Tag: Mafia

It’s crazy to think how far the Mafia franchise has come. The Czech gaming franchise has made quite the splash internationally with a variety of entries and spinoffs, even as Hangar 13 took over and it started being published by 2K Games. The original studio of Illusion Softworks even changed its title to 2K Czech over the years, but the fundamentals still remain with the game exploring a Great Depression setting to this day.

The game originally started with Mafia back in 2002 before it spawned two sequels. In 2020, they released a “Definite Edition” of the original after Hangar 13 took over production of the third entry. The game even got two spinoffs, but it looks like a new numbered sequel is potentially making a return as revealed by Art Director of Mafia 2 who would go on to become Studio head General Manager, Roman Hladík. In an interview as part of the 20th anniversary, he revealed an all-new game is in development.

I’m happy to confirm we’ve started work on an all-new Mafia project! While it’s a few years away and we can’t share anything more right now, we’re really excited to keep working on this beloved franchise and to entertain our players with new stories.

Roman Hladík

As the game is still in early development, it seems we’ll have to wait a little longer until we get any further details. It’ll be interesting to see fit this is an official fourth entry or perhaps a new game altogether that focuses on establishing a new spinoff to give the franchise a fresh start as it’s been quite some time since the third entry was released.

Source: Mafia Game

After 2K announced the departure of Hangar 13 studio head Haden Blackman, rumors began spreading over the project he walked out on. Hangar 13 is best known for the Mafia franchise, an open-world prohibition-era game franchise similar in a lot of ways to games like Grand Theft Auto. While Mafia may have never gotten the acclaim and popularity of its competitors, it does have a pretty dedicated fanbase and has seen some moderate success.

It’s rumored that Blackman departed very early in the development Mafia project, which is expected to be a prequel to the franchise and will be running on Unreal Engine 5, unlike the recent remasters collections that ran on Mafia III’s proprietary engine. No more details are known about the game at this time as it is still not technically confirmed by Hangar 13 or 2k who publishes the franchise.

After suffering two rounds of layoffs following Mafia III’s release and now losing not one, but two higher-ups, Hangar 13 has definitely been in a bit of a problem area for years now. While the studio head departing may not mean the project is in trouble, a lot of things are stacking up to have me guessing that something isn’t quite right. Hopefully, they are able to deliver on the new title and stabilize, a rocky development studio is almost never a good sign for a new game. Hangar 13 has been recently assisting other developers on their projects, including Gearbox’s Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. This has led many people to speculate that they may be moving into more of a support role, but we will see what the fate of the company is over the next few years.

Source: Kotaku