To me, the best part of Mafia: The Old Country is getting really into the idea of pretending you’re living in 1900s Sicily and drinking in the gorgeous vistas that the game’s world offers up like sips of wine. You can imagine, then, how keen I was to give its new first-person driving mod a go.
Having already knife-fought my way through the main story, I thought this sounded like a pleasant change of perspective to take in when motoring around the Valle Dorata, hoovering up the last of those Explore Mode collectibles. I wasn’t wrong either, the mod’s great. Well, when it’s not accidentally showing you the back of Enzo’s teeth and eye sockets.
You see, First Person Driving Camera by Norskpl is wonderful when you’re just merrily trundling along in the likes of the Bolt Model 1 or Dufort Camionette. However, if you switch to the likes of the Ekhart Speciale or one of the Carozella variants, you’ll start to see a bit of Enzo’s face clipping into view when you brake hard or hit a bump. It’s not too bad in those, if obviously something that shatters your illusion of living in old school Italy when it does happen.
Then, I hopped into the Delizia Type 86, and was permanently treated to two floating gristle orbs that I’m sure look like eyes from the other direction. That’s in addition to the view your dentist might get if they checked your teeth by climbing inside your mouth, slipping their body down your throat, then turning around to gaze up your gullet (is it just me they do this to?). I even had extra wrinkles in the form of floating facial hair from the beard I’d equipped, and the brim of my hat dipping into view. You can get rid of those last two by switching back to being clean shaven and hatless, but the first two issues persist.
Norskpl is aware of this stuff, and sadly it seems they may well be powerless to prevent it, unless they’re able to draft in help from another modding whiz with a handy solution. “That’s the reason why game devs deleted this feature,” they wrote in the mod’s comments section. “Game characters use animations during driving which are causing this sort of thing. I don’t know if there’s any way to fix it.”
That’s a shame, but as I say, if your aim is just to use this mod to go cruising around, I reckon you should still give it a try. That’s especially true if you’re happy with one of the slower cars, like the ones I tried first, as you’ll have ample opportunity to take in the sights – and the cars’ interiors. The latter are surprisingly detailed and nice to look at up close, given this angle didn’t make it into the base game. Hopping in something faster (like the Carozella) comes with a higher clipping risk, but it’s worth trying at least once, just to experience the wonderful sensation of raw speed you get trying to thread The Old Country’s vintage racers through narrow city streets or country tracks at top speed.
The mod is also about as easy to install as you’ll get. All you need to do is extract some files, and stick them where the description says to in your game files. As far as manual installation goes, there’s precious little with this level of minimal room for stuff to go wrong, unless you go out of your way to muck something up.
