Oh man, I still need to play that. Hangar 13 delivered some quality scary moments in the base game, which I won’t risk spoiling here since you’re still making your way through the campaign, so I’ll have to check out that last piece of DLC I get a new PC.
Roughly, how long did the side quest take to complete, JeffL?
Hmmm. I could only play about one piece of it at a time (work, wife, stuff, ;) ) My guess is 10 hours? That’s just a wild hair guess. But I will say it felt a step up from the other pieces of the main game I’ve played so far (I still have a lot of main game to play) and I like the main game story. A bit more than the “here’s where the bad guys are, go kill them for Sammy” motivation.
10 hours is a vast overestimation. Each DLC takes around 3-4 hours, so 10-12 all three DLCs in total. I can say that confidently because they are linear, each have few missions, and I was checking the playtime.
They are super great though, well worth playing.
I’m sure you are correct. I’m weird in how I play games like this, for example, I’ll often walk/run all the way across the map just to find stuff I miss in the car (not just stuff you can pick up, but exploring neighborhoods, etc.) So I probably take a lot more time than the average person to finish a DLC.
True, playstyle matters a lot in these estimates, always. That said I tend to be completionist (even did all the marihuana nonsense in Faster Baby!) too :)
It is weird how flawed this game is and yet I finished it twice and feel like playing it again. Something about that atmosphere and setting.
Man, I’m barely enjoying this game, once I finished the prologue.
Go interrogate a pair of guys. Put wiretaps.
Kill a pair of lieutenants.
Go kill sub boss A. Go kill sub boss B.
Next area. Repeat.
The repetition wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I would enjoy more the core gameplay, but meh. Just another third person shooter with cover, regenerating health, 2 weapon slots, stealth mechanics with takedown + throw object + whistle, etc etc. It isn’t super bad, but I find it aggressively mediocre.
That’s my biggest problem with the game too (though I did really like it overall) - it is very repetitive in the way you progress. In its defence, the missions to kill each underboss on your target list are all unique and cool. The story is a big motivator to continue I found, but that does mean progressing the city takeover aspect.
I agree that some things are repetitive. Once I crow-barred a few doors, and it was easy, I felt like there was no need for that mechanism any more, just let me open the door. And yes, the actual assignments are somewhat the same (though I’ve found the environments to be different enough to be interesting in terms of strategy.)
But the story, the presentation, it pulls me in. The combat mechanics, I like. There’s no one ubergun, IMO - the Viper is the one I’m using now, but it only has a magazine capacity of 16 bullets. So I try to make each shot count, and sometimes run out of bullets in combat and need to run scrounge under fire. The silenced pistol is handy but not very good when my rifle is empty or low and I need to use it in heavy combat.
I dunno, and everyone’s different, but I tried several times to get into GTAV, and I never was “captured” by it, even though I felt like I SHOULD love it. I don’t have a lot of gaming time, but I find myself thinking about M3 and wanting to play when I’m away from the PS4.
Playing more in the last day or so, Finished up the cult DLC, very nice. Just finished “No Stone Unturned” and that was also really good. The bad guy had more dimensions than expected, nice to have something in a different location. The scenes and interplay between Donovan and Lincoln in that one is also great.
I was thinking about the comments on repetitiveness. You have bad guys to take out, driving to do, sometimes you have to chase someone down to interrogate them (I try to block the car they always run to so I don’t have to chase them in their car,) combat, etc. between the story pieces.
But aren’t most open world games of this type pretty repetitive? I was thinking of one of my favorites, Red Dead Redemption. You really only had a few types of activities in that one (and the “random” encounters ALWAYS played out the same way, e.g “Help me, I lost my horse!” - steals your horse.) But what made it so memorable was the story and the character.
That’s what I’m liking so much about M3 - the story is mature, interesting, nuanced, told in an interesting narrative manner, with music during the story pieces that really enhance the “feel.” And the DLC missions I’ve played so far provide some nice variety.
Its been a while but I think most of the repetitiveness in RDR was in the side activities? The main story was varied enough I thought. In Mafia 3, the “side activities” are the core gameplay it seems.
