"For example, Sarah, the love interest in the original, she doesn't get very much screen time, but she's the heart of why Tommy Angelo is doing what he's doing," says Blackman. "At the beginning of the game you learn that he's trying to arrange a way out of the life and he's doing it all for his family, so we wanted to make sure that as a player you knew what it was that he was trying to protect. We wanted to make sure that Sarah got more screen time; she's in the game more, has an understandable kind of role in the lowercase family and uppercase Family."

In Mafia: Definitive Edition, Sarah is positioned as having been a working part of her father Luigi's bar for a long time. She's not a part of the mob, but she has an idea of how it operates. For Tommy, she becomes a sounding board for the problems of a made man, as opposed to the more passive character she was before. Blackman also points to Paulie and Sam, two of Tommy's compatriots as characters who find their roles expanded a bit.

Mafia: Definitive Edition wants to straddle the line between the original and Mafia 3 by offering a host of options. In addition to basic difficulty options, Mafia: Definitive Edition includes settings for police presence and how they treat infractions. If you want to play Definitive Edition like the original, you can, but it also opens the door for players that just want to experience the story of Tommy Angelo. Mafia 3 was designed to evoke the feel of 1960s crime dramas, while the Mafia remake harkens back to an earlier time.

One major change is gunplay is being pulled from Mafia 3, with more cover-based gunplay mechanics. The difference is Clay was a former soldier and Tommy is just a cab driver. Hangar 13 tried to capture the difference between the two men in the gameplay. Combat is "a little bit more lethal" for Tommy and "every bullet matters"; Mafia is about grounding the player in those encounters, rather than going in guns ablaze.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is the primary focus for the team at Hangar 13, but just as Mafia 3's improvements rolled into the Definitive Edition, the changes made for this game are rolling right on into what's coming for next generation consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

"We're actually a multi-project studio," starts Blackman. "Everything we do at Hanger 13 is meant to be shared across projects. The lighting in Mafia 3, we thought was really good, but at the end of the day it felt like maybe it wasn't good enough. So we went in and we redid our lighting model for Mafia: Definitive Edition. That's now tech that's been added to our engine and that will carry over into the next game that we do, the game that we're working on now."