Pay a visit to the Mafia III fandom wiki and you’ll find an elongated list of all known Mafia III bugs. Varying degrees of severity are archived for your reading pleasure: serious stuff like objective breaking glitches or mission requirements failing to spawn – like quest giving NPCs or heist essential vehicles – to more whimsical but still immersion breaking bugs like New Bordeaux’s citizens inexplicably diving in front of your car to allies undesirably joining stealthy combat blowing both your cover and your patience. Now, to be clear, this library’s worth of bugs are confirmed to exist by the admins of this wiki page after Mafia III’s final patch update back in 2020, so the question of whether some 8 years later if Mafia III is free from the game-breaking glitches which plagued its launch, the answer appears to be a resounding no.
However, switch your browser to Mafia III’s various sub-Reddits and you’ll read testimony decrying Mafia III’s so-called shoddy, unplayable state. “I’ve only noticed a few bugs here and there,” some say, whilst others declare – aside from a momentary frozen screen following a cutscene – that they played through Mafia III without issue at all. The worst, some acknowledge, was the need to restart the game if this frozen screen failed to reanimate, causing them to lose a portion of their save file. If you’re planning on playing through Mafia III in 2024, then these concerns are barely cause for alarm.
If we’re to take both these stances at face value – the wiki page’s lengthy list of problems, or the testimony of players on Reddit who’ve forged through the front line – then you’d have to go with the Redditors. It’s no secret the game launched with a glut of immersion breaking problems, but much like Cyberpunk 2077 or maybe Shenmue I & II Remastered, these problems presently seem to be minimal. Your tolerance for such issues will vary amongst yourselves, of course, but in its current state it doesn’t appear Mafia III is unplayable. Fixed? No, but certainly not broken.
The question then is would you want to play it anyway? There’s no denying Hangar 13 have created a wonderfully evocative world in New Bordeaux – an obvious stand-in for 1960s New Orleans. Swampland nestles adjacent to dilapidated housing, ostentatious suburbs decorate elaborate networks of rivers and canals, open farmland, slums, it all bustles with ever-presence. Interwoven into the fabric of the city are heavy socio-economic themes contemporary to the time (and still bubbling under the surface in most parts of the world today); racism, intolerance, prejudice, systemic struggle, social division, all sound tracked by the afternoon hum of emergent dialogue, opinionated radio stations, and hazy jazz bars. If the game’s mission design (which we’ll get on to later) makes for a hollow experience, hollow this city certainly is not.
Player character Lincoln Clay – a tormented Vietnam war vet – is just about likeable enough to endear the ripples of this intolerance to yourself, whether you’ve experienced it in real-life or not. The city’s police treat him with distain should he stray into a predominately white area, whilst shopkeepers alert the authorities should Lincoln decide to browse their wares long enough to appear suspicious. It’d be easy for Hangar 13 to drop the occasional racist slur and resulting anguish into open play as means to appear socially conscious, but having the player live through it first-hand underpins a considerate approach to how these issues materialise and the effects they have. New Bordeaux clearly isn’t a city on the cusp of resolution; these societal issues are deeply entrenched, and their effect on gameplay is tangible.
The principal issue however lies beyond the effects on gameplay and the decisions it forces you to make for Lincoln. For all its attempts at prodding at any political outrage nestling in your soul Mafia III’s absence of consequence no matter your actions mean the impact of this on-street tension is reduced. Case in point: you can literally plough through traffic lights and street signs in your stolen muscle car, crash into other vehicles, throw air punches in a pedestrian’s face – all within sight of the disdainful cops – and they’ll do diddly squat. Cross into the wrong side of town and eyebrows will furrow, anything else other than murdering someone seems fair game.
See, it’s the game’s AI that’s the biggest let down here, and if we consider the point of this article as to whether Mafia III is ‘fixed’ – in inverted commas – then the game’s AI unfortunately is unfixable. It isn’t only happenstance on the street which leaves you scratching your head as to where the repercussions are, missions – and in particular – missions requiring stealthy approaches are ruined by lacklustre AI. Opponents outright refuse to stay in cover, make non-sensical decisions despite an awareness that threat is lurking, or will split from the safety of their pack individually to investigate a whistle. Stealth becomes paint-by-numbers; spot your target, distract, silently takedown, move on.
Mission structure itself follows an identical format established by open world games for the best part of a decade prior too. Go here, kill some people, go somewhere else, kill some more. The overarching goal is to flush out district mob bosses, exposing them for assassination before taking control of their patch, but the means to get there we’ve done time and time again. To Hanger 13’s credit, they’ve justified Lincoln’s violent rampage by his terrifying military history, his revenge mission utilising tactics he developed with the Vietcong, his single-minded approach to retribution forged through the perplexity of proxy war. The story – if a tad predictable – is well-written and well-acted for the most part too, so the process of slaving through the 30 plus hour campaign isn’t mindless. It’s just that, despite the wealth of content, it’s all the same thing redressed in a different building or district and the sheer length of the game bites down hard on those determined to see it through to the end.
Some intrigue is implanted via the lieutenant system though, whereby once districts are conquered Lincoln then chooses who to assign to oversee its control. Giving one allied mob boss the keys to another wing of the castle risks undermining another, and it creates an interesting dynamic between this disparate conglomerate of nationalities and belief systems – with Lincoln at the helm – who’re attempting to wrestle control of New Bordeaux for themselves. Whether it’s enough to keep you engaged over the game’s length, with all the shoddy AI and occasional bug is up to you.
Going back to the start, the exorbitant array of bugs listed on the game’s fandom wiki paint a picture of a game that’s totally unplayable, but we know from eyewitness testimony this isn’t totally the case. So, from that perspective we can probably say that, yes, maybe Mafia III is fixed after all, or, as stated earlier, at least not broken. You can play it, enjoy it, see it through to the end, move on to something else. The deeper question: is Mafia III fixed from all its design foibles, its underbaked AI, and unimaginative mission structure. Well, no, it can never be. Much like the social angst engulfing New Bordeaux’s streets, these setbacks are interwoven into the fabric of the game code, and you’d have to ask yourself if it’s worth putting yourself through it given the wealth of superb open world titles out there that do what Mafia III does, but much better and less buggy.
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