Organized crime has come a long way since the 1930s; the same goes for video games published after the 2002 release of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, a genre-defining title about a cab driver who becomes a gangster and rises the ranks of the Salieri Family in the fictional city of Lost Heaven. With game studio Hanger 13 hard at work on Mafia: Definitive Edition, a complete re-imagining of the original Mafia, many long-time fans are wondering just how developers will update this game for a new generation – not just graphically, but in terms of new gameplay, voice acting, and plots that will make players feel good to be a gangster.
The sandbox third-person shooter Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven was first conceived as a mixture of Grand Theft Auto and the Godfather movies, guiding players through a story about a man's slow descent into vice and depravity. When Tommy Angelo, an Italian-American cab driver, gets caught in the middle of a battle between rival mob factions, he angers the wrong Don and joins the Salieri Mafia Family in order to get protection. The bulk of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven revolves around Tommy completing missions, robberies, and assassinations for the Salieri family, gaining money, prestige, and respect at the cost of getting his hands very, very dirty.
The unique draw of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven and other games in the Mafia series was how it deconstructed the "Damn it feels good to be a gangster" gameplay seen in sandbox shooters like Grand Theft Auto by showing how game protagonist Tommy Angelo becomes is just as constrained by the traditions and authority of the Salieri family as he was by the laws of 1920s/1930s America. To properly explore this theme in this current generation of video games, Mafia: Definitive Edition will likely build on the original game in these ways:
Mafia: Definitive Edition Will Expand the City of Lost Heaven
It goes without saying that the graphics Mafia: Definitive Edition's graphics are a big improvement over original Mafia, thanks to 18+ years of technical progress in the video game industry. Mafia: Definitive Edition isn't just a pretty re-skin of the original, though. The developers have also buillt up the city environment of Lost Heaven (a dead-ringer for Los Angeles) in both volume and detail, adding new neighborhoods, slums, and Art Deco architecture while still keeping key locations from the original game. With this increase in detail also comes more NPCs, more side-quests, and more streets for players drive down during thrilling car chases. Hopefully, the cars will at least be slightly more manageable to drive this time around, and hopefully the dreaded "racing" scene will be overhauled completely.
Mafia: Definitive Edition Will Flesh Out the Main Characters
The developers of Mafia: Definitive Edition have set themselves the challenging goal of giving players new content to enjoy while still telling the story of Tommy Angelo and the Salieri crime family that made the original a classic. To this end, the people at Hanger 13 have fleshed out the main characters from Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven by giving them new sub-plots, side-quests, and lines of dialogue. The main characters of Mafia: Definitive Edition have also been fleshed out in a more literal sense, thanks to developers hiring a cast of motion-capture actors to give the main characters realistic expressions in cut-scenes.
Mafia: Definitive Edition Should Explore Real-Life Crime in the 1930s
The Great Depression was one of the great nadirs of the American Dream while also being a Golden Age for organized crime. "Mobs", "organizations", and "outfits" all across the country swelled in power and influence, raking in cold hard cash from gambling, protection rackets, extortion, collusion with corrupt politicians, and, of course, the sale of moonshine during Prohibition.
To depict the history of gangsters in America authentically (if glamorously at times), Mafia: Definitive Edition needs to explore the nitty-gritty details of how the Mafia and other criminal groups operated back then – how they drew in revenue from various 'rackets', how their hierarchies and codes of honor rewarded loyalty and punished treachery, and how their success led to the FBI launching a full-fledged "war on crime."