With at least two people in the IncGamers office constantly extolling the virtues of open world crime title Mafia, we made it our mission to find out more about the upcoming sequel. We caught up with 2K's Denby Grace to find out what makes Mafia II stand out from the sandbox competition and why "no other open world city comes close."

The open world genre has become a lot more crowded in recent times. What makes Mafia II different from the competition?

Denby Grace (right): Our game, quite simply, has a hugely engrossing story with believable characters. Your buddy Joe feels like a guy that you’ve known your whole life; you really connect with these characters and want to see their story through to the end.

As well as the story, the level of detail and realization of the world really is an amazing technical achievement for the team here at 2K Czech.  No other open world city comes close with the texture quality, attention to detail and destructibility of our environments.

On a gameplay level, Mafia II really pushes the envelope.  Usually in an open world game, the focus is on a really wide scope of delivering lots of stuff, more often than not to a lower quality than you’d expect in say a third-person action game. We have really honed our gun play mechanics against games such as GOW2 and Uncharted making them the benchmark we set for ourselves for our combat encounters and it shows; Mafia II really stands out in this area.

All too often in open world games, one aspect of gameplay is solid, while another may be lacking. For example, the shooting may be great, but the driving is poor and vice versa. How did you make sure that everything ‘works’ in Mafia II?

DG: It’s a good observation and one that we’ve noted as well when sitting down and evaluating all the games around us.  People seem to want to create a really wide scope of gameplay types; invariably the quality of the game seems to suffer.

With Mafia II, we looked at the goals for the project and really identified what was important to the game. , So, we actually narrowed our scope where mechanics are concerned and picked our battles, driving and gunplay being on top on our priority list as far as the gameplay is concerned.

Then, as for looking at them individually, we actually look outside the genre for reference for these very different mechanics. If we want our driving to be great then we take a look at the driving game genre. For the gunplay, we looked at third person shooters.  After we’ve laid these things down we could really start to see how they are working with one another, while also balancing them against each other to ensure that the whole package delivers on the goals we’ve set forth.