Mafia 3 Developers Explain How Skills Are Balanced in the Game

Mafia 3 developer Hangar 13 are hard at work bringing to life the third entry in 2K’s open world crime saga. Mafia 3 is going to address a lot of the substantial criticism that was aimed at Mafia 2, and one of the ways that the developers are looking at doing that is with a nuanced, well realized skills system.

“We always want to be providing you with skill checks in the game. I think that’s a fun element in a game and for me, it’s that combination of challenge and choice. It’s hard to have fun with a game if you’re not being challenged. You want to have something to overcome, but then you want to have choice with how you do that,” Mafia 3 Creative Director Haden Blackman said to The Examiner.

These skills will be balanced to make the game more challenging, without being overwhelming- since challenge is what a player demands today.

“In the case of vehicles, we said ‘okay we’ve got the cover-shooting and are providing you with gun challenges constantly through the game and through that.’ In the driving, we don’t want the shooting to necessarily be the challenge. We want the driving to be the challenge, so a lot of that is done through smart targeting,” Blackman said.

It sounds like a more realized gameplay engine will provide some thorough grounding for Mafia 3 this time around- let’s hope the game is great when it launches on Xbox One, PS4, and PC in 2016.