《黑手党3》可信开放世界城市背后的隐藏设计决策

World Designer

16 October 2026

Veteran World Designer Nathan Cheever explains how pathways, landmarks, infrastructure, world states, rapid prototyping, and over 30 major layout iterations shaped Mafia 3’s New Bordeaux.

In his previous 80 Level article, veteran World Designer Nathan Cheever examined how traversal speed, encounter density, production resources, and player expectations determine the appropriate size of a game world. Once that scale has been established, however, developers still need to turn the available space into a coherent, navigable, and believable place.

In this follow-up, Cheever presents his approach to planning open-world cities, drawing extensively from his work during the development of Mafia 3’s New Bordeaux. He explores how studios can establish a city’s pathways, landmarks, districts, infrastructure, ambient life, faction boundaries, and potential world states before expensive environment production begins.

The Open World experience is meant to attract & distract from Missions. When a Mission isn’t happening, World Design is what players experience.

Creating Open World games can be challenging. They not only have to satisfy an expected, high-quality campaign story with spectacle & flare, they also have to support return visits for a variety of situations and systemic events.

To help people unfamiliar with this type of production, here’s an approach that has served me well in the past on multiple projects.

1st Step — The Vision

Agree on the project requirements and vision (story, tech, gameplay, art direction). Don’t forget market analysis for innovation, competition, and player expectations.

It’s also vastly important to understand what your game engine is capable of! Many developers see other games and expect to find the same features in the licensed engine, only to discover those were made internally by other game studios.

Questions You Should Answer

What follows is a checklist I go through when creating a new city in a gameworld. While this is city-focused, many of the concepts apply to all time eras and even those places outside of cities when civilization is involved.

Pathways

1. What rules determine the primary or main avenues? How do they intuitively attract lost players?
2. What situations determine the secondary or side routes? How do they inform secondary content?
3. Are there any tertiary or passive routes like park trails or alleyways bridging primary & secondary routes? These can be the unofficial way players shortcut to feel smart.
4. Are there other explicit or implicit routes the player will discover over time? (rooftop platforming, underground tunnels, re-occurring environmental trajectories, etc.)
5. How would a city where people walk more than drive influence routes?

Spaces

1. What major Landmarks are in each District? How many is too many? How does that influence playable spaces?
2. What Landmarks pull the player through neighborhoods? (bookends or centralized)
3. What are the sandbox spaces between major Landmarks players will travel through frequently? The routes to and from should be quick or pleasing.
4. What spaces are planned as social gathering, parks, reflecting pools, etc.? How is that open space used?
5. What’s unique about each sandbox space?
6. How are Points-of-Interest (fountains, statues, etc.) used as anchor points and identity for crossroad spaces or gateway moments?
7. How many area themes are there? What’s the thematic signposting or gateways to inner neighborhoods?
8. For example, what would thematically fit in an Arts & Entertainment district that wouldn’t fit elsewhere? (An Amusement Park, Sports Fields, a Wellness Retreat.)
9. How are they affected by faction control and branding?
10. How are residences vs. Businesses adapted for gameplay? (Home spaces are inherently more unique or interesting than office spaces.)
11. What are the major public spaces for crowd management?
12. What POIs can be mystery hooks for later use? (Mise en Scene moments like a collapsed building at the edge of town.)
13. How has city planning or construction overlapped with older existing areas?
14. How do city utilities and infrastructure influence layout? (waste management, water filtration, construction, police precincts, mailmen, etc.)
15. How has history changed a positive space into a negative space over time?

Ambient Life

1. How is the placement of shops and businesses determined for themes, pacing, and economy?
2. How are businesses going to be developed to allow quick swapping throughout production for easy storytelling and economy changes?
3. How does the flow of daily life affect the goals and presence of NPCs?
4. What bespoke or re-occurring non-NPC movement takes place in the city? (Rotating signs, street sweepers, media billboards, etc.)
5. How could a World State change be expressed visually in systemic ways? For example, the Bourbon Mafia take over the local Police.

Metrics

1. How deep is the deepest dead end? Do you have a large path weighting attraction leading to no reward?
2. What’s the minimum interior footprint to determine building depth and front/back connectivity?
3. What is your minimum stairstep slope and width? It impacts the footprint of exterior vertical routes like scaffolding and fire escapes.
4. How fast is your fastest vehicle or player movement?
5. Never forget metrics!

