Mafia II Senior Producer: Listen To What Your Game Needs

Author: by Staff

In Gamautra's latest feature interview, 2K senior producer Denby Grace discusses the unique creative decisions that have lead to the specific experience of its upcoming Mafia II. Though the prototypical open-world crime series, Grand Theft Auto, is also part of the same family -- published by Take-Two subsidiary Rockstar Games while Mafia II is handled by 2K Games -- Grace says the team didn't make its creative decisions based on player expectations for other titles in the genre. "Everything in the city that you can do, in the backdrop, supports the fiction, so we don't give you really weird things to be able to do -- go bowling, go play darts. It just doesn't support the fiction. "We do give you the ability to go into restaurants. We do give you the ability to go where you meet people; go into clothes shops and buy clothes because you need to change your appearance -- the player might want to change their appearance, but that's how the police system works, so. "When we sat down, we really embraced these things. We looked at Mafia 1, obviously; we looked at everything else that was about at the time. We really embraced the linear-ness of the game. "We don't do real-time day/night cycle, and people are like, 'Ugghhh!!!' But the reason why we don't is I want to present you with a mood and a feeling while you're playing this level. So I want it to be rain now; I want it to be dark, like a film." The full interview, The Bleak Arc of Mafia II, goes into much greater depth on Grace and the team's thinking behind Mafia II. It's live today on Gamasutra.