Mafia III sports a detailed world, fascinating setting, fleshed-out characters, and some of the most stylistic cutscenes to have come out of a AAA game in the last decade. Although its connection to the Mafia series is tangential at best and more of a stretch, it comes within arms reach of being a genuinely fantastic game that's up there with its inspirations in terms of quality. And then you play the game and wonder what the hell happened.
In truth, Mafia III had a long and troubled development cycle, and my god, it shows. The short version is that Hangar 13 was brought on board to replace 2K Czech (formerly Illusion Softworks) after their attempts to get a third Mafia game off the ground kept sputtering out. The Czech team was then relegated to a support role, and the decision to upgrade the engine for both Mafia 1 and 2 was made. There was only one issue: this was happening while Hangar 13's version of Mafia III was in active development. They struggled to update the engine, as most of its code was written in Czech and not translated. Horrible periods of crunch ensued, and the game's structure was an issue that they had very little time to fix due to an ever-approaching deadline by publisher Take-Two Interactive. If you're wondering why the final product is so gratingly repetitive, the developers have that same question, too.
For that reason alone, I can't hate Mafia III. Its developers poured their heart and soul into it, and while that might get lost in translation a little bit, the best parts of this game show that in colors. Somewhere, somehow, there is a version of this game that the developers wanted to make. You might have to mod all of the grindy sidequests out of the game in order to see that vision, but it's there. Mafia III is a special kind of disappointment in that it does everything well despite having no chance to do everything right.
If you want to hear the long story about how everything went belly-up, I highly suggest reading Jason Schreier's article from 2018 on the topic: https://kotaku.com/how-the-makers-of-mafia-iii-lost-their-way-1825242177
In truth, Mafia III had a long and troubled development cycle, and my god, it shows. The short version is that Hangar 13 was brought on board to replace 2K Czech (formerly Illusion Softworks) after their attempts to get a third Mafia game off the ground kept sputtering out. The Czech team was then relegated to a support role, and the decision to upgrade the engine for both Mafia 1 and 2 was made. There was only one issue: this was happening while Hangar 13's version of Mafia III was in active development. They struggled to update the engine, as most of its code was written in Czech and not translated. Horrible periods of crunch ensued, and the game's structure was an issue that they had very little time to fix due to an ever-approaching deadline by publisher Take-Two Interactive. If you're wondering why the final product is so gratingly repetitive, the developers have that same question, too.
For that reason alone, I can't hate Mafia III. Its developers poured their heart and soul into it, and while that might get lost in translation a little bit, the best parts of this game show that in colors. Somewhere, somehow, there is a version of this game that the developers wanted to make. You might have to mod all of the grindy sidequests out of the game in order to see that vision, but it's there. Mafia III is a special kind of disappointment in that it does everything well despite having no chance to do everything right.
If you want to hear the long story about how everything went belly-up, I highly suggest reading Jason Schreier's article from 2018 on the topic: https://kotaku.com/how-the-makers-of-mafia-iii-lost-their-way-1825242177