2nd Step — The Layout

Draft a design-centric Gameworld Layout upfront for the initial flow and regions. Depending on the game this could be a 2D sketch or schematic. Next, prove it in 3D before handing it over to Environmental Artists. They’ll do another proxy pass to satisfy all their baseline requirements once the team has agreed on the foundational world.

Parts of that proxy can sit for months until the team circles back to develop each local area more or update the broader strokes if the project’s requirements change. On Mafia 3 we staggered production for each of the 10 districts. This was because the team was smaller compared to other studios and allowed us to reduce or expand content later in the project.

Footprint

Competitive market comparisons and player expectations help decide the general size of the game world. I’ve shared ways to help your team pick the right size of your Gameworld in previous articles starting with Gameworld Size.

Macro Design

Once you’ve agreed on a general size, work with Narrative, Art, Gameplay, and Engine Tech to understand what’s needed in the gameworld, how often, how much, and is it technically possible. These major design elements will be factored into the layout of the Gameworld.

NOTE: “Sector” is a short label used to describe both urban and wilderness areas.

Comparing Other Games

Playtest common player travel times between major locations using the proxy 3D blockout and your most common player vehicle or run speed. Evaluate these results against other games too. When possible, lock in your maximum speed with all possible upgrades early to help pathways feel smooth and not tight.

Elevation is Good!

New Orleans is primarily flat in real life. However in Mafia 3, I wanted to give players opportunities to see above the horizon line. Elevation was added to give the player distant Points-of-Interest to be drawn to as well as vistas the player can look back on.

Flooding the City

New Orleans is known to have parts of it below sea level. The elevation was also used to help showcase what areas of the city could be flooded during a hurricane story event. We avoided flooding anything that was like the real world locations where people’s homes were destroyed and instead focused on the downtown.

Hierarchical Routes

Decide your Primary and Secondary paths. When a player is lost you want to have smaller roads flow into larger roads that quickly orientate the player and get them from one side of the map to the other side with ease. It’s what happens in nature with tributaries flowing into larger rivers then out to sea.

You also want to make all major routes never dead-end – have them always turn back towards the center of the city and cross over other major routes with ease when possible. Highways are the obvious example.

Rapid Gameworld Prototyping

An extremely fast way I’ve used is to paint them onto the proxy 3D blockout for evaluating player travel choices and sightlines. This method of projecting an image over a simple polymesh made it fast to iterate and convey intention to the team. Skip authoring roadsplines and other steps you’ll do later in production.

Faction Conflict

Plan what story elements will help drive the systemic nature of the world to help balance thematic contrast between sectors. How do your NPCs live their lives? Where are their interests, needs, and conflict?

Are there any special considerations to be factored into local designs, such as which neighborhoods are racist to visualize future gameplay variables in local areas? Images like these were adjusted and maintained throughout Mafia 3 for easy wiki or documentation reference in meetings, for planning, and eventually QA playtesting.

Iteration Over Time

Over 30 different major designs happened throughout the Mafia 3’s development. The first two major versions were Art-driven. Version 3 was Design-driven for gameplay and story, while Art helped develop all the local environments.

Art Collaboration

Throughout all stages Art has input to help drive development. Once the Narrative and general World Design requirements are established, Art can explore several thematic and building identities for each sector. In the example below three different ideas were considered for New Bordeaux’s eastern island. This was cut for budget reasons but was reintroduced as DLC for a low cost to become an Asylum.

1 of 3

Art concepts help drive and align the team before any gameworld is made. Let concepts inspire Designers while understanding game design sensibilities will shape the layout more than concept art will. In the beginning, Designers do more of the heavy lifting during blockout, while Artists take on more responsibilities to embellish and polish the layout to the finish line.

3rd Step — Local Details

Now that you have a sense of size and the general disbursement of routes, landmarks, and neighborhoods, you can go deeper into its local people and potential changes in the world. What World States do you want to plan for? For example, do you want to flood the city for a permanent or temporary change?

Each region or district goes through the same macro layout creation above; except it’s now focused on its local area. Major roads shouldn’t change unless local gameplay (Missions or Activities) benefit from it. Local landmarks and tertiary pathways can and should be created to elevate the local experience beyond the initial gameworld design.

