Creating the Characters and World of Mafia III

[Music] so I'm Bill harmes I'm the narrative director at Hanger 13 and I was the lead writer on Mafia 3 um and the talk I'm giv today is called the most turbulent of years creating the characters in the world of Mafia 3 um before I get start forgive me a little bit I'm fighting a cold or something so my voice is not super great and I'll have to rely on my notes a littleit more than I uh normally would um before I get started I just want let everyone know um that this talk deals with sensitive subject matter including discussions of race and the use of racist language specifically how we used it um while developing Mafia 3 so Mafia 3 um it was released on October 7th of last year on the PlayStation 4 Xbox One and PC and for those of you who aren't familiar um Mafia 3 is a pulpy Revenge thr Thriller um and I want say kind of

off the bat that it's not a story the game story is not about racism or quote unquote even cuan racism um but since racism permeates so much of who Lincoln Clay is because he's an African-American man living in the south in 1968 um we felt that we had to include it in some way and address it and make it part of Lincoln's world so like I said you play as Lincoln clay he's a uh orphan he's abandoned by his mother when he's around two and he initially lived Liv in a Catholic orphanage run by a man named Father James Ballard when the city uh shuts down the orphanage um Sam or sorry uh Lincoln's basically put out on the street and at that point he falls in with Sammy Robinson who heads up the black mob in the section of the city called Del re Hollow which is predominantly African-American uh neighborhood Samy has a biological son named Ellis and for all intents and purposes they adopt uh Lincoln he becomes part of their family uh when Lincoln turns 18 He

enlists in the Army he volunteers and he goes to Vietnam he's there for 4 years during his time there he's recruited into the Special Forces uh Lincoln's honorably discharged he's actually a highly decorated soldier and when he returns home his initial plan is to say goodbye to Sammy Sammy and Ellis and move to California and start a new life um unfortunately he finds out that Sammy owes the Italian mafia which is head up led by a man named Sal Marano um Sammy owes him a lot of money so Lincoln decides that he's going to stick around help Sammy make things right and then he's going to go um as you'd expect when you deal with a mob things don't go according to plan s marono betrays Lincoln he murders Sammy and Ellis and in this scene here that's actually South Sun Georgie they shoot Lincoln in the head and they leave him for dead and this is essentially the inciting incident for the rest of the story from that point on Lincoln vows revenge and the bulk of the game is him

uh specifically targeting Sal marcano's organization so when we first started working on um Mafia 3 we basically sat down and we tried to identify some of the key franchise pillars and one of the most important ones that bubbled up pretty quickly is that the franchise is about capturing a specific time and place in American history and then providing um acting kind of as an entry point to that time and place for the player so Mafia the original game was set in 1930s America that's Depression era it's a very different feel than Mafia 2 which was primarily set in post-war America so it's more optimistic you know the future's bright everything's going okay and Mafia 3 is set in New Bordeaux which is our version of New Orleans um in 1968 so again it's a very very different time and place than the first two games you have depression postwar in the 196 which I'll talk a

little bit um more about here in a second but 1968 was one of the most turbulent years in American history um probably outside of the Civil War so why link and Clay um with the first two Mafia games we already did we already created the um kind of typical mob story um especially Mafia 2 is the very traditional Rags to Riches um mob story in that case veto sceta who gets in with the mob and it's kind of his Arc as he he works his way up through the ranks um and Lincoln is a very different um obviously a very different protagonist not just because of his race as an African-American man but also of his background he's not somebody who is initially part of the Italian mafia or things like that he's very much kind of an outsider in that regard um and because he's an African-American he has a very specific way of viewing the world and more importantly the world has a very specific way of viewing him um and

that's something we wanted to explore narratively um obviously lets us tell a very different type of mob story and this also helps us reinforce the time and place again American South 1968 with an African-American protagonist so why 1968 um when people think of the 60s they think of I think of several kind of massive historical touchtones and a lot of those happened in 196 that was the year Dr King was assassinated it was the Year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated it was the year the Ted offensive the Riots of the Democratic National Convention um the black power black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics in October of that year um so it's a very very tumultuous time Vietnam was also going on like I mentioned the Ted offensive it's also the kind of it's also roughly the time when American soldiers started to return home and the kind of Rosy machine of

