Mafia: The Old Country is getting new Man of Honor DLC this summer

Mafia: The Old Country is getting an expansion on August 14 called Man of Honor. The new $10 DLC, which takes place in the middle of the base game, adds two new story chapters centered around longtime series antagonist Ennio Salieri, and new content for Free Ride mode.

Released last August, Mafia: The Old Country took developer Hangar 13’s crime series to early 1900s Sicily. While it made some references to the series’ past games, it was a standalone prequel story about Enzo Favara, a young laborer who joins the ranks of a local mafia family. In an interview with Polygon, franchise game director Alex Cox and associate design director Josh Zammit explained how Man of Honor connects two eras of Mafia games while giving new meaning to The Old Country’s story.

Man of Honor’s new chapters take place in the winter of 1905, during a one-year time jump in The Old Country after Enzo becomes a made man in the Torrisi family. (The new content slots into that gap in the base game, but you’ll be able to play them separately as well.) The two chapters, which add a few new hours of content to the game, find Enzo crossing paths with a younger Salieri in Sicily, before he became the American crime kingpin we know in Mafia and Mafia 2. He’s already planning a way to get to America in the DLC, something that the Hangar 13 team were able to tie back into Enzo’s desire to leave Italy late in The Old Country.

“We dive into some of the stories about what [Salieri] was doing beforehand, stuff that players of the previous games won't know,” Zammit told Polygon. “Ultimately, his goal to get to America is his driving factor at this point. And maybe that plays into the later story, right? Plants a little bit of a seed in Enzo's head about what he might want to do with his future. That was an interesting thing for us to play with as well — this idea that where did he get this idea of going to the new life? Maybe there was somebody there that was driving it home and sort of eventually it stuck with Enzo as an opportunity as well.”

Cox describes Salieri as a foil to Enzo. Whereas Enzo is a hardworking laborer who finds his way into the mafia by chance, Salieri is a little less honorable in his pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes. The dynamic between the two conflicting personalities creates tension within the story, and that becomes more complicated due to Enzo’s friend Cesare Massaro, who looks up to Salieri.

“Cesare latches onto Salieri,” Cox said. “Salieri for him is kind of an aspirational character. He’s who Cesare would love to be, but as we know, he's a flawed character. Cesare really looks up to him. He's a guy he knows from the past and follows him around. It sort of puts Enzo and Cesare's friendship into a different angle when there's a bit of a ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’ vibe with them.”

Fitting Salieri into the story of The Old Country, which takes place decades before Mafia, was a complicated task. For one, Hangar 13 painted itself into a corner by working some Easter eggs into The Old Country that created timeline problems once they decided to create the DLC. (Cox says that Hangar 13 never planned to make a DLC, and it only conceived an idea for Man of Honor last September, after the team deemed The Old Country a success.) The developers would also need to create a younger version of Salieri that still felt consistent with the older version in later Mafia games.

“It's not just, he's the same guy, but in a different place,” Cox said. “He’s 25 years younger or more, and so we've got to figure out… we know who he's going to be, but what was that younger version of him like? He's definitely a bit more brash, I would say. He's not that Don that we see in the original game. He's got a bit of maturing to do before he gets there, but he's definitely well on his way.”

To get that right, the team ended up recasting Salieri rather than having actor Glenn Taranto reprise his role. Hangar 13 de-aged the character model based on Taranto’s likeness to keep his face consistent, but melded that with a voice and motion capture performance from actor Andrew Russell in the English dub. Cox also noted that the younger Salieri has a slightly different accent too, since we’re meeting him while he’s still living in Italy rather than after he has been in America for decades.

Salieri also plays a role in the DLC’s new Free Ride additions. Players can take on a new set of challenges from Salieri, who has set up shop in the Galante Warehouse. In addition to giving players more races and assassinations, the DLC also features new missions where players get a lead on some stuff they can steal from Salieri’s rivals, follow a trail of notes to find the location, and steal the goods. Cox said that the expansion will also give players more reasons to visit stores, a common fan criticism that Hangar 13 ultimately agreed with.

Cox gave me one more tantalizing teaser for Man of Honor — and it’s one that I personally am going to claim credit for. At the end of our interview, Cox mentioned an article I wrote when The Old Country launched where I cooked a pork spezzatino based on a recipe that can be found in the game. Cox told me that the narrative design team got a kick out of it, and may just have slipped another recipe in the DLC.

“Maybe we’ll drop another recipe into this content pack,” Cox teased. “Poke around in there and see what you can find.”

Mafia: The Old Country’s Man of Honor DLC launches on August 14 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.