Mafia Interview

Our little boy, Ure has put together a nice interview with Illusion Softworks' (creators of Hidden and Dangerous) Daniel Vavra, Lead Designer of Mafia. Mafia is a cool-looking 3rd person action game, which puts players in the role of a Capone-style gansta'. Well, actually a cab driver who was, cough, persuaded by these two 'goodfellas' to be their chauffer for a while...

Now that I've read the interview, I must say Daniel strikes me as a very cool down-to-earth kinda guy. He reasons like a HC gamer, which is very rare these days. Dig in, boys and girls:

Action Trip: This is going to be a third person shoot-em-up driving simulation. Will the game mix in any other kind of genre? Do you personally enjoy, playing adventure games? And are you going to insert some sort of 'classic adventure' puzzle-solving?

Daniel Vavra: Yes, I like some of classic old school adventures like Revolution's LURE OF THE TEMPTRESS. But what I hate, is when the puzzles are too tough and if designers are lengthening playability by making them like this. I think, that's the reason, why normal people don't like adventures, it's not very entertaining to run over the same location for two days finding some hidden key, or making something absolutely illogical. So, we will not have puzzles like that, but we will have some adventure elements, like using of objects and lot of dialogues. But all the actions are strictly logical and simple. Everything is based around real life.

AT: Obviously, you accented details in every game aspect. How far will you go with the story?

DV: Story is one of the most important elements. Each action is based around it; each mission is absolutely different from others, because of it. We spent lot of time by watching movies, reading non-fiction books, and then writing story, which will explain gangsters' life as it really was. It is not as good as Goodfellas, but hopefully it will be interesting.

AT: When the police catch up in a chase, and you get arrested, will you then have the option of bailing out?

DV: No.

AT: On the official web site you mentioned that the city atmosphere is taken straight from 1930's - America, we know that the story begins in the City Of Lost Heaven, will there be any more cities introduced?

DV: No. One is enough. We would have gone crazy if we were making two cities.

AT: The architecture of the buildings seem very complex, as well as the car models. What sort of tricks does the 3D LS3D engine use in order to achieve maximum game performance?

DV: Well we have some methods how to hide objects behind objects etc. , which are little bit different from classic portal engines and better for outdoor areas, but basically it's in our graphic artists - if You do something four times, it's very presumable, that you have learned how to do it most effective way. And we did it five times : )