How Mafia: the Old Country Makes You Rely On Knife-Or-Flight Instincts

The Mafia series has long been a contemporary of franchises like GTA and Saints Row, but its focus has always been much more narrow than those sprawling games. From the very first Mafia game, the goal was to deliver a playable classic mob movie, making for a familiar pastiche of themes and characters. The first game was technically an open world in that you drove between mission hubs, but it was largely focused on its narrative. For its latest game, Mafia: The Old Country, 2K is similarly focused. GameSpot spoke with executive producer Devin Hitch and game director Alex Cox about the change in setting and a renewed focus on making combat feel intimate and personal.

The previous games have slowly become more modern, starting in the 1930s and then venturing into the 1940s and 1950s in Mafia 2 and finally the 1960s in Mafia 3. Aside from brief interstitial stories, they’ve also all taken place across a fictionalized United States. That makes this setting, 1900s Sicily, a significant change for the series, but one that won’t be unfamiliar to fans of organized-crime fiction.

“When we [begin a] project, as we usually do, we go back to the drawing board, we look at the ‘Mafia’ DNA,” Cox said. We go back to the project, the franchise pillars to figure out what would make for a new ‘Mafia’ game, what we want it to be different about this one. And in some ways, what we want about it to be the same. And when we look at Mafia, the Mafia series and what was done in the previous three games, they start to become this story of organized crime in the 20th century. Visiting different historical eras that are very iconic, very familiar to a mainstream audience. Players will have seen Godfather, ‘Goodfellas’, Untouchables, all of the kinds of movies that define very iconic eras in organized-crime history.”

Making a prequel was a conscious decision too, to give new players a fresh start if they haven’t played a Mafia game before. Cox hints that returning players will notice some references to later games as well, since the Mafia series has had a loose but unmistakable continuity.

“The Sicilian Mafia is the forbearer of the US mafia, the criminal tradition that gave the Mafia its name. [They] coined the term that became the way that we all describe organized crime internationally now, [and it] was born in Sicily at a very particular time and for very particular reasons. And so we found that interesting. We found it interesting because it’s a different environment than the American urban cities that we’ve visited in the past.

“And also in everybody’s head there is this mystique and fascination with those, the Sicilian mafia, it’s less well known. There’s more to discover for players who are interested, particularly fans of crime genre, it’s something that’s less well trod than those other eras that maybe we’ve done before. And if you’ve seen any of the Godfather movies, you know that there’s sections, each of them has sections set in Sicily and the tradition, the way that the guys refer to it. The old country comes from the way that American mobsters often refer to Sicily as they’re talking to one another in crime movies and TV shows.”

Those pop-culture touchstones are no accident. More than many other series, Mafia has always been very clearly inspired and paying homage to classic organized-crime stories like The Godfather and Goodfellas. Cox acknowledges that it “wears its heart on its sleeve” and the series has intentionally made some of its characters and plot points recognizable. As the series has continued, though, it’s progressed into more original storytelling.

“We have moved away from that, over the years, to tell more original stories,” Cox said. “However, part of the promise that we want to make to players is that you are playing a character in those movies. If you’re a fan of the crime genre, you’re going to have that fantasy. That’s the fantasy in your head, isn’t it? To be the main character in those movies. And so we always try and find a nice mix there of touch points that are familiar, our own original content and our own original, let’s say universe, and our stories that we tell inside there. So that’s the balance really.”

The largest change to Mafia: The Old Country probably comes to its combat, which seems aimed at becoming more personal and up-close. Mafia has always aimed for more grounded storytelling than its contemporaries–in the very first Mafia game, a rival mob sending a handful of enforcers to assault your crew was seen as a major escalation in an ongoing conflict. The Old Country pushes that idea even further with the introduction of knife fights, a grisly close-quarters style of fighting that was common before the advent of automatic weapons.

“We are set in a rural setting and everybody lives to some extent in an agricultural or a rural economy,” Cox explained. “So the weapons of the farmer or the poacher is part of it too, to try and evoke that feeling of this quite impoverished. When you imagine Sicily in your head, it’s this dusty, hard-scrabble environment. And that’s really what we wanted to put across in the whole combat design in addition to the firearms themselves. And then likewise, there’s a long tradition of knife-fighting and using knives in Sicily, which derive from their common use in this agricultural setting. And then also lots of different types of knives that specialize for different usages, but then obviously became associated with Sicilian gangsters and organized crime over time.”