what was going on in Vietnam started to disappear and social upheaval um Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 which obviously um culturally had a had a massive impact and this is a few years after that so people are still reacting to that and and I'll talk a little bit about this later um The Fair Housing Act portion of the Civil Rights Act passed in 1968 so there's still a lot of things culturally going on as well oh sorry about that um so why new Bordeaux um like I said before it's our version of New Orleans the fascinating thing about real New Orleans is has a very long history of organized crime dating back to just a few years after the Civil War um the Union Army couldn't control the dock so they basically hired a criminal to do it for them for them and that basically was the beginning of uh organized crime um roughly the time that our game is set the kind of Godfather of the city was this name man named Carlos Marcel

and he's this Larger than Life Crime Boss um and if you have a moment he there's actually videos of him on YouTube testifying before Congress and literally pleading the fifth before everything his name what he did the whole nine yards so they're pretty amazing to watch um and finally um new bordos uh you know obviously uh sorry New Orleans was our inspiration New Orleans is a very aspirational City it's also very iconic so you believe that a story like Mafia 3 could be set in a place like that but it also um it's as I said it's very iconic so if you see an image like this buildings with those kind of railings and things like that pretty much anybody can guess that that's New Orleans regardless of where they come from um and finally we decided to frame the entire game narratively as a documentary so what this means is we have specific sections in the game where um we quote unquote interview characters modern day as they reflect back on the

events of of 1968 and what Lincoln Clay did in new Bordeaux um that includes father James and also Nikki Burke who's the daughter of one of the under bosses that Lincoln recruits named Thomas Burke um and then we also have a senate hearing which you see here with a character named John Donovan a few years after 1968 in 1971 and the reason we did this is it's part of the franchise the other the previous Mafia games had these um like veto had his letters and things like that um it o grounds the story and what we thought think is a pretty realistic way um because it's a nice intersection between our world and the game world we actually licensed images and video footage that play during the documentary segments and all of that is obviously what was happening you know in real 1968 and finally for the writers it's a great way to deliver Exposition um documentaries are inherently about delivering Exposition because it's a question and an answer and so it's a great way to very kind of elegantly uh move the story along without it it

feeling really uh hamfisted so this was the big one um as we developed the game one of the most important questions we asked was how do we Infuse the game with events from that era protests Vietnam war Civil Rights movement and um even racism without it coming across that we're like we're preaching from a soap box so we had a lot of discussions about this and in the end we decided to address it across multiple disciplines um which I think is a big win for for the team um obviously my focus is on the narrative aspects of the game but I'll also touch on the other areas a little bit as well um the team also understood that what we were doing was was very risky because if we didn't get it right um we not only do a disservice in in my opinion not only do a disservice to everyone who worked on the game but also to the people who live through this this specific time and place um in American history um so part of that process was

research so we really did a deep dive on uh researching the 1960s specifically 1968 and that took uh um sorry that that basically ran across a a few types of media so I'll talk about each one of these in turn so there's documentaries there's movies books and then also firsthand accounts from African-Americans so in terms of the documentaries the big one for me is uh Tak this Hammer it's a movie that James Baldwin made in 1963 it's actually set here in San Francisco and essentially he he goes around and interviews African-Americans about their daily lives what it's like to live in San Francisco what it's like to live in the United States of America um Spies of Mississippi is about uh the Mississippi state government trying to infiltrate the civil rights movement and I don't know if it's still true but it was um I believe it's still true that it was the largest state sponsored surveillance that ever

happened in this country um and then the game is Mafia 3 so you know we have to uh look into criminality and criminals and how they work so Mr Untouchable is Nikki Barnes he was a huge crime figure in New York Cocaine Cowboys even though Cocaine Cowboys is about the rise of the cocaine trade in America in the 1980s specifically a man named John Roberts it again provided a nice glimpse into uh you know basically how Criminal Mind Works in terms of movies American Gangster um which was a movie with Russell Crow and turned into a movie with uh Russell Crow and um Denzel Washington about a man named Frank Lucas who's a contemporary of Nikki Barnes um the usual things good Fellas Godfather and then since Viet or sorry Lincoln is a Vietnam veteran we also wanted to look into the Vietnam experience and what it would be like to as serve there and then also what it's like to come home so platoon Full Metal

