After various rumors surrounding “Mafia 3”, the situation with the game still isn’t perfectly clear, and we don’t know when it’s coming – or even if it’s going to be anytime soon. The title was originally leaked, seemingly by accident, but even then we didn’t have any official confirmation for a while. And while many fans were looking forward to E3, expecting that they would get the game’s release date at the big event, the expo came and passed and nothing exciting happened on that front.
However, if we take a closer look behind the scenes, it gets pretty obvious that 2K Games are preparing something. Four domains related to the game’s name have been registered by Take-Two Interactive Software – the parent company to the game’s developer – and this naturally instantly prompted speculation among the franchise’s fans.
The domains are definitely not a misunderstanding either, with names like “mafia3thegame.com”. It’s possible that the company is just reserving them to protect their assets for the future, but if that’s the case, why now?
Still, the company hasn’t made any official comments on the situation, and we don’t expect them to say anything for a while until they’re ready to make the official announcement themselves. Some people have tried getting in touch with them regarding the domain issue, but we haven’t seen any responses about that.
One of the rumors that are going around right now is that three new characters will be brought into the game, based on real-life criminals. The characters, named Tony, Mickey and Franklin are going to add a unique twist to the game and have their own unique personalities, adding a lot to the story with their differences.
It’s worth noting that this sounds suspiciously similar to “GTA 5”, a game that already shares a lot with the “Mafia” franchise, so it’s possible that this rumor was the product of a “GTA” fan who got excited by the recent developments and wanted to generate some hype of their own.
In any case, all reports that we’ve seen so far seem to at least agree on the location for the game, which will apparently be in Louisiana. All three characters will be introduced there, but we don’t know much about how they will be integrated into the story or what kind of plot the game will feature that gives equal attention to all of them.
It’s also possible that we saw a piece of promotional material for the new game leaked recently, as there was an animation showing the “Mafia 2” logo transforming into the one for “Mafia 3”, followed by “2016”. Of course, we don’t know if the video is genuine or not, but if it is, it’s pretty clear when the game is going to be released.
What’s not clear is what platforms it’s going to be available on – PC is pretty much guaranteed at this point, and 2K will definitely want to tap into the modern console market as well. We don’t know if they have any plans to have backwards compatibility with older generation platforms for the title or not, but it would certainly be happy news to many fans of the game who haven’t moved to the next-gen consoles yet.
If the game is indeed being prepared for a 2016 release, then it shouldn’t be long before we hear something official about it and the marketing starts rolling.