Widescreen Gaming Forum

Well IMO turning reflections off is a lot uglier, esp on the water.

Starting with today, information embargo in Czech rep. is lifted and lots of previews and interviews are revealing, so to sum up the most important informations (as i see it):

- game will not be action oriented, but story and atmosphere oriented
- in every mission where you will face an opponent, there will not be tons of oponents, but usually 4-5 enemies and the fights are designed to feel interesting and unique, so there will not be massive gun battles with many people
- no walking with gun on streets, or police locks you up
- although there will be 50 cars (30 normal + 20 story based), you will be lead to use and spend your money on one or two
- many things are not implemented yet - car driving was presented only partly, because it is still unfinished - it will be presented later this year when it is time
- contact fight (punches, kicks, bashing with your opponent onto walls) was also not yet presented (there should be 50 animations + their variations of single combat).
- auto heal will work upto some level during fights, you will need to eat and drink to keep this level on max. It will depend on difficulty level, how many bullets you will need to absorb in order to die
- furniture is already fully destructable (except for few locations - like your partners flat - because why would your character in the story want to destruct it?)
- if you destroy furniture in the bar for some reason, and you leave, after some time police arrives, then the bar is closed for some time - you can not buy yourself food and drink there
- in press demo the gun fights felt better than in GTA4 according to the journalist (in GTA4 they felt less dynamic)
- 2 hours of gorgeous cutscenes
- professional English, German, French and Czech dubbing (the list is not final) by actors known from TV (if possible from mafioso movies, if possible then the same actor that dubbed a character in first Mafia will dub the same character in second Mafia)
- 120 developers working hard on the game, + 100 testers
- and lots of talking about missions and side quests and your relation between you and police that evolves as you become more powerful (you have more money to spent on police)

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/04/19/rps-preview-mafia-ii/#more-10434

thx for great preview...

here is another Mafia 2 video (it shows also how it looks inside 2K czech studio .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xqX-mRYeYA)

Great review there, the AI sounds impressive. That video was awesome too. It's a humble yet techy looking studio. I liked the background music being created and the video itself definitely looked better quality this time, as if taken straight from the PC version with minimal degradation from compression.

Thanks guys, as soon as anyone finds sys reqs, please post ASAP.

make sure to download those 2 trailers in HD from official site - cutscenes look gorgeous and if there will be more then 2 hours of it (+ minimally 15-20 hours of gameplay), it will be awesome

the only information about sys. req. as far as i know was mentioned in one of interviews ...

[list]Mafii II proto zvládne i běžné PC, neděláme žádné nové Crysis, jak se různě povídá. Výkonné PC ovÅ¡em dokáže z naÅ¡eho Illusion Enginu vymáčknout opravdové maximum.

=

You will be able to play Mafia 2 on every common pc. We dont create any new Crysis as it is said here and there. But powerfull PC will be able to squeeze out maximum from our Illusion Engine.[/list:u]

So only that usual talking... :wink:

Not interested in the trailers, just newer gameplay footage that shows what it will look like on PC. That req comment doesn't say much considering multi core CPU rigs are common these days.

It's also funny how they refer to Crysis because it happens to be one of the high tech games that actually runs fairly well on a single core CPU, provided you use common sense with the settings.

Some people are going to hold them to that promise though, so it damn sure better run on a single core CPU because obviously Crysis does and still looks pretty good doing it.

2K Games plan to do bigger promotion for Mafia 2 then for any of its past games (Bioshock, Sid Meier's Civilization IV, Prey, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion..) .. as I read in Interview with developers in one Czech preview. So we should hear about Mafia 2 quite a lot in next months (more trailers, demo... etc.)

Some other interesting things:

- the music will be finally recorded by Prague's Philharmonic orchestra
- many many music hits from 40s and 50s in car's Radio + special news about 2 gangsters that just robbed a shop and how they or their car looked like (if someone saw you) - police is listening to radio as well...
- mission objectives are everything - you can drive through city, occasionally see oportunity to do some sidequest, or keep shopping for several days, but until "you meet your partner at 12 in the bar" it is still morning in the game, the weather does not change etc. It is these milestones, the storyline that is everything in the game... so you have a freedom to move through the city, but mission objectives are that what makes the story go on, that makes morning to become afternoon in the game, that changes weather etc. It is not GTA4, it is story telling game.
- you can make your own decisions - like in that gameplay scene on the roof of the skyscraper - you can start shooting on your enemies or you can act as window cleaning service.. there will be also hidden bigger decisions that evolve in different endings of the game...
- 50 different wounded animations + 50 death animations (that is a lot)

Seems much of the story structure will be same as original Mafia then. Personally I don't like this fascination with suspending time (TOD cycle) because only the missions themselves progress it. To me that sounds like they have each mission scripted to take place at a certain time of day or night again, like Mafia.

I do like some of the added nuances like the quality background music, more diverse radio playlist, and news flashes, but you need to have good structure in the core of the game regarding missions, it's much more important than those little details.

Still no talk of arsenal structure it seems. Mafia kind of sucks for weapons choices. You only get access to Yellow Pete's toward the end of the game. It's actually more useful for Free Roam than for the story.

It also lacks any kind of cover system whatsoever and shooting while crouched behind cover often results in shooting the cover vs the enemy. Nice to see they added a cover system. So many times I unintentionally went into a side roll strafing while crouched in Mafia while struggling to find cover that protected me without obscuring my fire.

I am still optimistic about this game, but when they play up features like 2 hrs of cutscenes and suspended TOD cycle, I get the feeling that just like old Mafia, much of it will be very scripted, despite all the talk about freedom of choices.

interview on GT TV - http://www.gametrailers.com/gametrailerstv_player.php?ep=57&ch=1&sd=0