Jacket terms of books these ran the range from fiction books to non-fiction so there's a novel called Matterhorn um which is a fictional account of um basically the the about three months in on the ground in Vietnam but it was written by a combat vet um The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien which is an amazing book um and then again touching on the criminality the Parker novels by George Stark uh the novels of George V Higgins friends of Eddie Coyle if anybody's read that um and then American Desperado this is actually the biography of John Roberts who I said was the subject of Cocaine Cowboys and the great thing about something like this is you literally cannot make up the crazy stuff they did um so it provides a great Glimpse again into that life of being a criminal and kind of where their moral compass um is directed and then Double Deals about a man who is um made the chief of police of a small town out side of Chicago and he's placed there by the

mob and it really goes into the nitty-gritty of what that's like and one of the things we learned from this is how much money the mob makes from illegal gambling um and a side note he actually did more to improve the police department than any of his predecessors and he was totally in the pocket of the mob um so I I'll take a drink and let everyone read this so for those of you who don't know who Jim Brown is he's the running back for the Cleveland Browns I'm a Browns fan so to me he's the greatest football player ever lived um he went on to be an actor and activist this is actually an excerpt from an interview he gave with Alex Haley the author of roots that was published in Playboy magazine in February 1968 um and essentially the entire interview is the two of them discussing what it's like to be an African-American man in America um I won't say that this is I'm using

this as an example of a lot of the firsthand accounts that we that we researched and that we read about but it's also I think one of the most visceral because literally he was driving with some of his friends and they get pulled over because their car through dust on white people and even though this happened I believe in 1957 um you know those those sorts of things were still going on um which obviously has resonance in 1968 um and this and these these firsthand accounts like this um did have a direct impact on how we characterized some of the characters in The Game and also some of the gameplay systems which I'll get to in a second and finally one last thing we did for research is we actually made a giant Excel spreadsheet that listed pretty much every major event that happened in 1968 so it was a nice thing to go back to um so for the for the characters in the game um we talked a lot about how to make them reflect the era of Mafia 3 while at the same time ensuring that the

characters didn't feel like they were beholden to history so we did is we started with their narrative purpose and then let real world history and that character's opinion of that history further Define them um in terms of their personality and also the opinions they had and then from that point on we basically did um you know it's just taking creative license um I'm not going to go into every character in the game um just a few that I think kind of best exemplify this I will say one of the big lessons we learned is do not be afraid to write characters that you disagree with um there's there's some pretty reprehensible characters in this game and they were hard to write um but we felt that they were very important to include as a part of the game story because they again they helped establish a specific time and place so the first is Father James Ballard um narratively his role is basically he's the quote unquote angel on Lincoln's uh shoulder so he ran the orphanage where Lincoln

lived the for about eight years or so um and then he also still has a place in Lincoln's life after that um and he warns Lincoln by extension the player about taking things too far um about t about turning into the thing that you hate but he also provides important narrative context because he was a he fought in World War II he was a medic and he was part of a segregated unit that took part in the battle for a French town called clach and that was actually the third platoon company C and that experience is basically what prompted him to become a priest and it also defined his worldview from that point on um not only in terms of race but also in terms of America as a whole and he's the he's uh the primary focus of the documentary footage that I mentioned earlier and after you eliminate um each of the three cappos that we Port up to Sal marono we cut to Father James and he not only provides kind of commentary on what Lincoln's

doing but he also provides relevant thoughts on um what he thinks is happening in America uh this is John Donovan he's a uh CI agent that Lincoln met when he was in Vietnam the two of them there were these things called um provincial reconnaissance units and basically they would recruit and use indigenous peoples in Vietnam to fight the VC and Lincoln and Donovan team up to uh take part in that and he's the if Father James is the angel on Lincoln's shoulder Donovan is the devil he believes that the ends justifies the means and that Lincoln has every right to do whatever he needs to do in order to bring down s Marano and like Father James Donovan's character was shaped by history at that time um CI agents typically um were East Coast Elites they were men who went to Ivy Le colleges and that's the world he comes from he's also violently anti Southern which is something that I don't think

anybody ever mentioned which is kind of surprising to me um he makes several references to CI the Civil War reconstruction and at one point he even says that uh President Andrew Johnson should have hanged all the traitors after the Civil War and the country had been better off um so in other words he's a proper Yankee um but he also represents the air in another important way and that comes across because he deeply distrusts the government and is openly hostile to what he see he sees as the cronies and yes men who essentially man the levers of power and this is a shift that really took part in the 60s as we kind of went from trusting our government to not trusting our government and he represents that um and his attitudes really um are reflected in his documentary segment which is him testifying before a Top Secret Senate panel in 1971 um he absolutely loves everyone in that room he thinks they're all cowards and traitors and that they put their own interests in front of the interest of the of the country at

