Yesterday's report published by Kotaku's Jason Schreier is not only dedicated to
the future of the Bioshock series, but also gave us an in-depth look at the current situation of Hangar 13, the studio which debuted with the ambitious, big, and sadly filled with smaller and bigger issues
Mafia 3, the continuation of two excellent
Mafia games developed by the closed and rebranded last year 2K Czech.
The troubles of the Californian studio begun a few months before the release of
Mafia 3. At the time, Christoph Hartmann, president of the game’s publisher, 2K, told employees that their bonuses would be tied to the game’s aggregate review score on Metacritic, some developers remembered the threshold being an 85, others remembered it being 80. Their game achieved “
mixed or average” 68.
Despite the bad reception of Mafia 3, some developers still got bonuses, but they weren’t nearly as big as they would have been if Mafia 3’s review scores had been higher (for example, other open-world games released in 2016, Watch_Dogs 2 and Far Cry Primal managed to score 82 and 76 respectively). With no doubt, morale at Hangar 13 took a huge hit, but the game's sales weren't terrible.
A month after Mafia 3's release, 2K bragged about the game’s sales, calling it the “fastest-selling game” in the publisher’s history. It didn't stop 2K from restructuring Hangar 13. The developer went through two different rounds of layoffs over the past year. In the result of 2K's new strategy, many of the people who made Mafia 3 are now gone, including the game’s art director, technical art director, senior producers, design director, many design leads, and a number of other key staff.
The studio still has more than 150 team members and is already growing in key departments to hopefully focus on new projects. Interestingly enough, the devs behind Mafia 3 were working on Mafia 4 in 2017, when Hangar 13 split into two groups, one of them moved on to create more Mafia 3's online content, while others started conceiving ideas for what their next project might look like.
According to Schreier's sources, the plan was to make Mafia 4 and set in Vegas during the 1970s. Sadly, this idea didn't last long as Take-Two and 2K higher-ups have decided to let Hangar 13 start something fresh, their own IP. This game was called Rhapsody, focusing on subterfuge in 1980s Berlin, giving players a chance to play as a Russian Jew whose parents had been murdered in a Soviet labor camp.
Our protagonist would be ultimately rescued by Americans, who recruited him to join a spy organization called Rhapsody. “It was hitting a lot of the beats we were good at,” said one person on the project. “He’s doing missions, trying to save the world and get revenge on whoever killed his parents, trying to decide between the personal good and the public good.” Other source compared it to Matthew Vaughn's spy movie Kingsman “without the really goofy shit.”
The fascinating concept and setting of Rhapsody have quickly changed. For some reason, the studio and the publisher have come up with the idea to use musical cues, which were integral to the main character’s backstory, as the focus of their new game. "Suddenly, Rhapsody would be an action game fueled by music. Maybe instead of being set in Berlin, it’d be in San Francisco. And maybe instead of playing as a spy, you’d be a superhero," Schreier's source explained.
By the end of 2017, the studio’s management had all but given up on the music idea. Apparently, as awesome as it sounds, it was never practical to begin with and the licensing costs for all those songs (including Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”) would have escalated into the millions. Instead, the project started morphing into more of a more traditional and standard superhero action game.
It's unclear what Hangar 13 will do next. Some of the people who helped to shape Mafia 3 are currently developing an unannounced BioShock game, some of them are working at 2K Czech, which was rebranded to become part of Hangar 13, or at the company’s studio in Brighton, UK, which has not yet been officially announced. Hopefully, Hangar 13 will manage to overcome the current problems and will return to developing ambitiousn, and maybe even more polished games. You can say many things about Mafia 3, but you can't say that the studio was playing it safe...