Mafia: The Old Country's "world is a character" full of lifelike lemons

A cursory glance at any of the pre-launch material shows just what pains developer Hanger 13 has gone through to bring its early 1900s Sicily to life. The sunbaked hills, paths and towns all tell their storied past, steeped in ancient history, culture, hardships and bloodshed.

Game director Alex Cox is in agreement: “One of the things for Sicily that was really important to us was being able to really capture these beautiful landscapes. I mean, if you're familiar with [the] environment there, [it's] a really kind of stunning environment, [and] something very distinctive about this game.”

It’s a stark departure from Hangar 13’s previous foray, 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, a full remake of the seminal 2002 title that saw players return to the iconic Lost City, and one that is said to have required a shift in technology.

Mafia: Definitive Edition was powered by Hangar 13’s proprietary in-house tech, the Fusion engine, which Noake describes as a “city-based engine” that was unsuitable for the kind of natural vistas they wanted to showcase in The Old Country.

But what's old is new, as following the lukewarm reception of Mafia 3 and revisiting the first game, the team, many of whom were not around during the early days, were able to “rediscover something about [the distinctive] DNA of the franchise”, according to Cox, which has resulted in The Old Country moving away from the open world.

But whilst that remake looked great, much has been made of The Old Country’s graphical fidelity, which is powered by the oft-controversial Unreal Engine 5. Undoubtedly, the game looks beautiful in curated cutscenes at 30FPS, but there is concern that it may prove too taxing for current-gen consoles and mainstream PCs.

But, Unreal Engine 5 has allowed the otherwise relatively small team (these days, anyway) to create a believable world and achieve “cinematic presentation quality” with technologies such as Metahuman and Nanite.

And this isn’t just to the benefit of the environment or characters. When The Old Country was first revealed, one of the screenshots they chose to share was an admittedly very handsome photo of a sawn-off shotgun nestled in amongst some very lifelike lemons.

Noake is “absolutely convinced we've got the highest quality and the largest quantity of fruit”.

In order to ensure that Hangar 13’s rendition of Sicily was as accurate as possible, multiple trips were made to the sun-kissed isle, with the team discovering new locales not on their itinerary that they wanted “to incorporate [in] the game, because it was so distinctive”.

But the island is only the backdrop to the Sicilian culture, which Hangar 13 has strived to represent as faithfully and respectfully as possible, with the team working with a local consultancy group to ensure the game is “authentic as it needs to be”.

There was a lot of hubbub around the time of the game's reveal, as people were quick to point out The Old Country was not going to have an Italian language option for dubbing.

That is because Hangar 13 is instead providing a Sicilian language option for dubbing, a distinct dialect of the Italian language. There is, of course, full Italian language support for text and subtitles.

During one of the trips to Sicily, the team visited Castello degli Schiavi, the house used to portray Don Tommasino’s home in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, the residence of one Baron Platania, whom Alex Cox had the pleasure to meet.

“He came out in his kind of dressing gown [and] showed us around the house [and] showed us all of [his] historical possessions [and things] from his family's history,” Cox tells us, saying it was “really great”.

But perhaps most importantly, he was “able to tell us how to swear in Sicilian”. A skill no self-respecting mafioso would want to go without.

However, there are far too many quotes to include here, so be sure to check out the full interview at the top of this article, or on the Radio Times Gaming YouTube channel!

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