Mafia 3 world designer outlines a three-step approach to planning open-world cities

Cheever's article follows an earlier 80 Level piece on how traversal speed, encounter density, production resources and player expectations set the size of a game world. This one covers the next job: turning that space into a city players can navigate and believe in. It is a first-person account of an approach he says has worked on multiple projects, not a formal standard.

Step one is the vision. The team agrees on story, tech, gameplay and art direction, and does market analysis. Cheever also warns that teams should check what their licensed engine can actually do, because some features they see in other games were built in-house by those studios. He then gives a checklist covering pathways, spaces, ambient life and metrics. It asks things like how main routes attract lost players, how many landmarks a district can carry, how shops can be swapped during production, and how deep the deepest dead end is.

Step two is the layout. He drafts a design-focused layout first, as a 2D sketch or schematic, and proves it in 3D before it goes to environment artists, who then do their own proxy pass. For fast prototyping, he paints an image onto a simple proxy 3D blockout to judge travel choices and sightlines, and skips roadsplines until later. On Mafia 3 the team staggered production across the 10 districts, which he says suited a smaller team and let them cut or expand content late in the project.

He also describes how the layout changed over time. Cheever says there were over 30 major designs during development. The first two were art-driven, and version 3 was design-driven for gameplay and story. Elevation was added to a mostly flat New Orleans to give players distant points of interest and vistas. It also helped show which areas could flood in a hurricane story event, and the team focused on downtown rather than real-world locations where people's homes were destroyed. An eastern island cut for budget reasons came back as low-cost DLC, where it became an Asylum.

Step three is local detail. Each district repeats the macro layout process at a smaller scale. Major roads should change only if missions or activities benefit, while local landmarks and tertiary paths can be added freely. Cheever suggests assigning one artist and one designer to each area from start to finish so someone can explain its history as staff change. Teams planning a city can use the checklist as a pre-production review, with the caveat that the details come from one Mafia 3 designer's experience.