Assign a dedicated Artist & Designer to champion each area from start-to-finish. As teammates and other departments come and go throughout production, these two individuals will be able to speak to its development history and keep track of how each idea is applied by others.

Cornerstone Elements

• Design engaging exploration motivation loops and rewards.
• Create enticing layouts for player routing, gating, landmarks, and mystery hooks.
• Set foundational streaming scope and major Mission locations bookmarked.
• Design neighborhood Hubs for repeat use and World State change repurposing.
• Develop biome, neighborhood, and branding with Art, Narrative, and Legal.
• Create differences for repeating elements in other areas like monorails and shops.
• Detail local NPC profiles, spawning, factions, and vendors.
• Discuss dynamic Push Events for attraction & distraction.

Conclusion

If you’re making a city or village, treat it like a character. It reflects the citizens, the history, and therefore connected to the game story itself. It has strengths, weaknesses, shows its age, but still has wonder to witness. When you design your space like it can exist on its own, it creates more curiosity for players as they are subject to the winds of the digital world and what unfolds before them.

New Bordeaux Examples

A lot of games can miss designing and using how a functional city operates. Layer in city utilities and services around the city in ways that tell and compliment stories between the rich and poor or powerful and powerless.

Electrical Grid

These power grid locations were placed to support the local neighborhoods and larger industrial areas like Tickfaw Harbor. While not interactable in the final game, they were created to provide gameplay opportunities like turning power off for a neighborhood or re-routing to overload a particular location.

People Fuel

People need to eat as they say. Besides a lot of restaurants, there were numerous small grocery stories players could enter added to local neighborhoods. Several large modern grocery stores were also placed in key residential districts. They helped capture the transition between the small Mom & Pop stores from the first half of the century and the big corporation stores of 1968.

Vehicle Fuel

While Gas Stations were not required for game vehicle use, they were added all around the city to provide that option at a future date. Many were placed in residential areas, some in rural areas. Several were placed on street corners allowing players to cut through them to avoid intersections and traffic. Many docks featured fuel pumps around the river and ocean.

Water Utilities

Barclay Mills was primarily an industrial space for the city utilities including a major power plant, a recycling center, the city’s water filtration, a sawmill, train depot, oil tanks, and various warehouses.

Police Stations

Local Police Stations were also relevant to each district and how they operated. The one in Delray Hollow was closed down, for example. The one in Frisco Fields was fenced off with the one option to quickly get in there by jumping a car into the restricted parking lot.

These stations were uniform buildings except for the much larger one in Downtown. The purpose was to again provide gameplay opportunities later in the project. Outside of various mission ideas, one was to have these as ambient resource locations. Disable the neighborhood power to get in undetected or assault it directly to gain access to weapons, gear, other supplies, and police vehicles for use in other activities or roaming.

Train Switching Stations

These small Train Switch houses were placed throughout the city to interact with ambient train movement. A gameplay use for example would be switching tracks to divert trains to rob or invade gang territories.

Trains were eventually removed due to the high cost of edge cases with existing pedestrian and vehicle traffic, along with “What ifs” like what if a player bombed the train tracks or parked a car on the tracks to get hit. There were too many physics and NPC issues which were a lower priority to the core of the game.

Train Stops

Trains were narratively restricted to industrial areas and the southern half of the city where ships came to port, avoiding the metropolitan center and more modern northern districts. Trains did once exist in the northern areas decades before when they were more plantations, but have since been replaced by roads.

The exception was a Trolley system. Downtown and French Ward featured a closed loop circuit with various stops throughout the route. The main station was in the French Ward (purple circle) as a unique POI.

In addition to the Switching Stations (yellow dots), other elements seeded for Train gameplay were small train platform buildings (short yellow lines). Several warehouses also let trains drive through or dead end into (yellow boxes).

The city featured two large train roundhouses. The one in River Row was damaged from an earlier fire and intended to duplicate interiors from the one in Barclay Mills as an additional location to raid or explore.

For citizens, two train stations exist. The larger station in Southdowns was fictionally connected to Lost Haven and Empire City. A smaller western one was built when Delray Hollow was its own town decades prior. It was now used for workers commuting to work.

Bonus Material

Here are all those elements in one image for those curious about their proximity from one another.

Lastly, here’s a drive through the city comparing Pre-Alpha and what was Released. If you are familiar with the parts in what players experienced, you may be able to find locations that were moved or changed over development.

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