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In its first week of sales, Mafia 3 managed to ship 3.5 million copies. This is actually a new record for 2K Games. Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, said that despite these sales figures, the game has reviewed well below expectations for the company."In terms of the reviews and scores, it was sort of an odd anomaly," Zelnick explained. "The scores were lower than we would have liked. But there are a lot of stellar reviews. I think the most prominent reviewers really loved it and recognized that what we're doing here, from the story, art, character, and excitement perspective is really unmatched in the marketplace. So I think we and our competitors are seeing some anomalies in the review system, but we take them as they are and we don't argue with it."
Total Gaming Network's review for Mafia 3 gave it a 2 out of 5 score, noting a number of bugs, lack of gameplay depth and variety, and poor AI, among other things.
(via GameSpot)
It's a similar reason why I prefer the Midnight Club and Midtown Madness series when it comes to street racing games. The city is alive with pedestrians, attractions, construction, and shopping malls, without relying on arrow signs telling you where to turn and acting as obstacles so you don't drive off into the sunset. Need For Speed and Burnout series? Ghost town. Because you need all the room you can get to street race without any of the real danger of street racing other than having mindless drones posing as traffic (and God forbid you having the desire to run over pedestrians and bringing this to a higher age rating). I've even seen the Underground series use scripting to deliberately put a single car driving on the wrong side of the road, just so I can smash into it when taking on a blind turn. Midnight Club? If I smash into it, I KNOW it's my fault, because it's the same traffic AI as it was BEFORE THE RACE EVEN STARTED DURING FREE ROAM. Same freaking city, nothing new to generate other than waypoints. That's a world that acknowledges the player's presence. And it's something I want in open world games.
Heck Job Simulator is fun and it's not even open-world, and that's because the environment is designed to respond to the player's presence and actions. When the world responds to the player, the world/game will have a higher chance of being more fun to stay in. Not always the case, but usually it helps.