To believe or not

It is said that one of the most imperative tools of any storytelling is the suspension of disbelief. The ability for the Storyteller to present an idea or situation and the listener to sit back, nod along and go with the flow. And it all comes down to the very tepid and ill-shaped thing known as 'believability'. "Can I buy this", "Does the story do enough to suspend by perception of what is real and what isn't." Without that there is always a distance between us and the story, a film behind which we observe ourselves more than we observe the story- and when you're in that state it's near impossible to be driven emotionally, feel the adventure, react to the stakes. It is the death of immersion.

But how does the act of 'believability' translate into gaming? That's actually something more of a nuanced question, because the very nature of a game does not engender itself to 'true to life depictions'. You create a game where the character needs to eat and sleep and go to the toilet in order to function in their day to day and 9 times out of ten you've made a boring gameplay loop that people don't want to engage with. One bullet deaths? An unfun overly brutal game. But there is still a balance to be struck, as evidenced by the philistine spread of that mostly misunderstood concept coined as 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' that bevies of half-educated luddites cite as though proof reading their own dissertations. People can sense when something doesn't feel right, even if they can't quite verbalise why that is. 

The very nature of how most modern games play out means that we can never really create a one-to-one parity. When a gameplay loop is built around shooting bad guys- it makes sense to throw dozens of enemies at the player even though a sensible mind will tell you that one guy in a fight against several bigger dudes is never going to work out for them. At moments like that what is 'believable' shifts in perspective to how we are presented with these scenarios- what little branches are offered to the audience that they can sell themselves into this world. A world were one men armies exist and bullets sting like a wasp poke.

Given that I've been playing through them recently, the Mafia games come to mind when I consider this. Games with their fare share of ridiculous explosive set pieces- but set against fairly comprehensives crime narratives about the nature of organised crime and how the desire to always get more eats away at yourself, those around you and very nature to enjoy the life you thought you wanted. Mafia tempers it's more explosive moments with a relatively sedate pacing for a video game, where the evolving and devolving life of these mafiosos are placed in contrast to the bursts of violence and death. It's a great sobering device to keep us in the frame of mind to 'believe' in this world and the consequence of our brutality. Then Mafia 3 kind of spat on all that, but we're focusing on the positives today.

Tomb Raider, the remakes, are one such game that gets brought up often- largely because of half-heads who can't comprehend what stakes in a narrative are. I always found that new Lara to be very well attuned to realism in the manner of 'consequence'. They went as hard as they could into the explosive set-pieces and insane magical insanity- as long as they could back everything up with grounding consequence on the otherend- and it really worked out! Lara had to kill so many to survive that original island, and watch all her friends die or drift away after the fact- landing her in therapy. She saw supernatural happenings before her very eyes, making her an intellectual outcast after the fact. She learned of a great secret society praying on the hidden world, making her a paranoid recluse. Living in a world where A equals B is a great tool for having that world feel like it matters.

And on the more extreme example side we have the likes of Borderlands. Yes, I know- "Borderlands? How is that a game that can sell a believability to it?" And to that I would like to reiterate- we're talking about the player's ability to buy into this world of belief. It's all about being believable within the space you've created. If there's a wacky world in the ass-end of the universe were bullets are more common than water- then I want to believe in everything that comes with that sort of setting. A dusty and rustic world were civilisation are all but tiny rare pockets against a land gone mad- that sense of prevailing isolation amidst the crazed wackiness of the local power players. When you start softening the edges of a world like that- you lose that carefully crafted image. Suddenly Borderlands no longer feels like Borderlands anymore now that it's just a bad-joke factory. 

Of course this works best with a game like Grand Theft Auto. One that bills itself around capturing, and then mocking, the state of modern life. Rockstar do this immensely well, bringing entire cities to life and extracting just the right slices of culture for mockery- but if we take this to the other degree and talk about immersion than it would probably be the Red Dead Games that take the cake from the catalogue. Lean slices of the mid-to-south west brought to a interactive playspace that feels weighty. Where you track and hunt, pick up bounties, get drunk and start bar fights: Red Dead delights in spicing up the mundane to be just exciting enough- striking this careful balance between the realistic and the playable. A masterclass, some might say.