large so Cassandra is um she's a the uh the head of the Haitian gang which is initially in opposition to Lincoln and later on he recruits her to be one of his three under bosses who assists him in his war against um s Marano and she's a black militant um but for her it's more individualized so she her primary focus is what's going on in the city and how that directly impacts the lives of her and and also the other members of uh Del re Hollow so to her the struggle for equality is is deeply individualized um the other interesting thing about Cassandra is that you're either with her or against her and this is what drives her actions in the early parts of the game because she essentially sees Sammy who's the former head of the black mob and Lincoln's um adopted father she basically sees him as a traitor to his race because he kicks up to a white man um s marono the head of the Italian mafia and this attitude even extends to other

members of the Haitians including a man named Baka who tells Lincoln at one point quote black men shouldn't answer to white men and it's also worth mentioning Cassandra's opinion on guns her open world activity is centered around obtaining them so that she can distribute them to the people of Del Hollow so they can use them in defense and gun control essentially has its origins in racism um African-Americans were restricted from owning Firearms after the Civil War war and there was a gun control Act passed in 1968 that was also widely seen as targeting African-Americans and restricting their right to uh guns so Cassandra's um um open world activity is a direct reflection of that and at one point her and Lincoln have a conversation where she even says there's a tragedy that happens in her life and she actually says if I would have had a gun that wouldn't have happened so again using history to very much inform her worldview um sarano is the head of the

Itali Mafia he's the man who betrays Lincoln and kills Sammy and Ellis and one of the things that you learn over the course of the game is that sarono wants out of the so-called life he wants to go legit so his plan is to build a Cino north of the city and one of the reasons he does this is that he instinctually understands that the world is changing and that the old order is is under assault um and that's just nothing The World At Large that's that's also including his world which is the world of criminality which Lincoln represents um historically in the late 60s that roughly marks the beginning of the end of the golden age for the Italian mafia in America um and S knows it's coming and so the mafia which is essentially at that point an institution like every other institution in the country it was under assault over the course of the 60s and it won't will not survive in its current form and like I said that's something that s understands um I go on and on talking

about some of the other characters like we have a woman named Nikki um and her sexuality is a part of the game there's also a man named Emanuel who is a um he escaped Haiti and he works for Cassandra and so there's a part of his backstory involves Papa do duvay who was the dictator in Haiti and he tells the player story about how he used to smuggle people out of Haiti and that's how essentially how he ended up up in America um but hopefully you see from these examples basically how like I said before we used history to kind of help to Define who they are and let that guide some of their opinions um so the world um as I mentioned before the story from Mafia 3 is not about racism it's about uh Lincoln clay getting revenge on the Italian mafia and we went to Great Links to ensure that we never lost sight of that very uh simple through line and there are a couple reasons for this first of all the game is part of the

mafia franchise and at its core it had to be a pulpy Crime Story um even though I like Lincoln clay and I feel bad for what happened to him he is a criminal all of his friends are criminals that is the world he he inhabits and like I said before we didn't want to climb up on a soap box soap box and preach um instead we decide it's much more powerful if we made um the elements of 1968 as a part of the world and expose those to the characters and then let the characters essentially interact with that world and um uh see what happens and it also we think made it feel more real and organic and since Mafia 3 is an open world game uh we decided to use that to our advantage and create a city that could only exist in 1968 so pedestrians the police enemies and the radio were all powerful tools that we tried to use for maximum effect and there is some overlap um in each of these areas but I'll go through them each one at a time so the first is pedestrians this is actually a scene earlier on in the game

um those women right there are actually talking about the extradition of James R Ray who was the man who assassinated Dr King and we wrote hundreds of conversations and although a lot of them discussed things like that like the already mentioned extradition of James o Ray or the biracial kiss on Star Trek um we intentionally included a lot of conversations that did not mention race Vietnam or anything that uh would closely align with that era and the reason we did this is that if every pedestrian was either a racist or War PR protester or just talking about how the country's going to hell um in our opinion new Bordeaux wouldn't have felt like a real grounded place people talk about other things um than just you know immediate history that's going on um and we also felt that it would have duded the moments where characters in the game do discuss era specific topics so this is why we have folks telling jokes um there's two guys talking about their

friend who had a heart attack and why he was tending his pigs which had a very bad ending um and then my personal favorite is we actually have guys uh telling era specific urban legends so even if the player doesn't know that that's from 1968 everyone has heard of UR urban legend so one of the other things we as a part of that um we also have systemic uh lines from pedestrians that are directed at the player as they as they travel through the game world and one of the things we obviously part of that is racist language unfortunately but we tried to model it in a way that it felt natural and was based on the location of the city where you were currently at um and so the the context of the city so the likelihood of hearing those lines would go up or down depending on where you were and this was determined by a percentage

