Mafia: The Old Country’s Free Ride update finally has a release date: November 20. It adds a number of new features, including challenges, a first-person driving camera, classic difficulty, and photo mode.
The major update to Hangar 13’s narrative adventure is a callback to the original Mafia’s Free Ride Extreme and the Free Ride mode in Mafia: Definitive Edition. As explained by Peter Amato, Content Manager at publisher 2K in a post on the PlayStation Blog, Mafia: The Old Country’s Free Ride update is a collection of challenges separate from the main story that give players chances to revisit the world in a “more self-guided way.” Veteran fans of the series will find that Mafia: The Old Country’s Free Ride mode will be slightly different from previous titles as a result.
The repeatable challenges include combat, stealth, and different race types. Completing them earns you the Dinari in-game currency to spend on the new outfits, charms, weapons, and vehicles unlocked by progressing through this content (as well as on items unlocked via the campaign).
“We want players to explore the world in a freeform way, and Free Ride turns it into an expansive hub where you’ll find and access various challenges by travelling around, unlocking Hitching Posts, and meeting contacts,” Amato said. “Challenges are instanced and accessed via these contacts, and doing so will place you into a combat location or special world state.
“These combat encounters reuse mission locations, so once you’ve played the corresponding story chapter and unlocked a Challenge in Free Ride, you’ll get to re-experience areas in new ways. Races happen out in the world and we’ve placed them along less-traveled paths, so it should be fun seeing parts of the map you may have previously passed by.
“Of course, there may be new places to explore too, but that’s something you’ll have to discover for yourself…”
Elsewhere, there’s the Cinema Siciliano visual treatment, which Amato said makes Mafia: The Old Country feel like playing “a genuine piece of classic Italian cinema.” “The visual treatment is stunning and it feels like you’re experiencing a black-and-white movie shot on an old-school sound stage, while the vintage-sounding audio convincingly brings the whole thing together,” Amato explained.
All the new items earned by playing Free Ride are usable in the main story campaign. All the new elements are present from the start, so new players will have them as options going through the game for the first time.
The addition of first-person driving is a first for the Mafia franchise. And the Classic difficulty makes the game harder.
Earlier this month, Strauss Zelnick, boss of 2K parent company Take-Two, teased a bright future for the Mafia franchise after Mafia: The Old Country “performed well ahead of expectations.”
“Definitely,” Zelnick said when asked if The Old Country performed well enough to instill confidence to continue the franchise. “We’re really excited about Mafia, and I think that’s a great question because it is sort of a reset for the franchise. We don’t have anything to announce — that comes from the label — but it definitely performed well ahead of expectations.”
It sounds like the decision to sell Mafia: The Old Country at a cheaper than expected $49.99 price point paid off, then. Fans praised The Old Country’s $50 price tag when it was confirmed, and publisher 2K and developer Hangar 13 managed expectations by stressing pre-launch that it was absolutely not a Grand Theft Auto-style open-world game, but a linear, narrative-driven game.
Take-Two stopped short of providing exact sales figures but said the early 1900s Sicily-set Mafia “quickly surpassed our internal expectations and affirmed our belief that consumer demand remains strong for premium, narrative-driven experiences that over-index on value.” Although it’s unclear when or how another Mafia game could materialize in the future, more new content and updates for The Old Country are confirmed to be in the works.
Mafia: The Old Country launched in August as a prequel for the crime drama video game franchise that got its start with the original Mafia in 2002. The series saw semi-regular releases up until the launch of the divisive Mafia 3 in 2016, with only a group of well-received definitive edition remasters arriving to break up the wait for more in 2020.
IGN’s Mafia: The Old Country review returned an 8/10. We said: “Mafia: The Old Country is a conventional but effective return to the linear and tightly story-driven format of the original Mafia and Mafia II, and it boasts a wonderful eye and ear for detail.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
