Mafia 2 Developer Call

Friday I got to sit down and listen to a developer call with Jack Scalici who is the director of creative production at 2K Games, and we got to hear him answer various questions that were emailed. All in all some info we’ve heard before, but a ton of new and interesting information you’ll get here.
If you’d prefer to listen to the whole conference and get some other info I didn’t put here feel free to take a listen.
Mafia II devcall by Diego Escala

So how destructible is the environment in Mafia 2?
-It’s not 100% destructible, you’re not going to destroy entire buildings but there is one scripted event where you have a mission where you do blow up a building. Cover will chip away like if you’re behind a table bits of wood will chip apart when your enemy fires at it.

What’s the coolest most unexpected thing you’ve seen someone pull off in Mafia 2?
– I’ve been playing this for years as you probably know and every time I play it something new happens. Something weird happened the other day when we were demoing the game. The cops chased me all around the city, I didn’t feel like bribing them, I decided to car jack somebody but the guy had a wife in the car. His wife got out of the car and then the cops flew into me, knocked the door down, killed his wife, then fell off a bridge.

What was the most fun you had while recreating this era in time?
– The music for sure. I handle all the music licensing for 2k, and when I saw the script for this game I thought of all the possible songs we could put in this game. We ended up with 1000 tracks and I listened to them over and over for 3 straight years and ended we up with 122.

Do you see the Mafia franchise progressing into more recent time periods?
– Of course. The mafia is something that has existed for hundreds of years and has become a general term for organized crime. It doesn’t have to even be the Italian mafia, there are also the Russian and Japanese mafia too.

Where there any features that didn’t make the cut that you wish had and might be added later?
– I wish we had gotten the melee combat weapons working. Although the Mafia is really more known for using guns, but at one time we were playing around with using baseball bats and pool cues. Destructible environments where if a chair breaks then you can take those pieces and use them as weapons.

how long will it take to complete main game
– I’ve seen some players complete it in 13-14, but the average time 15-20.

Will there be multiple endings?
-Mafia 2 is pretty linear, at one point we had a couple choices/different endings, but the closer we got to them we said these choices aren’t as meaningful as we wanted them to be and none of the ending had an big impact so we stuck with 1.

What ways are we going to see city change?
-Things like the cars. 1940 cars are boxy painted in dull colors, while in the 50’s factories making planes during WW2 are now making cars and they have bright colors. Music of course, 40s you don’t have any Rock ‘n Roll while in the 50’s you’ll start hearing people like Buddy Holly. In the 40’s you’ll see WW2 propaganda, while in the 50’s you’ll see advertisements for products. Fashion will change as well as hairstyles.

Are there any side missions you can play after completing the storyline and will there be free-roam once finishing the game?
– There’s no free-roam in the game. You can do them during most of the main story. For the PS3 we have free dlc, The Betrayal of Jimmy, and that is more of a free-roam arcade style missions, but they don’t take as long as Vito’s objectives take and are around 5-10 minutes.

Will different clothes make a difference in missions like making Vito easier to see for enemies.
-Not really, there’s nothing Vito can wear that’s loud extravagant that would draw any attention even if we had that kind of feature.

what kind of weapons can we expect
-WW2 weapons like m1 grand, 1911 pistol, 20 weapons all together, grenades, cocktails, shotgun, & the Tommy gun of course.

What makes your game stand out from free-roam games
-The story for sure. There’s no other game out there that has this kind of combat wrapped up in this city in this era that no long exists

How will Vito being WW2 vet influence Mafia 2?
-Vito is an ex solider at start. He’s seen the hell of war in WW2. At one point he’s seen by a high ranking mafia member who more or less asks Vito ‘can you kill’ and Vito response to this is ‘I was in the war asshole of course I can kill’. So what he’s basically saying is all this mafia stuff back here is great and I’d like to be a part of it but it’s nothing compared to what I went through overseas in the war.

Are there any cameos or references from the first Mafia in this game?
-Yea but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

Did articles make it into the Playboys?
-No they did not, we didn’t have enough time to add any articles.

Was there any debate/difficulty about whether adding multiplayer or not?
-At 2k we’re not forced to do anything, like adding multiplayer. Like with the original Bioshock we couldn’t find a way to do multiplayer that made sense so we didn’t want to waste resources on a feature we didn’t know how to do.

Can you talk about how the voice acting wasn’t done single voice at a time?
-What a lot of games do is they put each actor one at time in a booth, which is easiest to do but doesn’t always sound believable. What we did with Mafia 2 was I rented a stage where they rerecord dialog for movies, and I brought in 4-6 actors at a time so the actors were able to play off each other with their lines while recording.

Any famous voice actors in Mafia 2?
-There are a few you might recognize, but nobody major. I feel it takes you out of the experience if you meet a new character and suddenly you hear Al Pacino speaking to you.

Can you tell us of the types of music we can expect?
-Jazz, everything from 20’s-30’s, rock and roll, swing to blues, and more.

So the Collectors Edition will have an orchestral soundtrack. Is there a chance of a CD version coming out or will we need to buy CE for it?
-122 tracks in one soundtrack is kinda hard to pull off, but I’m working on it right now. It’s something I want to bring but it’s not easy.

How does the PS3 version compare to 360?
-To me they look pretty much the same. Yea I’ve seen people take screen shots side by side, but if you take 2 monitors and run them side by side they’re pretty much identical.

Any other post release content can we expect besides The Betrayal of Jimmy & Jimmy’s Vendetta?
-No comment.

At any point during the game will you fight zombies or vampires, cause they’re really popular right now?
-haha, no you will not. I know you heard about me joking about zombie mode, but that’s all it was a joke.

What are your top 5 gangster movies?
-Goodfellas, Godfather 2, Godfather 1, Donnie Brasko, & Miller’s Crossing.

Will there be a Mafia 3?
-No comment.

Any of the gameplay take place in prison?
-No comment.

Any ideas you wanted in mafia 2 but couldn’t cause time restraint?
-Not really.

Would you like to see Mafia made into a movie?
-Not really, I don’t like movies made into videogames. Taking the gameplay out of the equation ruins the experience for me.

Does the dlc take place before or after Mafia 2?
-Jimmy never crosses paths with Vito but it will take place during the 50’s.

What will keep players playing Mafia 2 for a long time?
-I don’t know, why do players still play mafia 1? It’s just the feel of the game that keeps them playing.