The Godfather II Gets Official, Detailed

About two months ago we received the first precious piece of information on The Godfather II, when EA's CEO John Riccitiello confirmed the game during an investors' meeting and offered the first details on the title (you can read the full story here). However, since then, no other piece of news on The Godfather II has surfaced and people started to slowly forget about it. But right now the madness can start all over again: the company has officially confirmed the game and offered even more details to keep us busy until they announce a release date.

The first and most important thing is that the sequel will go beyond the story of the film by setting players in the world of organized crime of the '60s and giving them one goal: to create the most powerful mob family in America. And this sounds like a challenge everybody is ready to accept!

"In the 1960's, a mafia Don was only as strong as his family," said Hunter Smith, Executive Producer of The Godfather II. "We found the hierarchical culture of organized crime intriguing. Running an organized crime family in a world defined by family loyalty is something that we felt could introduce a new strategic element to the genre. That is what the Don's View is all about - laying out a strategy to pick off the competition one by one. The Don's View is so unique, it could fundamentally change the rules of open-world games by blending action and strategy to create something entirely new."

In other words, you will have to expand to new cities after being promoted to Don of New York by The Godfather himself. You will have to build up families, extort business, monopolize illegal crime rings and defeat all the other mob families. A strategy element is, therefore, introduced in the game. Called "The Don's View", it allows you to oversee the entire world while keeping and eye on movements of rival families and recruiting crew, handing out orders and so on. A rather interesting element that will, however, scare a few of the younger "GTA-like" fans.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that The Godfather II will not be quite charming: it expands on the gameplay of the original, offers more lifelike mob brutality, introduces combo systems and more. Also, it brings into play specializations such as demolitions, arson, engineering, first aid and so on, as well as multiple play, meaning that you can send a team to do a job, while you go with another one to do a different job. It seems that finally "open world" will be the term to best describe the game and all we can say is that we're really happy with that!