nearby, but why not let the player have the final word? Maybe it'd be a better idea to grab a boat instead (yeah, I know these are not in the game) and go to the island yourself, or maybe simply take the shot all the way from the ocean. Alternatively, it might be possible to smuggle a bomb in there (yeah, I know these are not in the game either) before he gives his speech? Or perhaps you'd want to wait until the speech is over and then set up an ambush when he leaves the island? Instead, the game just tells you to go to a specific point in the map and then fight your way through a linear level until you can take the shot in the exact way the developers intended.

Of course, it's a really cool mission in itself, which applies to almost all missions in Mafia, but all illusion of an open world can be flushed down the drain pretty much right away.