Unreal Engine 5 is the latest engine from Epic Games, and the intent of this engine is to be the best way to create a video game. Many top-tier companies have either already used the engine to great success or are working on it right now for big AAA titles that are soon to come, and all the trailers we’ve seen from games using this engine are pretty spectacular. One title that came out this year that used the engine was Mafia The Old Country. The franchise went back to its roots in Italy to tell a rather classic kind of mafioso story, and Unreal Engine 5 helped render the details of the world and its characters beautifully.
On Unreal Engine’s website, they talked with Hangar 13, who developed Mafia The Old Country, and talked about what it was like using the powerful engine to render the old-school look and vibe of Sicily.
Game Director Alex Cox had much to say on the matter, including:
“A group of us actually traveled to Sicily to take photos and gather reference material in order to make our version of Sicily in the game as authentic as possible. We also looked at rare photos and written accounts from the time period when the game takes place, along with consuming tons of media about the Sicilian Mafia.”
That says a lot about how Hanger 13 thought about the title. They clearly didn’t want to just “make another game about the mafia.” Instead, they wanted to recreate a time, place, and feeling for players to enjoy, and having those little details helped them recreate it in Unreal Engine 5.
“The art team was able to use new tools with UE5 to refine the tiniest details within the game. Layering hyper-realistic lighting over these already incredible visuals makes our version of Sicily even more beautiful to look at and makes the world more immersive for players. We used the powerful material and texture tools and workflow in UE5 with resources like Megascans to help achieve an incredibly realistic final result. Megascans assets were especially useful for rocks, cliffs, and other aspects of the Sicilian terrain and landscape.”
Cox gave a lot of praise to the “advanced systems” that the engine had, and used both their knowledge of Italy and other things they researched, and applied it to the layers of detail that Unreal Engine 5 offered to create as authentic an experience as they could.
Clearly, it worked, and it’ll be interesting to see what others do with the engine going forward.
