Mafia: Trilogy, including full remake of masterpiece Mafia: City of Lost Heaven

The game just looks horribly blurry by default…to counter-act it I downsample it from 3325x1871 res to 1080p.

I dont have any graphic options on the Xbox sadly. But if you look at the other cars in the second picture, you can see just how horriblly blurry it is.

I just didnt remember it looking like this before , but I could be wrong of course.

Apparently this patch removed X and Pro enhancements, so the game is running lower res, hence the blur.

What a shitshow.

If we’re talking about Mafia 3, surely the PC version was unaffected, right?

There really needs to be an adage: remasters/remakes are rarely any good. Why?

Making a game, especially a classic that’s worthy of remakes/remaster, took a lot of game designers and visual designers time to get ‘just right’. Even if the tech is old, it was designed to make best usage of what was available at the time. And it worked – that’s why the game is a classic. Remastering an old game often feels to companies like a no-brainer, when in reality, you’ve got to work really, really hard to keep the aesthetics and mechanics just as good while updating them. For example:

  • Bioshock remastered brought very minor graphical improvements, while introducing many bugs.
  • Full Throttle Remastered didn’t have the budget to fully do justice to the old graphics in hi-res. At least they had access to the original DAT voice recordings.
  • Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition introduced many bugs and took years of long-term commitment from the developer to become stable.
  • Oddworld: New 'n Tasty: remade Abe’s Oddyssey by moving to real 2.5D. Unfortunately, recreating the unique constraints of the original game was very hard, making this game prettier but mechanically inferior.

Many more examples abound. Making a proper remaster/remake requires long-term dedication to the original vision, which most remasters just don’t have – usually the idea is to invest a little money and get more sales in return.

Oh man, H&D were so brutally hard. Every nazi had eagle vision and incredibly steady hands. I will almost surely never forget the actual hours my buddy and I spent doing the first(!) mission over and over again LANing in my basement years ago, failing countless, countless times, only to succeed (finally!) and bask in our triumph as the mission end voiceover was playing and my buddy turns to the truck that you had to sneak to for exfil and says, “suck it, truck” and sprays it with the sten only to have it explode and kill us both MISSION FAILED. ARRRRRRRGH

This is the proper remaster:

What the hell did I just watch?

Nobody knows, has known and will ever know.

In definitive edition of Mafia 3, there is quite some stuff that can be found.
For example, untextured city of Berlin from their canceled game Rhapsody:

Or car trackmania for testing:

Or a cut airplane mission played as Donovan:

Or…Empire Bay from Mafia 2:

Alternate reality Mafia, one in which The Thing escaped from U.S. Outpost 31 and infected the whole planet. It would continue to live life as we had but in it’s own twisted version of our reality.

Paul, I don’t think I should trust Google Translate on this, but this report on Eurogamer Czech seems to be saying that Hangar 13 returned to Mafia 4 after Rhapsody was cancelled. Is that the case?

https://www.eurogamer.cz/articles/2020-05-26-v-mafia-3-objevena-mapa-berlina-ze-zru-ene-piona-ni-hry

That is what he writes, but CZ eurogamer is kinda trash and I would never assume Doskočil has any actual confirmed insider info about it.

This was a lovely article about revisiting Mafia 2:

God I really hope Mafia 1 remake is great and these remasters get fixed because I am reeeeally itching to replay this trilogy.

Thank you, Paul. I wanted the sequel news to be true, but getting a Mafia 1 remaster softens the sting considerably. I just hope it releases in better condition than M2 & M3.

Is Mafia III (on the PC) actually changed in any way except for the label in the Steam Library (and the fact that it comes with all the DLC)?

There’s a few very minor changes:

  • The launcher has a new look
  • Three extra options have been added to the launcher: Texture Quality, Bloom, and Disable Launcher
  • The logo splash screens are new.
  • There’s a big banner on the title screen advertising the “Mafia Trilogy.”
  • You can adjust graphics options in-game now; previously you had to to this through the launcher.

The big issue I was having is that basically the map stops showing junction boxes and icons related to them (med kits, collectibles, fuses). And on top of that you can’t wiretap junction boxes to reveal those icons on that part of the map because there is no prompt to break a lock on junction box. Makes tackling the rackets a lot more difficult. There seems to be a patch in the works that I hope addresses these bugs.

Just a note, this wasn’t the case, graphics settings, incl. resolution and all that was always modifiable ingame.

Some good news about Mafia II at least…

Ah, even fewer changes than I had assumed. :(

Guys, 2 and 3 were farmed out to different porting studios for the remasters. What did you expect? It’s one thing to farm out a port. To farm out a remaster to a company that specializes in ports? Good luck with that.