The new Mafia II trailer (below) shows some neat gangsterism, and has a John Lee Hooker soundtrack. That’s going to doom me to a morning of Blues while I get on with writing all the words about videogames. The game itself has been delayed again, apparently, with 2K saying that it won’t make the first half of 2010, as anticipated. However, the game is coming along handsomely, and we might just have some more news on that progress soon. Worth keeping an eye out for, I think, because this could just be one of the games that makes 2010 worthwhile.
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They must be polishing each byte by hand.
They are using vast amounts of Brasso thats for sure!
DX10 only too?
First DX11a exclusive. That’s why the delay.
@AndrewC
Please let that be a joke. Please!
Gorgeous. I can’t wait. As someone who played and loved every buggy, overly difficult, unintuitive but thoroughly charming moment of Mafia, I’m entirely pumped.
What Martin said.
The first one remains the only “open world” (-ish, because it wasn’t quite) game I’ve ever liked, had interesting characters and a decent plot, looked great for the time and was piles of fun. This looks like it’s going to be more of the same with shinier graphics, and since it’s a multi-platform release, I get to run it with all the shinies turned up to their maximum level without needing to update my hardware.
DX11? sigh, here we go again.
Shall we just fast forward to the moan about DX12?
Hands up all those people with a shiny new DX11 computer just begging for a decent game that you can show off to your freinds.
err, is there a text symbol that represents a hand up?
Saying that, i can really understand people being gutted being stuck with a old machine. Only just managed to scrape enough cash together this year. I think 7 years per PC is perfectly acceptable. £100 a year. Pay more for my TV license and that just pumps endless shit into my living room. My PC is for Entertainment after all.
Maybe the goverment should subsidise PC upgrades like they do with old gas boilers.
Anyway, Mafia 2 looks great, lots of smoking too. Like lots of smoking….
you mean like
o/
Are you joking? 7 years for a computer?
A computer just for office and internet browsing will not last 7 years.
A computer for gaming should be upgraded every 3 years minimum.
I made my pc in 2002 and it was only when Bioshock come out I couldn’t play new games anymore. Luckly I can play the orange box fine because Valve know most people don’t upgrade often. Every 5 years or so is fine unless you wan to play at max gfx settings, which I don’t care about as long as I can play it! Will have to get around to upgrading one day but its costs so damn much
This statement shows what a slave you are to the closed-source forced-upgrade grind. If you weren’t using an OS from Microsoft or Apple, who are in league with/actually are the hardware vendors, then you’d have an OS that knows that word processing and browsing the web hasn’t really become *that* much more computationally complex over the last 7 years; certainly not even close to as much as hardware grunt has increased. I’m typing this on an almost-exactly-7-year-old CPU/Motherboard/RAM combination, which are running the *latest* Ubuntu release completely smoothly. I have no need to upgrade in the at-all-near future, except perhaps for more HDD capacity as my collection of FLAC rips grows. Obviously the situation with gaming is quite different, but in terms of pure productivity-computing, don’t be duped: open-source software can make any old piece of crap hardware function perfectly well. It also has the benefits of usually being cost-free and on the socially-responsible side of the moral fence.
Also, upgrading every 3 years for gaming assumes you’re playing games on the bleeding edge of graphical fidelity. While I can’t imagine many PC gamers NOT wanting this at least some of the time, it’s far from necessary: the PC has an enormous back-catalogue of highest-quality games that could provide almost endless entertainment on old, old hardware. In fact, I’d have said that one of unique qualities of the PC gamer is that s/he is much less mindlessly chase-the-new-shiny than his/her console cousin.
My post in response to blargy, not Bob; sorry.
It is interesting how the PC culture has changed. I remember when I got a computer that could play Unreal after having a PS1 for a few years. I actually shit.
I’m a little worried about this game after two of the major problems (that I saw) in Mass Effect 2, namely: Bigger shinier graphics means pitifully small level-sizes (OK not of the scale of Thi3f or Deu2 Ex IW) on this-gen consoles AND apparently everyone still thinks re-gen health makes for satisfying combat. The combat nearly ruined ME2 for me to the point that I considered cheating so I could just see the story through and be done with it.
What do you cool-minded and high-opinioned gents and lasses think?
I’m feeling that, initially I really liked the ME2 combat but the regenerating health completley took all the fun out of it. As soon as you’ve got barrier or armour to level four you can wander through most battlefields unscathed. “ooops that one slipped through my barrier and my shields, better duck behind this convinient chest high wall!”
@The Colonel
I know what you mean. In ME2, I think those two elements actually ended up neutralizing one another to some degree, though. Because the combat was somewhat flawed, it was better that the areas weren’t huge as it meant the combat sequences weren’t extended beyond my tolerance for them. In the end, it was all brief enough that I could appreciate the intensity of the firefights without getting too hung up on the overt silliness of the regenerating health thing. Granted, I’d have preferred a better combat system and bigger areas, but if one was going to be flawed I’m just as glad the other one was as well.
are there any games that actually penalise you for healing?
@Tom
In the older Fallout games couldn’t you develop a stimpack addiction?
