Interview: Bill Harms On Creating Mafia III’s Story And The City Of New Bordeaux

Taking us back to 1968 New Bordeaux, Mafia III effortlessly conjures up feelings of the era, from the look and feel of New Orleans in its fictionalised city to the social upheaval that the country was going through and the wide reach of the criminal underworld.

It’s into this world that Lincoln Clay steps and starts to wreak all kinds of mayhem, as you can read about in our preview. However, the setting and story as a whole throw up some interesting questions, which we put to Bill Harms, Lead Writer at Hangar 13.


TSA: Let’s start with the city of New Bordeaux. You’ve talked about this almost being a character in the game, but what does that mean for you as you’re designing the game and how does that feed into the story?

Bill Harms: One of the primary reasons we settled on New Bordeaux, our version of New Orleans, is that New Orleans actually has a very rich history with Italian organised crime.

In fact, it was one of the very first American cities to have the Italian Mafia, back in the 1800s, so it’s been there for a very long time and then it came into the 1900s and we had Carlos Marcello, who was a very larger than life crime figure. They tried several times to indite him, they sent him to Nicaragua and he basically walked back!

TSA: {laughs] Crime always manages to find a way, I guess!

Bill: [laughs] But also, beyond that, just the city of New Orleans. We obviously take creative liberties with it, but if any city in America is, this one really is its own character. There’s just the vibe of how it feels with its music scene, it’s the people who live there, and there’s things like the French Quarter – which we call the French Ward – and it has this very distinct flavour.

So when we settled on recreating it, the next thing was what elements we want to bring along to help really ground it. It’s a very diverse city; you have a wide range of people who live there on every rung of the economic ladder, and we use all of those things so the city can express itself.

TSA: You mention the music, and it’s obvious there’s going to be a pretty strong soundtrack to the game. Music is so closely related to culture, especially with black musicians, the birth of jazz in New Orleans, and so on, was that something that you’re really able to draw upon?

Bill: Yeah, you know, at a very high level we have a hundred licensed tracks in the game, and that’s everything you’d expect. There’s CCR – Fortunate Son is, I think, one of the greatest songs every recorded – Johnny Cash and things like that… but then, as I said, New Orleans has its own rich history in terms of jazz and blues.

So when you walk through the French Ward of New Bordeaux and in parts like Delray Hollow, you’ll see people playing music out on the street corner and they’ll be playing jazz.

TSA: I guess you can use that to help ground each particular district?

Bill: Exactly. I think the really powerful thing about music is that it’s very nostalgic, so things that you did as a kid when you were listing to a specific song, you hear that song and it brings those memories back. The amazing thing about the music of the 60s is that even if you weren’t alive then, it’s so powerful it transports you to a time and a place you weren’t even alive in and really reinforces it.

We also had conversations about characters. So when you’re in Sammy’s bar, who’s basically Lincoln’s adopted son and the head of the Black Mob, what’s he play on the jukebox? We actually had this conversation. What music does Sammy like to listen to? What music does Lincoln listen to? What does Vito listen to in this old diner that he’s set up shop in?

So it helps bring the city alive, but it also intersects with who the characters are.

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TSA: You’ve got a wide range of characters, and from the demonstration, it feels like you’re trying to use them to tell Lincoln’s story from a lot of different angles. It’s always difficult to get a sense of that from a short demo, especially at Gamescom, so is that how it actually is?

Bill: Yeah, so it definitely is Lincoln’s story, and it’s the story of a man returning from war who doesn’t have very much, and even that’s then violently taken away from him. From that point on the game’s about his singular focus to destroy Sal Marcano, the head of the Italian mob. Along the way, he recruits the three underbosses, Cassandra, Vito and Burke.

But the interesting thing we’re doing, from my point of view, is that the narrative framework for the game is actually a documentary, and that’s something from the very beginning that you see and we carry it through.

There’s an FBI agent named Maguire who’s just joined the bureau in the late 60s and the ‘Events of New Bordeaux’ as he calls them was one of his first cases. He’s spent the 40-50 years since then trying to bring Lincoln Clay to justice. So we see him in the modern day reflecting back on the events.

Then we have a CIA operative named John Donovan who worked with Lincoln in the special forces in Vietnam, and Lincoln recruits him to help go after Marcano. So you see Donovan testifying in front of a Senate hearing on intelligence in 1971, and they’re asking him all these questions and he fills in little details. Donovan’s, I wouldn’t say a jokester, but he’s very sarcastic, so you’ve got these little beats where he’s like, “I don’t even know how Lincoln got outta the hotel!”

Another big one is Father James who ran the orphanage where Lincoln grew up. He actually exists as a character in the game, but then older Father James is also reflecting back on the events and if Lincoln was justified. He’s kind of the voice of morality.

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TSA: I think it’s an interesting way to frame the action, and you also have the cutscenes where you see the Italians, with Tony on the phone to Marcano. You also get to see the bad guy side of the story as well at times.

Bill: That’s actually something I think is very important and I really worked hard to make sure we did. I think a protagonist is only as good as their antagonist.

TSA: It’s the classic Batman thing.

Bill: And the other thing is that people don’t think that they’re bad. Sal Marcano, he doesn’t wake up in the morning and twirl a moustache, he has very certain goals, and so we actually spend a lot of time with the antagonists in the game.

To a certain level, this reflects player choice. You can go after the city in different ways, and we have cinematics where we have Sal reacting to what you’re doing. Those reactions are custom made based on what the player’s done.

But I think it’s very important, not only to bolster Sal as an antagonist, but it also incentivises the player to say, “That guy’s freaking out because of something I did.”

TSA: Are there elements that then flow and change depending on how you go about playing the game?

Bill: I don’t want to go too much into story specifics, but there are areas where we track player choice, like with Sal’s reactions. One big area that reflects player choice is the sit downs.

In the case of Downtown, there’s two rackets there: construction fraud, and extortion and blackmail. As you take the rackets down, you can assign those to your underbosses, so you can assign construction fraud to Cassandra, extortion and blackmail to Vito, but when it comes time to assign the whole district, you can give it to Burke, and that takes the rackets from those other characters and gives it all to Burke, which pisses them off.

In the sit down, there’s a lot of custom VO, and there’ll be no question what they’re thinking. It can even come to a head where they’ll actually betray you and you have to go kill them. You might finish the game with all three loyal to them, but maybe when I play I only have one, so it’s a very different experience.

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TSA: Something that stood out for me was the sheer brutality of the fighting, especially in the finishing moves. Was that drawing upon the real world violent acts of the period?

Bill: I mean, part of it is who Lincoln is as a character. He’s highly trained and he was in the special forces, so he’s not messing around. So that reflects that, but there’s also the fact that the narrative for the game is a revenge story.

We do actually have an option for the takedowns, so you can do lethal or non-lethal.

TSA: As a group we chose the stealth approach, but I think they were a bit tired of demoing that at this point! [laughs]

Bill: [laughs] So we offer the player a lot of tools, so maybe I don’t want to use the knife, I just want to knock people out. Maybe I want to go in guns blazing, or maybe I want to take the stalking way.

We give the player the tools and that aspect of Lincoln can be defined as they play through


Thanks to Bill for taking the time to chat with us. Make sure to check out our preview from Gamescom, with Mafia III heading to release on PS4, XBO and PC on 7th October.

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