2K Games are actively selling Mafia: The Old Country as a sideshow

It "can easy complement the different much persistent games our players besides love"

Mafia: The Old Country volition merchandise connected August 8th, developers Hangar 13 and publishers 2K Games person confirmed, and look, here’s a trailer featuring overmuch headlong bloodshed successful the villas, citrus groves and *squints* mysterious firelit dungeons of aboriginal 20th period Sicily.

With GTA 6 present releasing successful 2026, the caller Mafia is the transgression endeavor to bushed this year. Rather than trying to capable the spread near by the Rockstar colossus, it’s playing things tiny with “a focused, linear acquisition that combines prime storytelling, authentic epoch immersion and a refined instrumentality connected the acquainted Mafia gameplay,” according to Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes.

As noted by Eurogamer, 2K Games and genitor institution Take Two Interactive are positioning the caller Mafia arsenic a broadside crockery for the tremendous unrecorded work productions that person go triple-A publishing's banal successful trade.

“We deliberation there’s a ample assemblage for compelling stories that don’t necessitate monolithic clip commitments,” said 2K president David Ismailer successful a release. “We’re excited to connection a crippled similar Mafia: The Old Country successful our portfolio, and to supply a linear highly-polished communicative acquisition that tin easy complement the different much persistent games our players besides emotion and prosecute with connected a much accordant basis.”

Good lord, I retrieve erstwhile accidentally uttering the connection “linear” successful a property merchandise oregon interrogation for a big-budget enactment crippled was the buss of death. You’d find torch-waving gamer mobs astatine your gates the adjacent day. That epoch has passed beneath the horizon: we are older now, and afloat of woe. We crave the saccharine succinctness of a mildly interactive corridor.

It’s decidedly a tapdance, openly selling your crippled arsenic a “complement” for different games - perchance the devs astatine Hangar 13 find the connection present a spot condescending. My somewhat much depressing investigation is that The Old Country is efficaciously being offered arsenic a vacation from those games. You've done your clip astatine the seasonal contented coalface, truthful disconnected you spell to Sicily for immoderate highly scripted R&R.

Personally, I’m little bothered by questions of magnitude than by the information that The Old Country seems rather formulaic and lumbering. Guy shoots guy. Guy shoots feline portion hunkered down down table. Guy drives car precise fast. Guy stabs guy. I bash similar the environments, though – hopefully, Hangar 13 person baked successful plentifulness of accidental to conscionable rotation done the groves looking astatine lemons and whatnot.