Other than that, nothing comes to mind.
“are there any games that actually penalise you for healing?”
Well, The Void penalises you for staying healthy
Strictly speaking, Vietcong would qualify. That game has my favourite implementation of healing for a tactical shooter: Whenever you are healed (either by med-kits, or by your medic when you are with your squad), your health is restored to a lower maximum than before. Repeatedly getting healed means your maximum health gets lower and lower.
The point isn’t really to penalise you for healing, of course; the penalty is for getting injured in the first place, and the reduced maximum is a way of making injuries have longer-term effects than you get in regular shooters.
It adds some extra verisimilitude without making the game too brutal, which I always liked.
I refuse to believe that all those “ME2 was a walk in the park” players played the game using the higher difficulty levels.
@The Colonel: what difficulty did you play ME2 on? I’m asking because even on hard I found it pretty good/balanced but hey, maybe it’s my FPS side talking.
That said, I had completely forgot about this, seems like they are taking WAY longer than expected; and The Colonel just reminded me that (supposedly) Thief 4 was in the making…. right?
They got laughed at so much for the Thi4f title that they had to go back and remove all the leetspeek from Garrett before they could release a trailer or more info.
Those put off by the DX11 exclusivity should keep in mind that with the DX11 API they can target DX9 or DX10 class hardware no problem. So the only limitation the DX11 API has is that it won’t run under XP because of the driver model.
Wow, MS is making quite the push on forced DirectX upgrades, aren’t they? I’m actually starting to think of my appalling game backlog as a good thing.
Well, it makes more sense than DX10 exclusivity at least. In any case, I’m still looking forward to this one. Glad to see they’re giving it enough time to make sure it’s polished.
Today just became a Muddy Waters day. Hurrah.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28XIcc8wh4&feature=related
A snippet of my faourite Muddy track. I really want to get hold of this live recording (Oregon 1971)
More delays? Sigh. Hopefully, this will mean the final product will be very polished.
Been looking forward to this one for a long time. Really loved the first game and it is by far the best open world gangster game (okay, it is better than GTA.) I would say that only GTA4 has come close to matching its excellence – which I am playing right now and enjoying very much.
I’m a little skeptical about the regen health too. It is something that works if you play the game as intended, but can easily be broken by sticking behind one piece of cover. Some people have complained about the cover-system too, but this is less of an issue for me. Personally, I remember spending a lot of time behind cover in the original game, so in affect they will just be using a better animation than the standard crouch.
If they can balance the regen health so that you really can’t take much gunfire, much like the original game, then I will be happy.
Am I the only person who rejoices at most delay announcements?
I have too many games on my plate at the moment and I have a nagging feeling it’s only gonna get harder to stay current.
Also, longer development times mean better games in the end. Either that or it’s a sign that this game might have too many development issues for it to formulate properly.
I agree – my first thought upon reading about the delay was ‘I’m glad they’re taking the time to finish it properly’. Like you, I’ve got dozens of untouched purchases to keep me busy ’til then. I’m *really* liking the look of this one, and I’d rather they do it right than do it quickly.
Though as you said, the delay could mean that it’s all gone horribly wrong and they need an extra few months to try to polish the turd. I remain optimistic, though; at the very least it looks like it’s going to be a very pretty turd.
sigh. the more they polish it, the more likely it is that it won’t run on my laptop. Wish they’d released lit last year when i could have actually played it.
Forgive me, but did the DX 11 exclusivity idea come from my post above? I ask because it was intended as a deliberately ridiculous idea to mock all the ‘DX 10 touched my mum’ outrage going around at the moment.
So I apologise for lying – it is genuinely rude to be misleading. But also please ask yourselves why you were so quick to believe the idea that anyone would make a game exclusive to a DX that doesn’t exist yet?
Damn, should have checked :P.
In any case DX11 does very much exist, and it has been publicly available to any developer since the August 09 DirectX SDK.
My original post mentioned DX11a, which doesn’t seem to exist yet. This, while technically affording me the victory, makes me a horrible, tedious pedant. Sad face.
Really looking forwards to Mafia 2 though! And maybe the DX11a patch will finally make in-game characters smoke cigarettes half-way realistically.
o/
Meh. Posting replies is incredibly unreliable.
Am I the only one reacting to the completely insane amount of bloom (or whatever it’s called) in that screenshot?
It looks like a dream sequence!
That said, I’m looking forward to this game, I think it’s going to be like the secon coming of jesus, I hope it’s not flawed, blah blah blah.
Hopefully this will be playable on release, unlike the GTA 4 PC version which actually runs worse on PC compared to the XBox 360. Let’s hope some of that polish goes into the PC version.
John Lee Hooker, you say?
That’s already a selling point to me.
Oh, wow. This looks really, really great.
Trailer/ pic reminds me of that bloody racing mission from Mafia I. Surely they don’t want anyone to think about that….
As an enormous fan of both Mafia and John Lee Hooker, all I can say is wow, that’s fucking stunning.
Looks awesome. Really liked the first one. I better not buy open-world games anymore until i have a quad core though. It’s slowly getting upgrade time here.