chance so in Frisco fields which is a rich white Enclave in the city there's a 70% chance that racist characters would spawn in Del Hollow which is where Lincoln is from there is a 0% chance for the other districts the racial makeup actually played a role in determining the percentage chance of racist lines playing so as the population of African-American pestr increased the odds of encountering uh someone who is racist decreased we also identified pedestrians along other axes there are 30 in the game there are 38 pedestrian archetypes and we divided each of those along several lines so there's income which is excuse me Low Middle High gender race and bias which was our term for whether or not that character was racist that information was then used to determine where those pedestrians would spawn in the world so there's a section of the city called Rivero which is where veto has uh the protagonist from raia too that's where he's located and that's

a poor part of the town so only lowincome with an occasional middle class pedestrian would spawn there um and based on the breakdown of of specific pedestrians we actually created writing guidelines and biographies for each of those 30 38 archetypes in the game which we then use to um basically provide a kind of a Launchpad for not only their systemic lines but also their conversations and this is one of them so this is actually what basically what we wrote for all 38 of those um so in this case that archetype is named saffron she's racist we explain why she's racist and then there's Mirabel who's not racist and we also explain why she's not racist um and I should note that all offensive lines in the game racially insensitive lines I should say they're all on a universal timer so if an enemy says something it's then 10 minutes before any other

character pedestrian police officer another enemy uh um says something that's racially insensitive to the player so move on before I move on to the police um I'll talk a little bit about how we handled Stores um although segregation officially ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 it was still present in housing like I mentioned ear the fair housing um act excuse me passed in April 1968 an individual store owners still discriminated against customers of color so what we did is we we created a mixture of essentially desegregated and segregated stores across the city and these are places these are locations the player can enter so in the case of desegregated store when the player enters the uh the person who owns that store greets them they're friendly ask them how they're doing when the when the player leaves they tell them goodbye oops in the case of uh a segregated store they're immediately hostile they ask you why you're there

they insult you and they tell you that if if you don't leave immediately they're going to call the police um so this is a this Loops back a little bit to the example of uh of that Jim Brown quote which was part of the the kind of real life interviews that we uh that we read um so police and open World Games generally act as a guard rail for the players actions um so they only respond when the player is openly hostile such as running over civilians running around with your your gun or directly attacking the police themselves and we wanted to keep that but one of the things that kept coming up was how we could essentially allow the game systems to express what it'd be like to be Lincoln clay in a southern city in 1968 um specifically as it how it relates to the police um and again this was all with an eye toward creating um an authentic experience so one of the big changes is

that the police in our game are always watching you so we decided to do is was populate the world with persistent police both on foot and in cars and unlike police in other open World Games as soon as our police see the player they become suspicious and that's represented if you can see it there's actually blue icons on the map and it shows you that a police officer is watching you in the direction that they're um where they are from you Direction wise if you're on foot I'm sorry if the police officer is on foot he will actually there's we had systemic lines where that police officer would tell you that he's watching you he might also warn you tell you to move on um and get out of there if you commit a crime and a police officer sees you they're immediately hostile and they open fire on the player um and much like the pedestrians we controlled where the police spawn and increased or decreased the police presence in parts of town to make the feel the world feel consistent

so Frisco fields which again is the rich white Enclave has the most persistent police while while Del Hollow which is where Lincoln's from has none um and this was done again with an eye toward showing that just as in real life in 1968 police prioritize certain sections of the city over others um the second part of how the police system works involves the police dispatcher so if you're seen committing a crime by a pedestrian they'll run to a pay phone and call the police and this is universally applied across the city because nobody wants to be the victim of crime so they run and they call the police um what happens then though varies based on where you are in the city so if you're in again Frisco Fields the the police dispatcher which the player hears will say describe the crime that's happen and basically say all units immediately converge and then the police are there right away um um if you're in the hollow it's much more

apathetic in fact that's one of the which I'll mention here in a second um it's much more apathetic in terms of the dispatcher response they still describe the crime but then they may say something like eh if anybody's up to it go check it out and there's no urgency behind it at all there's also a middle ground so our three kind of stages um for the uh dispatcher is apathetic normal and aggressive and as a part of this um the aggressive normal and apathetic not only is that an audio clue to the player um in terms of how the police is going to respond to them that actually dictates how the police respond to them in the game so the police Bond again where you are in the city determines the speed at which the police respond to the crime that you've committed um with the hollow again being the slowest so just like with the uh pedestrians we have a lot of enemy conversations throughout the game both

