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00:01We're going right back to that part of the story that we haven't told yet.
00:06How did the Mafia begin?
00:08All of the men in this room are bound by blood.
00:15One of the strongest changes in direction we could take for the franchise creatively
00:19was to not set the game in a city, rather to take it to somewhere else
00:23to show where these criminal customs and traditions began.
00:26I'd very much consider Sicily and Sicilian culture almost as a character within the story.
00:32When I say to someone, 1900 Sicily, where does their mind go?
00:36What have they seen before? What do they expect? What's the fantasy?
00:39We try and put ourselves in that place and try and imagine how we would start to build the game around that experience.
00:45It also gives us an opportunity to present players with something that they haven't seen before.
00:56I'm quite lucky because Sicily at this time was photographed by a handful of people and those photographs still exist.
01:02There's one really iconic image for me with a child and you can see the incredible poverty.
01:09There's such humanity in those faces. There's such a huge amount of storytelling in that location
01:14because they're also in front of one of these beautiful carved stone buildings.
01:18That's the starting point for me.
01:22Sicily's been in the franchise before. Sicily's featured in Mafia 2.
01:26That's something that was very interesting to us when we went back and looked at the possibility of making a new game in this environment.
01:32Sicily's a much more diverse country than I think a lot of people imagine.
01:36Greek and Roman ruins and some of the Byzantine architecture as well as the Norman architecture.
01:41So it's a very diverse world.
01:43Sicily is rich on many architecture styles. There are certain, as you call it, layers of history.
01:50It's very exciting to explore this setting and time period. It brings some challenges also for us, but it's quite fun to try to tackle those.
01:58The team's able to deliver really, really spectacular environments, beautiful-looking scenes, which really captures the essence of Sicily.
02:05I went with a team of artists to go to Sicily to work with Storm Minds, our deaf partners in Sicily,
02:14and they took us on the most incredible journey, taking in so many different locations.
02:19Every day was super jam-packed between museums and other locations, meeting people that you wouldn't have expected to meet,
02:26and there's no way that we could have met on our own.
02:29We worked closely with Unger 13 to recreate early 900 Sicilian cities, ensuring that every cultural and narrative reference is as accurate as possible.
02:40We wanted to highlight an aspect of Sicily that many had never seen before.
02:44I felt we were captured in a time capsule because from every corner of the street we've seen a history.
02:51Sicily isn't just a backdrop for us. It's a place that welcomes you, that you come to understand and appreciate.
02:57We can't wait for players to experience first-hand.
03:00This is a family, and in this family we follow a code of honor.
03:08Our priority has always been to ensure that everything in the game feels authentic.
03:13The details are absolutely key in keeping the immersion of the player.
03:17We need to make sure that the game is grounded in the real history of the Sicilian Mafia.
03:22Experts in their field are able to kind of help us contextualize things that we read and the stuff that we see on the screen with real lived experiences.
03:31When it comes to something like the knives in the game, there's very little reference that's available for that writing, so really we had to dig very deep.
03:38So we went into some tiny little backwater machine shop where this guy and his son were still crafting knives by hand, imbuing them with their particular regional styles and also their thumbprints, if you like, of their particular approach to building knives.
03:52We just wouldn't really have experienced that any other way.
03:55Previous Mafia games were more or less city heavy, and now we are moving to more organic, wildlife setting of Sicily.
04:04A very realistic, high fidelity, authentic setting really feels like we're transporting you back to 1900 Sicily.
04:11That's what Mafia players really expect from one of our games.
04:15Players will form a relationship with Sicily over the course of this game.
04:20The landscape is always a character in any Mafia game.
04:24I think that's especially true of this location and of this time period and setting.
04:30The promise is to play a classic mob movie.
04:33That's the game that you're going to play, allowing players to really imagine themselves back in that time and playing through the game as a Sicilian gangster.
04:40I hope players find it as exciting as we do.
04:42I can't wait to show what we've built, genuinely, to the world.
04:48Welcome, handsome.
05:10Welcome, handsome.
05:28Thanks, chef!