Mafia: The Old Country is looking to return to the linear roots of the first two Mafia titles, but one particularly way in which it’s going to be different from all of its predecessors is its settings. Up to this point, the Mafia series has taken players to urban city environments in different time periods of American history, but in Mafia: The Old Country, players will be travelling to Sicily and winding the clock back to the 1920s.
And as you might imagine, that will bring with it a very different tone from past Mafia titles. Speaking in an interview with VGC, game director Alex Cox explained that with its 1920s Sicilian setting, Mafia: The Old Country’s world will be much less dense and much more rural compared to past titles in the franchise.
“This is something we really wanted as another big point of differentiation, let’s say, between Mafia: The Old Country and the Mafia trilogy – let’s just sort of group those all together, because they’ve got a similar kind of design – was the setting,” he said. “Sicily at the time was largely – you know, obviously it has towns, it has cities in it and things like that – but it’s predominantly a rural environment, with a primarily agricultural kind of setting.
“This is where the Mafia actually sprung up in history, it was a reaction to… it started on the lemon groves and the farms and suchlike in the Sicilian countryside, and we wanted that to be the setting for our game. Obviously it makes it feel a lot different to those kind of bustling city environments of the Mafia trilogy, it’s a rural setting, so yeah, we’re kind of largely in towns and villages in the game.”
Cox went on to mention the town of San Celeste, which will serve as the largest town in Mafia: The Old Country’s world. Even in San Celeste, however, players will be on horseback through rural environments, a far cry from driving through the city streets of previous Mafia settings.
“We’ve mentioned that the town of San Celeste is the main town of our game world, and yeah, as you’d expect, it’s not like bustling city streets with traffic, cars and pedestrians and things like that, it’s riding around on horseback through a kind of more rural environment, and had to visualize that through the beautiful Sicilian countryside,” Cox said.
Ultimately, Cox says that though The Old Country will be a familiar Mafia experience at its core, as far as its setting is concerned, it will deviate from the norm quite a bit.
“It’s a lot different in that regard,” he said. “While the core of the game is a Mafia game in ways that you’d probably expect, that part of the experience is strongly different.”
The game director has also spoken about Mafia: The Old Country’s switch to Unreal Engine 5, and how that has helped development. Read more on that through here.
Mafia: The Old Country will launch for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in summer 2025.