within the missions and in racket locations and again they talk about a wide range of topics but since we also wanted them to reflect on the player actions there's also conversations about that so there's a mob Lieutenant the game called Tony derazio who you throw out of a high-rise building and so you later on you may hear enemies talking about it hey did you hear what happened to Tony you know we can't believe that happened we need to get the guy who did it things like that um and again there's also era specific conversations with them um so they discuss what's going on in Vietnam you know there's I think there's one conversation where one of them has a buddy who's a draft Dodger things like that um but the biggest challenge with the enemies was their bark specifically how racist they could be to the player um so the men you're fighting we we generalize obviously since they're the enemies but by and large they're racist Southerners so initially we pushed that as far as could thinking that it would make for a more authentic experience um this included

enemies using the most racially charged language you can imagine but as we uh started to focus test the the game we Reed pretty Universal feedback that the barks um felt gratuitous and that that that that they were there simply for shock value so obviously that's the exact opposite of what we wanted so as we investigated the feedback um what we learned is that there needed to be context so while an enemy yelling out racial insults might be authentic to that time and place it didn't make for a good player experience so because of that we slowly removed the most egregious bark from the game until we had a what we felt was a nice balance between authenticity and context um the enemy still spout out you know they still yell harsh language but like the pedestrians um how we had specific pedestrian archetypes we limited that language to them we did the same thing with the enemies so two of our archetypes the shotgunner

and the enforcer they were the only ones that would express any racist lines at all um with the exception of the Dixie Mafia who is basically racist across the board um the big lesson for us was not to be afraid of pursuing something as sensitive as this um but also trusting in the in our Focus testing both externally and internally to help us essentially kind of navigate through and make sure that we got it right um just put these up here so the radio is a great tool because it's in open World Games with driving it's pretty much ever present um every time you get in a car it's pretty standard for the genre there's a song plane or you know a news story things like that um and we decided pretty early on that we wanted to lean on it and use it to help expand the narrative in the World Behind the US beyond the usual confines of missions and open world activities so the first two up there hollow speaks and Native Sun those are actually two radio programs that we created um they each

have about 12 to 15 episodes and they're mapped out over the course of the game so again we we try to use them to reflect player actions and where they were within the story um the first Hall of speaks is hosted by a man named Charles Theo Lavo and the second one native son is hosted by Remy Deval a rich white man who also happens to head up the Southern Union which is our version of the clan um and our goal with those was to offer two very view two very different viewpoints so what was happening not only in new Bordeaux but also the country in 1968 um and then the uh last two points is something we call the trial which I'll talk about and then also how we used news both real world and news that reflected uh player actions so Hollow speaks that's Charles lvo right there the voice um he's actually one of the main characters in Faster baby which is our DLC coming out in I think about a month um he was inspired by Malcolm X specifically a a speech he gave called The Ballot or The

Bullet and a man named Robert F Williams who was the Pirate Radio guy um who if I remember right he had a boat and he basically just floated around offshore so nobody could get him and had a Pirate Radio Station um and it was called Radio free Dixie um so in the case of uh Lavo unlike cassandre who tends to have a more local view of what's Happening laau views views things on a much larger scale he believes that what's going on is um needs to have National context not just local context and he agitates against the Vietnam War uh drug policies things of that nature the other thing that he's he does is um although he's very much about African-American empowerment he also understands that um class defines a lot of people in the buckets they fall into too um spe so specifically poor white Americans so when he talks about Vietnam his point is it's poor people going of

any race it's not just poor African-Americans who are going um so Native Son um that's Remy Duval there um he was inspired by William F Buckley uh he's a wealthy land developer so he comes across as very uh genial he's what I call hey buddy you know he comes up to you he's like hey buddy um he believes in maintaining law and order agitates against social change and uses coded language to advocate for the suppression of minority rights so um in both these cases these these these two characters don't exist strictly in the radio um in the case of Lavo he's act early on in the game he's actually one of the first contacts you meet at the beest of Cassandra when you reclaim the hollow from the Dixie Mafia um Remy is actually involved in Sal's plot to legalize gambling he's actually the land owner uh and developer of the casino being built so initially they start off with the on the radio but then