The idea of knife fights went through several different iterations. The team started with giant knives, “almost like swords” as Cox describes it, which were the ones most associated with Sicilian knife-fighting. That idea became impractical during development, but the end result is a more versatile system with several types of knives that imbue you with different skills.

Hitch added that the team did research around Sicilian knife-fighting, especially in the pre-production phase, and found that it was considered almost like a martial art, and local artisans put great care into the production of these knives as tools and weapons.

“We sent some folks to Sicily, actually, to look at how these knives were crafted, because there’s a really beautiful artistic quality to some of these,” Hitch said. “And then we actually met with some of the knife smiths, the guys who are actually making these, and they’ve been doing it in a very similar way for the last 150 years or so. So there’s some really cool, interesting stuff that lit a creative fire for us in pre-production. And then we’re really proud to see how that’s translated to the screen, and it is a new mechanic in the game that we haven’t had before.”

Sometimes that research revealed gruesome details as well. Cox said there was one particularly grisly description of an argument between rival clans that broke out over who laid claim to a bench in a church, leading to a massive knife fight in the town square with multiple casualties. To capture this level of violence, Hitch said the tech and character artists worked out ways to produce procedural blood marks from your fights, which appear on characters’ bodies and pool on their clothes. All of this was made to help achieve one of its key goals, which is to make the violence feel real and impactful.

“That was something that was really attractive in terms of storytelling, because one of the things in previous Mafia games that we have always wanted to do, was get more up close and personal with some of the key antagonists, or let’s say ‘bosses’ in the game,” Hitch said. “And because we’re such a realistic game, we’re not a superhero game or things like that, there was not necessarily as much opportunity to get really up close and personal when you’re doing gunplay. There’s this distance.”

Cox added that the knife fights present “a great opportunity for us to get up close and personal with story characters and fight out the last minutes of their lives, looking at their faces with the cutscenes and cinematic presentation you’d expect from that, which in the past we were not able to do.”

Guns are still present in Mafia: The Old Country, but the setting means they aren’t as omnipresent as they have been in previous games–particularly Mafia 3. Hitch noted that in that game, set in the 1960s, Lincoln Clay was a Vietnam veteran, and the gameplay was built around the time period and his experiences. That meant he had ready access to lots of weapons, ammo, and grenades at any given time. The Old Country, by comparison, wants to make you feel more scrappy, needing to scrounge for limited resources and make calculations about what to do with them.

“That was something that we really felt jived super well with this hard-scrabble, resource-depleted environment of 1900 Sicily,” Cox said. “So we introduced ideas, the resources to the player are scarcer than Mafia: Definitive Edition, for example. So you have to be a bit more considerate in how you use your ammunition. We introduced the idea of looting enemies to find bullets and other combat resources as you play through those encounters. And generally we dialed up the challenge a little bit so the feeling is a kind of surviving in some of these dangerous encounters. Rather than if I was to use the Lincoln Clay, Mafia III example of charging in there in a military sense. Enzo [the Old Country protagonist] has to play through these combat encounters in a more tactical and considered manner because of those things, limited resources and slightly raised combat challenge.”

There are still large-scale gunfights, which Cox said exercises some “artistic license” on Sicilian history, and once in a while you will need to stock up and prepare for a large encounter. But it requires some more prep and looting bodies, as opposed to Lincoln Clay calling in a supply drop.

“When you’re Enzo, there is a point at which everything that you brought with you starts to run dry,” Hitch said. “And that’s when you start thinking, ‘Okay, how am I going to get to that next body to get a few more bullets or a bandage or something like that so that I can keep going?’ And that’s one of the things that I really like about the combat–ultimately my play style, I go in quiet and eventually I get spotted and then I have to start shooting my way out and then that’s when I start getting scarce on resources. So I think it definitely makes you think, and that’s one of the things that we wanted in our combat was to be intentional in that regard.”

Cox said that the system is made to be dynamic, so resources will wane as necessary to make sure you’re kept in a “zone of scarcity” to keep combat tense. That also helped facilitate the idea of knife fights as your trusty sidearm that never runs out of ammo, “something you can turn to in these moments of desperation.” Ultimately the goal is to have an ebb and flow of different types of combat encounters with different feelings.

“We’ve got choreographed shootouts where ammo scarcity and things like that aren’t part of the design formula,” Cox said. “And then we have extended periods in various missions where you are playing your own ways. Where you can choose whether you go stealthy, whether you go loud, how to approach the objective. So again, like every previous Mafia game, there’s a rollercoaster of different experiences from game to end.”

Mafia: The Old Country is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on August 8.