Anyway, I just finished this. And really that surprises me because I was bored after capturing the first 2 districts. In general, everything seems undercooked, a stealth mechanic which is largely pointless, wealth accumulation with barely anything to spend it on, districts seem largely pointless and so on. It wouldn’t matter if the core gameplay was exceptional but I didn’t find it so. Just a long slog of the same old stupid enemies. And I think it infected the story in the end (which is the game’s main strength). So for me, a game that started out promising and then wasted its game world and story.
Largely agree with this, but it didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game. Maybe I played in small chunks and didn’t get burned out by things, or kept the side quests to the minimum but I felt the story line was sufficient to outway the shite.
Once I finished the game, I actually spent a good while on youtube with the videos covering the various options I didn’t explore, e.g. the various ways you can complete (kill) the final boss and what happens in the various endings. I managed a “keep all deputies happy and rule the city” ending, but the options available showed the level of detail put into the story line.
It’s also been a while for me, and RDR is an all time favorite of mine due to the story, but as I recall it was kind of like M3: you have a piece of story unfold, but to advance it you had to go fight all the bad guys on the boat, go fight all the bad guys in the fort, go help kill and rape all the good people in a village in Mexico, etc.
When does this unlock for Humble bundle monthly subscribers who don’t opt in for early unlock?
When you get the email telling you you got billed, which will likely happen today.
On Friday this unlocked so I downloaded it and started playing. Really loving a lot of it (the soundtrack, the voice acting, the facial animations/mo-cap, the Senate hearings interstitial scenes) through the prologue before the big double-cross.
But hoo-boy have I seen some jank in the Windows version. There was an invisible staircase in a courtyard during the Mardi Gras scene, and during the early brothel rescue mission things started going south so I reloaded the checkpoint, but then I was spawned well away from the action back at the CIA guy’s motel base, and when I got back I’d already apparently talked to the coat check girl.
Not only that but at some point all the baddies got into full combat mode and fixed all their attention and active fire toward the front of the club, and stopped searching for me, making it trivial to get the drop on all of them.
Is there a full-on “reload mission from the start” button to avoid that?
Goddamn. What a tragedy.
In mid-2016, a few months before the release of their first game, Mafia III, the developers at Hangar 13 in Novato, California gathered for an all-hands meeting. There, according to two people in attendance, Christoph Hartmann, president of the game’s publisher, 2K, told employees that their bonuses would be tied to the game’s aggregate review score on Metacritic.
Some people remembered the threshold being an 85; others remembered it being 80—either way, it didn’t matter. Mafia III did not earn an 80 on Metacritic. It didn’t even get close.
Also, buried in the article is this tidbit:
Some left voluntarily; others were let go or asked to move. Some went to other game companies; others moved to the top-secret studio next door to work on an unannounced new BioShock game.
Plus, there were cultural clashes to sort out. “They have different mannerisms,” said one person who worked there. “Czechs will tell you flat out that an idea sucks, it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard. Americans will sugar-coat it, dance around it.”
Cute. And true.
How do you get from 1980s spy thriller to musical superhero game I have no idea though. That is some next level incompetence.
What a shame, their original pitch for Mafia 4 and Rhapsody both sounded like 100% my jam.
A Cold War spy game set in the two Berlins could have been awesome.
In conversations, nearly everyone I spoke to told a similar story: Designers and other people who played the game argued that the district system felt too repetitive and needed to be changed, while managers thought it might work and wanted to wait to see if it would all come together at the last minute, as many video games do.
“The things we got knocked for, once it came out, were always known,” said one person who worked on the game. “We just couldn’t get traction on it. Like the game being grindy and repetitive—we all knew that for years, had hundreds of conversations about it, and just couldn’t get upper management to agree with us. And then we’d go to focus testing, and they’d go, ‘The game’s too grindy.’ We’d go, ‘We’re in beta, can’t do much about it.’
Oddly enough, that was my primary complaint with the game. Ten districts, which IMO was about 4 districts too many.