At the end of the day all this talk about what is and isn't believable amounts to little more than a studying of tools- tools with which artists create entertainment that grabs and moves us. Breaking through the tough skin of the fictional becomes harder as we move into an age of more all consuming entertainment but as artists it will forever be our duty to stay ahead of all of that and sink our teeth into the real next level ways our work can snake into the hearts of the public. Immersion is just another one of those tools that can cut through so much of the doubt and dissention when used right, to the right audience and create the truly unforgettable.  

The Mafia Retrospective

 

Mafia- a narrative driven crime series that actually remembers why we love telling stories about this to ourselves. Not just to revel in the what-if excesses of a life free from the constraints of law and morality, of the unattainable wrestled from the hands of ever-so romantic life-or-death drama- but to remind ourselves of the grip of karmic retribution. To hear that ever present ticking of the universal doomsday clock clicking ever closer to midnight. These games were seeped deeply in their cinematic influences, to a near fault, whilst keeping up with their audiences as decently entertaining and immersive tours through the iconography of post-war America stretching from the thirties up to the late sixties. Having recent played through the series as it exists on modern storefronts I am struck both by how solid these games were and the lack of comparables that exist on the market today. Truly the field is wide open for 'The Old Country' whenever that title rolls around.

Now the first Mafia game dates back to 2002 by Illusion Softworks, and as good as I'm sure it's fans will tell you it is- I was very happy to have a modern remake by Hangar 13 to play instead through 'Mafia Definitive Edition'. Mafia Definitive Edition is a very good looking game- at 1080p- (4k really doesn't seem to agree with it.) and those visuals go to bring to life a vision of Great Depression LA that feels oddly distinct from the dozens of other LA video games we get. Maybe it's the time period, maybe it's the strange omission of Hollywood altogether, either way this old-school gangster aesthetic is preciously rare in gaming. Doubly so in open-world's like Mafia's. Of course, Mafia 'open worlds' are more window dressings- they exist to be pretty to look at, not to really engage with in a meaningful fashion.

There's a retro-istic charm to the way that Definitive Edition presents itself, even with the totally remade scenes and dialogue. I can almost feel the GTA 3 era set-up of 'get given a mission in a smokey room with the loud mouth boss' aesthetic that both feels reductive to high level storytelling whilst nostalgic in a sweet way. That being said- despite the 'GTA mission structure' layout of the story there is something of an authenticity to the core character Tommy and how we explore who he is. Not a good man, but a human who tries to make something of himself in a not-so-upstanding way. There's a muted charm to him and his performance that crosses the basic threshold of connection, even if I won't exactly tie him in as one of the great protagonists in gaming. I wish his supporting cast made more of a role beyond fairly basic archetypes they slide into- there's a recognisable kind of charm in the familiar I suppose but it's hardly a good sign when I couldn't remember which name belonged to which face throughout the entire game. Even now I'm unsure as to who was who outside of the literal Don himself.

Also- I have no idea what Hangar 13 did to make this game but did the gunplay need to feel that bad? I was getting seriously worried about playing through Mafia 3, (Which was to be my first time) knowing this game was made after 3 and yet played like an early 2000's 3rd person action title from hell. AI felt messy and preferred to rush then stick to any strategy, all the guns felt cock-eyed and sounded weak and the 'driving mission' needed to die. Why no-one at Hangar 13 saw the driving mission from the original and went "Yeah, this really needs a 'skip' option in the remake" is totally beyond me. What idealised version of the world do they live in and how can I move there permanently?

