Hangar 13 Studio and 2K Games released some new footage of Mafia III, featuring what they call the New Bordeaux. The city will feature nine different districts for players to explore, as well as various rackets to take down within the criminal underworld.
The trailer was spotted by PC Gamer, who further explained that there will be different and unique areas scattered throughout the Bordeaux, giving gamers a smorgasbord of content to explore in the open-world environment within Mafia III.
The game will see players starting off small and working their way up the ladder as Lincoln Clay, a war veteran who has to deal with the mafia during the 1960s. There will be poor parts, suburban areas, as well as industrial spots and even a marsh land further south in the Bordeaux.
If the name and the imagery looks familiar it's because it's a fictional city based on New Orleans.
There will be criminal rackets sprinkled throughout the game world as well, giving gamers plenty to do when it comes to taking down rival gangs in Mafia III. They don't go into a lot of detail about the rackets, but the little clip that they show sees Lincoln attempting to infiltrate one of the hideouts that appears to be near the docks. The different rackets will have different levels of security and focus on different aspects of the criminal underworld.
When they brought up the rackets in the trailer above the first thing that came to mind was EA's classic open-world crime drama, The Godfather 1, where players had to take over rackets by infiltrating them and using an interaction system to threaten or kill the owners into complying with your demands. It may have been a movie-based game but that was back when cross-over property was pretty darn good in the gaming industry, and it was one of the few open-world titles where creating a character and getting tossed into the world felt somewhat natural and the story unfolded in an organic way without disrupting the narrative put forward by the movie. The analog-based fighting and contextual shootouts really helped that game stand apart from the competition.
The question is: will Mafia III be able to capitalize on what made Mafia II so great and still manage to improve on the racket system that was present in The Godfather games?
For now, we haven't seen much of the racket system in action, so it's tough to tell how much interactivity it affords gamers, but if it's anything like the first Godfather then it should be pretty cool. Hopefully they give gamers options because that's what extends the replayability of open-world titles... options. There's still plenty of time before the game releases, so we'll likely get a lot more details on some of the other lesser talked about features leading up to the release window.
Mafia III is scheduled to launch on October 7th for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Expect to see a lot more of the game at this year's E3 as they continue to build up the hype for the fall launch.