later on they intersect with the uh with the main narrative and you confront uh Remy at a Southern Union rally so the trial um we also want to use the radio to to introduce kind of B and C narrative stories um and this like I said before this is what we call the trial it starts off as something you hear in the radio about four or 5 hours in and then again just like Remy in the voice it intersects with the the primary narrative path at a at a later Point um and what happens here is two African-American men Trey McCall and LaMont Harris they're actually driving through a section of the city called South Downs and their car breaks down they go to a white uh homeowner's house to ask for help he comes out and shoots both of them and over the course of Remy and the voice and then also the in-game news discussing this what he claimed is that he's heard about Lincoln clay and he he thought these two men were Lincoln

clay and that's why he did what he did um that case is being overseen by a man named judge Holden and at first he's kind of a sec he's just part of that radio story but then later on what you find out he's also part of s's Casino plot he's the judge who's going to rule and and legalize gambling so at a certain point when you're going after Uncle Lou Who runs um the French Ward there's a mission where you actually directly confront the judge and again um this was this was another way of you know again it's all about that time and place and trying to show how hard it is for uh certain people specifically people of color to get justice so and we it was another way to reinforce that specific time and place um and finally the news which unfortunately I don't have a slide for um but we wrote over 100 news stories and those reflect the actual events of

1968 and that's a wide array of topics um is everything from what was happening in Vietnam you know escalation major battles things of that to Vince Lombardi retiring um and we also included around 40 stories that comment on what the player is doing and we did this to give the player a sense of agency that the world was a um understanding what they did that the world was acknowledging it um and again our Our Hope just like the the uh the documentary segments we are hoping that this intersection of real news and ingame news would help ground the experience and create the sense that this is a real time and place in American history and wasn't um something uh completely created by scratch by us um so in conclusion um my primary goal with this talk was to encourage other developers and Publishers to take risks and not shy away from sensitive or controversial topics and I'm not going to lie to you working on this game was very hard um we had a

lot of very uncomfortable conversations about race about language um about our country about our country's history um about how the World Views Lincoln clay um just to name a few um and strictly on the writing it was sometimes it was very difficult to give voice to some of the most reprehensible characters you can imagine like Remy Duval who's essentially the head of the clan um we have another character in the name game named santangelo who is just a vile human being but again we we felt like we had to include them because they provided that context and help reinforce the time in place um in the end you know obviously everyone hanging 13 in 2K believes it was worth the risk um we think we created a game that resonated with a lot of people and even now I think it's 5 months since release um there's still a lot of PE it's obviously resonated with people cuz people are still talking about it um NPR did a

story on the game The New York Times actually last weekend ran a story about the game um and it's easily been the most rewarding part of uh of my career doing uh video games and that's it so thank you very much if anyone has any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them we got two mics set up obviously in the aisles if anybody wants to get up and ask no questions or they'd rather do the Comfort the W that's sure whichever people prefer no takers hi um I guess I'll go um you talked a lot about how you created the world and um the people within it making sure it was uh very much um all cohesive in a time and place uh but one thing

that really impressed me uh when I when I played it was that um the his extended family uh you know his adopted father and brother and all those core characters and um the first you know several hours of the game was getting to know them before all hell breaks loose and I felt really connected to those characters and I really liked them I I'm curious about um you talked a lot about creating the world and the time and place what was your process when it came to actually creating the characters themselves and how uh you provide made that connection to the from sure yeah so in regards to creating the uh the uh specifically I think you're speaking to Sammy and Ellis and by extension I I include Danny in that as well um a game at at its core Lincoln you know like I said at its core Mafia 3 is a Revenge story so in order for that Revenge to mean anything we have to feel the same loss that Lincoln felt M as much as possible so we spent a lot of time and effort to make you can't let me

rephrase that you can't make the player hate someone but maybe you can make the player love someone and if you take the people that they love out then hopefully they feel the same loss that Lincoln felt so like you said we we spent a lot of time on we call that section of the game act one and we spent a lot of time um doing it and I we I don't know how many times we actually redid that maybe five six times like completely over and restructuring things and moving things around and to a large extent it was done with that eye to ensure that when what happens in the bar happens that the player feels at least some degree of loss just as much as Lincoln does it worked no thank you hi excuse me hi I just wanted to say first of all I appreciate your work on Mafia 3 very much and I just wanted to ask specifically what was the cultural makeup of some of the writing teams that you worked with as as a Lee narrative director um so we don't it's 2K policy not to

