Mafia II will have two driving modes, improved combat

Senior Producer behind Mafia II, Denby Grace, has told VG247 that the game will have two driving modes, and a new and improved combat system.

Speaking at GDC yesterday, Grace spoke on;

Cinematics

The things we felt we did right with the first Mafia was this cinematic presentation of the story, the level of quality with the story, the authenticity – our last game was really highly rated. So the 20s and 30s setting really felt right, but again, we looked at it and said okay, this is a franchise how can we make it even better.

Combat

I don’t think we went through and tossed anything out, we just reevaluated everything like the police system, gun combat, and brought it up to gamers expectations of 2010. The last one was in 2002, so what we did was revise the combat, looked at games that had come out like Gears of War and the way they were doing their combat, we looked at more third-person shooters. With the combat, what we wanted you to experience was something more intense and more visceral – so yeah the gun combat has been revised a lot.

Cars

The driving has been revised a lot too and while our cars behave realistically to the 40s and 50s, we have two different driving modes. Simulation mode which is absolutely authentic, and a more assisted mode -which you played today- so that it’s a bit more fun and a lot more exciting.

With the last game, we went fully simulation with the 1920s cars and some people absolutely loved it and other people were like ‘the cars are really slow, they accelerate really slow, the steering is poor’, but that was a 1920s car for you.

So, we’ve still got that authenticity for the people that really want it, but we’ve provided another mode that we really spent a lot of time on, by looking at other driving games and looking at how to make the driving really thrilling.

Mafia II is slated for release in Fall 2010 on the Ps3, Xbox 360 and PC.