With developer Hangar 13 moving away from the proprietary game engine it had used to develop Mafia 3 in favour of Unreal Engine 5 for the upcoming Mafia: The Old Country, the studio has elaborated on this decision. In an interview with IGN, studio president Nick Baynes, along with game director Alex Cox spoke about the switch, and how the studio benefited from it.
According to Cox, a big benefit of going with Unreal Engine 5 for Mafia: The Old Country was with the number of tools that the engine provides right out of the box. He spoke about the studio wanting to accurately portray the beauty of the game’s Sicily setting, and how tools like MetaHuman helped out in that regard.
“Well, Unreal, I think as many, many players will be familiar with now, brings an awful lot to new games, gives us cutting-edge visuals in particular,” said Cox. “And for the kind of game we were looking to make this time around, we really, really wanted to put a massive emphasis on portraying the beauty of Sicily, the fantastic landscapes, plus the MetaHuman tech and all of the stuff that’s really allowed us to do really, really top quality cinematic presentation.”
“The performances of the actors are really, really fantastic. Amazing quality facial, and that’s key to this Mafia game as it was for all previous Mafia games in their time of release and achieving that kind of let’s say visual cutting edge in particular, environment art and cinematics, was really front of mind when we decided to make the transition.”
Baynes mentioned how a studio using its own engine means that quite a bit of time will then be spent on making sure that it has cutting edge toolkits that would give the developers more freedom. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that Hangar 13 wanted to focus more on the gameplay, visuals, cinematics, and storytelling for Mafia: The Old Country rather than spend time working on the engine itself.
“As things get more and more advanced, that takes more and more time,” explained Baynes. “And I think as a studio, we just really wanted to focus on the gameplay, the visuals, the storytelling, the cinematics, and to be able to put as much focus on that as opposed to actually creating the engine that it sits on, it really helps us and I think ultimately allows us to develop and deliver a better quality game.”
Cox also spoke about how the studio first started its work on Mafia: The Old Country by first getting used to Unreal Engine 5 by recreating the market square environment from Mafia 2. This was especially helpful since Mafia 2 starts its story by taking place in Sicily, which is the main setting for the upcoming The Old Country.
“We chose that for a whole wide variety of reasons,” he explained. “A, we already know what it looks like. B, we can see what it looks like when we’ve massively upgraded it like 15 years later. And also we know that at the pre-existing location from the franchise, we’re going to channel the creative vision, we’re going to channel the narrative universe. We’re going to get all of the stuff in there by grounding ourself in that first place. So that’s where we started, right in the center of San Celeste.”
Mafia: The Old Country is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 8. For more details about the game, here’s everything you need to know. Also check out details about some of the features from Mafia: The Old Country that have us hooked, as well as our thoughts about whether it could potentially outshine Mafia 3.
