Sulphur on 28/9/2020 at 17:55
One of the things they've done with the story is make Tommy a sort of smarmy dickface, which rubbed up against my memories of him being just this confused lad tossed in the middle of all of this. I revisited the old game's cutscenes to confirm, and yeah, what immediately stands out is that ol' Thomas Angelo was probably too pure for the story they were telling. In redoing it H13 have made changes that skew things towards less ludic dissonance and more, 'yeah, these people are all dicktits who deserve what's coming to them.' It's more realistic, if not very enjoyable.
EvaUnit02 on 28/9/2020 at 18:24
Quote Posted by Tomi
he music isn't as good as in the original, which is a shame - the old tunes may have been annoyingly catchy, but they were such a memorable part of the game!
The original game was pulled for sale off Steam when the licensed music rights expired. They put it back up some time later, sans licensed music. My point is the generic sounding music on the remake's radio stations is probably a bunch of public domain stuff.
henke on 30/9/2020 at 13:41
I wasn't really gonna pick this up, but then I saw some videos of the wonderfully weighty vehicle handling and remembered how great the driving was in Mafia 3 and I just had to dive in. I liked the early taxi driving mission a lot and decided I wanted more of that, so I fired up Free Ride mode. The original game let you drive taxi in Free Ride, and it should be pretty easy to implement so it's a no-brainer this game would include a similar mode, right? NOPE! :nono:
henke on 30/9/2020 at 15:37
Difficulty: Hard.
Driving model: Simulation.
Here we go.
[video=youtube;2pogJvGmCrY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pogJvGmCrY[/video]
so... uh... turns out it actually is kinda hard
Tomi on 30/9/2020 at 17:52
That's not bad for a first try! I think you need to get a fairly good start, otherwise you're just wasting your time. If you let the top three drivers or so get too far away, you haven't got much of a chance catching up anymore. If you spin or lose too much time competing against the bottom drivers, it's game over.
I really liked the race, even though it would have been even better without the scripted events. One of the drivers crashing in the first big curve is the obvious one. Also, I was in the second position on the last lap of the race, hopelessly behind the leading driver and just about ready to restart the race because I knew that there's no way that I could win the race... But in the last curve of the race the top driver "surprisingly" lost control of his car and crashed, and I cruised into a victory! Such drama! Still, I'd be happy to play a racing game if they built one around this. :)
henke on 1/10/2020 at 07:23
Yeah, I did eventually win, on attempt 6 or 7. Really, you just have to play it like a proper racing game, braking in time and doing clean lines. Really, if you think about it, it's pretty... ez. :cool:
Sulphur on 1/10/2020 at 07:38
Sorry, but I'm here to roleplay a questionably characterised protagonist making questionable choices that end up with a lot questionable shooting. In the grand scheme of all that, questionable racing can go do one. (Also, I played that on Classic mode three times before I said fuck it, which I think adds even more sadism to it.)
Tomi on 1/10/2020 at 18:03
Finally got into a proper gunfight, and I was delighted to see that it has a similar feel that the original did. Moving around still feels a bit awkward, especially in smaller rooms, and switching from one cover to another isn't as lightning quick as in other action games. But when the bullets start flying, damn... things get very intense! I love the fact that you can't just go all Rambo on your enemies (at least not in Classic difficulty) when they can kill you in one shot in the worst case, and there's no regenerating health either. The original Mafia may have been a bit unfair with the difficulty occasionally, but so far that hasn't been the case in the definitive edition. The checkpoints are much more generous too, which is shame in a way, but I can live with that. The guns in the game may not be very imaginative, but I actually like it that way, and not being able to carry a huge arsenal of guns and ammunition makes for some tactical gameplay.
Sulphur on 2/10/2020 at 05:24
You do get a sliver of regenerating health when you're down to your last legs in Classic, so it's still calibrated to be less unfun than Mafia 1's design. What really makes the whole enterprise enjoyable is the modern-day graphics, they went all out in doing this right.
An aside: I was wondering how the reflections in the game seemed pretty accurate most of the time, usually when looking at car roofs and seeing the surroundings reflecting off them even if the buildings weren't in the camera's view (which meant they were doing something that wasn't purely screenspace reflections). Turns out they've got an (
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-mafia-definitive-edition-tech-review) ingenious screenspace raytracing solution, and that's the kind of clever trick raster rendering would have gone with en masse if the industry weren't pivoting to brute forcing a solution via ray-tracing. It's not perfect, but just the fact that it's
there, subtly making the world look better without the devs needing to tell you about it via an nvidia programme or whatever, is the kind of thing that deserves kudos and respect IMO. (And Digital Foundry continues to be one of the few places invested in digging out these details for the general public, for which I'm always thankful.)
EvaUnit02 on 2/10/2020 at 11:26
Quote Posted by Sulphur
An aside: I was wondering how the reflections in the game seemed pretty accurate most of the time, usually when looking at car roofs and seeing the surroundings reflecting off them even if the buildings weren't in the camera's view (which meant they were doing something that wasn't purely screenspace reflections). Turns out they've got an (
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-mafia-definitive-edition-tech-review) ingenious screenspace raytracing solution, and that's the kind of clever trick raster rendering would have gone with en masse if the industry weren't pivoting to brute forcing a solution via ray-tracing. It's not perfect, but just the fact that it's
there, subtly making the world look better without the devs needing to tell you about it via an nvidia programme or whatever, is the kind of thing that deserves kudos and respect IMO. (And Digital Foundry continues to be one of the few places invested in digging out these details for the general public, for which I'm always thankful.)
Meanwhile Mafia 3 has broken reflections in mirrors that were never fixed. Definitely gives vibes that the Czech teams probably worked on Mafia 1 remake, rather than Southern Californians.
[video=youtube;Mu6yhTrSIZg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu6yhTrSIZg[/video]
Quote:
Hangar 13 is an American video game developer based in Novato, California, in the area of the former Hamilton Air Force Base. Established with Haden Blackman in December 2014 as a division of 2K (a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive), the company's debut game was Mafia III, released in October 2016. In 2017, 2K Czech was merged into Hangar 13, wherefore the studio received two additional studios in Brno and Prague; another studio was opened in Brighton in 2018.
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