really go into that stuff however those of you I mean all there's three of us who are full-time we're all in Twitter it's me a man named Ed Ed Fowler and another game named Charles uh Charles web who some of you may follow um Charles is African-American um so it was very much it was very important to us to make sure that we actually had voices um to speak to that community and that extended beyond the writing too um obviously we have a very large African-American cast and when we did the cinematics for example we would sit down and talk to them hey does this feel natural does this feel right to you in terms of your experience as an American is there anything that doesn't feel that feels off is there anything that you want to express um for example Gordon green who's the actor who played father James I can't tell you how many conversations he and I had about father james' sections um specifically the documentary things I'm we spent one time in a conference room hours going through his script and just discussing things so it was very very important to us again to make sure that we uh we got that right

absolutely thank you and my your work very much thank you so my question is really more about like characters uh as you're building a character and you're planning on them not being involved very much and then you end up falling in love with that character how difficult is it to kind of tie them back into the story line um it's hard I mean it it we didn't have that problem let rephrase that that problem wasn't exclusive to the Allied characters mhm so for example a lot of people the guy I mentioned before Tony derazio who you Chuck out of a 28 story window like a lot of people on the team loved him yeah that's actually who I was kind of total weirdo and and so we had conversations like hey can you go on a mission with him early on like what how can we expose him to the player in in additional ways in the end what we decided was we just have to hold the story okay and that it' be better to leave better is not maybe

the right word but acceptable I guess to leave the player wanting more and saying hey you know what that was a really cool character I wish I could have spent more time with them but feeling satisfied then it would be to go the other way and just kind of jam them into narrative places that they don't necessarily belong okay and maybe let them overstay they welcome a little bit okay thank you thanks hi first of all thank you so much for giving this talk sure and I wanted to ask ask you um you you spoke a lot about the research you did to to make this game and I wanted to ask you how long of your Productions was spent doing research and and conceptualization it to be honest it never stopped okay um as long as we were we were writing we were still researching okay um I forgot to mention and it wasn't even though the like the documentaries the books and the things like that even though uh the narrative team like we we digested all of that we also exposed it to the team at large we have a actually have a theater um at

work and on Wednesdays we would actually show documentaries and movies to the entire team so that everyone within the team understood the kind of historical context that we were going for um but like I said it never it never stopped um literally up until we hit our localization deadline and we had to stop okay did did you designate a conceptualization phase before starting pre-production or production in that sense I'm I'm sorry I can't hear you sorry did you did you set aside at the beginning uh before reproduction and conceptualization research yeah I mean we we we tried to follow the kind of normal development cycle in terms of like like so I mentioned we had this giant Excel spreadsheet that was part of pre-production and it was just to kind of give us a grasp of the breadth um of what was happening historically and then it was a matter of um just taking that and parsing it out across to the story but like I said I mean you know we'd be halfway done right in the cinematics and either Eder Charles or someone would find something and say hey this is really interesting we didn't know about this is there way we can incorporate it and we try to do that a lot we call them

persistent character conversations so um there's these three characters who actually work for the bosses that you recruit they're Alma Emanuel and Nikki and we tried to use them as a way to further expose um those historical elements so like Emanuel who I mentioned he's Haitian and he escapes from Papa do du VA that actually came about pretty late originally his scripts were written completely different and then Ed kind of settled on that you know started going down that historical well so to speak and we're like hey this is super interesting it helps further Define who he is as a character so we incorporated it thank you thank you I want to ask about the fictional city in New Bordeaux and the real City of New Orleans and sort of how you made new new bardeaux be its own thing and where you sort of Drew those lines and why um so the the short answer is that most of the accommodation we made in terms of of shaping new board bordo was related around gameplay so if you've been to New Orleans the the streets are pretty

narrow it's very flat I mean it is that place is flat I mean so driving a you know the other part of the era is driving these awesome muscle cars so driving a muscle car down flat roads in a very narrow streets wouldn't be that fun so that was part of it we widened the roads to accommodate that the other thing we also did is we added um a Subterranean level to the city so there's actually canals obviously um New Orleans is below sea level I think the water table is like 5T down or something like that so that's physically impossible but again it was in search of some cool gameplay um and like I said we just used we used New Orleans as our inspiration and then kind of did what we did um as we created new Bordeaux to just kind of shape it to fit our story but then also fit our game world and what we wanted to ACC uh accommodate in terms of game playay thank you thanks I think we're out of time we yeah basically so yeah if anybody else wants to has questions askville uh he can go to the rup room for a few minutes which is uh the pen as was talked about

earlier um over there across the hall poster sessions the students will be out there with their posters uh the new writer Q&A starts here in about 5 minutes uh so feel free to go get your go grab lunch and bring it in um it's sort of a workking lunch session and uh we will see you at that thanks very much thank you