Mafia Definitive Edition is a fine game that seems dragged down by the severely dated skeleton it is attempting to emulate, alongside bewilderingly poor gunplay. But with high quality cinematics, solid performances and keen script rewrites Hangar 13 managed to cobble together something that ascends above it's foundations and becomes sparingly worthwhile. I use 'sparingly', because any allusion to experience this adventure once more for the memories vanishes when I recall the sheer agony of that relic-of-a-mission at the race track. Born from a time where 'variety' meant "chuck in a random level of another genre we barely comprehend", I can scarcely believe that total roadblock shipped in the game back in 2002, let alone again in the 2020 remake! Overall, a C+ game but not one which scores my recommendation, I'm afraid.

Mafia 2 was the one that really got my attention. A definitive remake of the game that I played religiously as a kid? I wonder what they would change, what the would keep the same, would the game still hit as hard as it did- carry the same narrative weight- endear me to the same characters... oh, it's just a remaster. Yeah, they didn't change a thing for the 'definitive' version of Mafia 2 beyond upscaling the visuals a little bit and cleaning up some background faces and I have to be honest- they didn't really need to- Mafia 2 remains the peak of the franchise. Building off everything that Mafia Definitive Edition tried to do, Mafia 2 even has a more comprehensive open world to explore in New York analogy 'Empire Bay'! (Although only slightly more comprehensive. This ain't gonna be beating out any GTA games for go-to-sandbox anytime soon.)

Set across multiple years in a very tactile manner, Mafia 2 is the only game in the franchise to give us an interactable spectrum and really pan out our protagonist's life in a changing world. We get to experience Vito's story from the days after his discharge during World War 2, scrambling to make a life for himself in the ration-driven icy American streets, to experiencing the birth of the rebellious age during the early 50's, and see that bear out in the music we hear and the cars that drive along the street- it works fantastically as the backdrop for a much more engaging protagonist and his likable best friend Joe Barbaro. Their friendship really is the beating heart of this game with Vito as the lightly sarcastic straight man and Joe as the boisterous deviant who often drags his friend into trouble right alongside him.

There are definitely beats reminiscent of Goodfellas stretched along Mafia 1 and 2, although it's the sequel that brings more the feeling of that movie to me. The sensation of this unearned sense of respect wrangled out of an unjust world, only stretched over the more typically heroic lens of a video game protagonist rather the more garishly awful lens of that movie's protagonist. The faces you meet and the various sides of the underworld you cross all stand out with distinction which makes their stories intertwining with the core narrative feel significant. Playing it again I was seriously surprised how many storybeats I remembered wholesale from over a decade ago because of the memorable situations, the funny character interactions, the explosive set pieces- the whole nine yards. And again, narrative is the key driving principal of this game, even above 'enjoyment per hour' in the gameplay. The story isn't afraid to get boring for a few minutes in order to settle you into a scene, make you feel as fed up as Vito or drive the tension of a building heelturn.

Obviously they are still hang-ups with the game. The age shows with the controls and the visuals, and there is certainly a pacing issue as the game progresses. Pretty much the entire final three chapters were an absolute blur in my recollection and now I know why- events spiral out of control but not in a manner that feels uncomfortable and affronting, such as in Goodfellas, but in a manner that seems rushed and a bit confusing. I still don't know who the hell those Police-cosplayers were working for when they jump you- and the fact that everyone else just kind of brushes that entire episode aside kind of makes it feel like a haphazard action scene stuffed where it wasn't really needed. That and the finale has that 'endgame stupidity' in it's writing that a lot of games suffer from, where an entire gauntlet appears out of nowhere despite there being literally no reason for several hundred men to be waiting at the observatory all over it's floors- but to be fair Mafia 1 did that much worse with what was designed to be a simple three man ambush giving way to a literally hidden army out of nowhere. It's not the end of the world but a more immersive and tense finale would have served an otherwise genuine story more faithfully. Still a spectacular game, if not quite a masterpiece, I give Mafia 2 Definite Edition an -A Grade and an absolute recommendation. You have to play this one at least once before you die!

As the developer behind Mafia 2 went their separate ways (some of which going on to create a small studio called 'Warhorse' which put out the incredible "Kingdom Come Deliverance") the newly formed Hangar 13 took over. Built from a few former employees who worked on Mafia 2 and a new branch of fresh faces. I wonder if any of this upheaval is to blame for Mafia 3. But first let me address the marsupial in the pantry- Mafia 3 has a reputation, this is something I very well knew considering the fact I never played it's original release despite being a Mafia 2 superfan. It's known for having totally disregarded the franchise it birthed from. Shirking the unique narrative excellence the franchise had just started to scratch at in order to chase much more accessible and tried-and-true Ubisoft style soulless checklist gameplay. That is all true. But it's not a terrible game.

Despite my fears after playing Mafia Definitive Edition, I can attest that Mafia 3 is the best feeling title in the franchise by far- and I'm not just referring to the fact that the game introduces you to the golden age of muscle cars. Shooting feels great, weapons slap with satisfying feedback, Lincoln Clay feels smooth and responsive, enemy AI trades bullets and attempts flanks like they should- it just feels like a hugely competent third person action game in the vein of an Uncharted title. Which is fitting given that Mafia 3 plays much more like an Uncharted game than any Mafia title before it- both for the better and, more commonly, for the worse.

The core of this story is a revenge tale set up in the first act and like a typical Ubisoft game- that is pretty much all the stakes the narrative has to go on for the rest of the game. Gone are the complete explorations into these characters lives where we see the breadth of their journey into criminality- in it's place is a slightly vapid gamified 'take over the city' metagame with an extremely thin "violence is actually bad" narrative stretched poorly across the runtime. The framing device of 'interviews in a documentary' was a stroke of genius in a way to establish some form of pathos and narrative- but it's still a vast downgrade from the more linear and rich narratives of both games before it.

Luckily Lincoln Clay himself is an incredibly likable protagonist, perhaps the most so out of any Mafia game, which sprinkles a lot of charm and life into what could have easily been a dull-as-dishwater Ubisoft copy-and-paste affair. His interactions with the core cast feel intention-driven and worthy even if the gameplay scenarios feel bland and uninspired. The free-roam friendly 'clear out the criminal operations' objectives quickly blend into a soup of repetitive blandness. When taking out the prostitution rings and the PCP rings both involve going into a back alley and shooting 5 or 6 men do those really count as separate missions? (At least you get directed towards different alleys for each objective. This isn't quite 'Watch_Dogs: Legion' levels of lazy...) Even taking out the heads of these various operations just sends you right back to a location they'll have already had you clear only to do it again.

The only tailor-made missions are taking out the various district heads and those missions range from fine to a couple of 'that was pretty cool' moments. None stand-out as particularly memorable. Even the big finale at the end has to be the least elaborate and intense finale in the franchise, and I don't particularly think the first two games were masterpieces on how to finish your game- they just stuck around in my noodle a bit better. The pivot towards open world objectives gutted the potential of what this game could have been and I have evidence to support that in the form of the DLCs. All of them are much more linear direct mission-to-mission affairs and though none really feel like Mafia- they all are supremely more engaging and interesting than the base game. Stones Unturned in particular just feels like a mini Uncharted game only given a lean late 60's aesthetic that really sings well with the style of this game- I would have preferred if they went action adventure the entire way then the relatively lacklustre direction Hangar 13 lumped Mafia 3 with. It's fun enough to recommend, but not good enough to get any higher than a C+ Grade.

Mafia feels like a franchise always chasing it's 'Masterpiece' moment and never quite getting the hare. Mafia 3 should have been it, building off the momentum of 2, but they fumbled down the hill and got totally lost in Ubisoft checklist land instead. But I just know that with a tightening of storytelling, a return to direct character introspection and another new timely setting to settle into- we'll be right back on track. Which is probably why 'The Old Country' has me so very excited. But should you play Mafia in the modern age? Absolutely, the franchise stands up surprisingly well and, given the decently anthological nature of it, there's no need to suffer the inequities of the middling titles. Just give Mafia 2 your time, and maybe a bit of 3 if you want some mindless fun. 1 is really only for the hardcore franchise lovers.