Mafia III Definitive Edition: welcome to the Bayou! New Bordeaux awaits you in version 2.1.2 (Patreon)

As promised, the Mafia Trilogy is now fully converted to VR!!! What a wild ride it's been []-)

Mafia III DE on Steam - Update: All issues with the Steam version of the game should be resolved in release 2.1.2 (attached to the bottom of this post)! To check that you have the latest version, hover your mouse on the dxgi.dll file in the game folder: it must be at least version 2.1.2.2596. If you get a lower version number, please download the attached zip, extract it confirming that you want to overwrite existing files, and then run RealConfig.bat again.

Quick setup: same as previous versions. Install Mafia III: Definitive Edition and run it at least once, to make it generate the folders for your user profile. Quit the game, then locate the directory containing "mafia3definitiveedition.exe" (for example, I have the Epic Games Store version and my directory is "C:\Program Files\Epic Games\MafiaIIIDE") and extract the mod to that directory without changing the folder structure in any way; finally run RealConfig.bat, which should take care of the rest and finish without errors.

The next time you launch the game, it will run in VR. Once again I modded the custom square resolutions directly into the game, so it will start with 2160x2160 and you'll be able to customize that to your liking in the display options menu. Remember that for WMR headsets like the Reverb G2 you need to select the OpenXR renderer from the mod overlay, otherwise due to a bug in the SteamVR driver for WMR you'll get a black screen in VR.

Game options: Most can be tweaked at will, but mind the following display settings (which are automatically tuned by RealConfig.bat) because they are required for a good VR experience:

• DISPLAY> RESOLUTION must be selected among the square ones
• DISPLAY> FPS must be <Unlimited>
• DISPLAY> DEPTH OF FIELD, FULLSCREEN, VSYNC and MOTION BLUR must all be OFF
• DISPLAY> ANTIALIASING must be LOW (higher values only blur the image even more)

Additionally, to get the maximum area for the HUD which is already pretty cluttered in this game, you will want to extend:

• DISPLAY> SCREEN BORDERS to cover the whole screen

If you use my first person on-foot camera:

• GAME> ON-FOOT FOLLOW CAMERA must be OFF

and if you use a gamepad, which is highly recommended for all my mods:

• CONTROLS> AIM ASSIST must be OFF (this can also be selected when starting a new game)

Point of view: just like I did with the remake of the original Mafia (which shares a lot of engine code with Mafia III), I modded the game to implement a first-person camera, both for driving vehicles and when on foot. The 1st person driving camera can be chosen dynamically using the normal keyboard/gamepad bindings, as it replaces the useless hood camera. The on-foot camera instead must be selected from RealConfig.bat before launching the game. The operation can be repeated as many times as you wish without extracting the zip file again, however, if you want to experiment with both choices.

I would like to remember old users (and to inform new Patrons) that my mod provides a control system that makes setting up the perfect driving position when you switch car models a breeze. YouTubers in particular haven't seemed to catch up on it yet. I will probably need to make an in-game tutorial for the function to make it more discoverable. If only each day had 240 hours :-P

When you enter a vehicle, if the camera position looks wrong, tap the D-Pad Up button on your gamepad, which will bring you into a special "camera setup" mode. Use the left thumbstick to move the camera left/right and up/down, and the right thumbstick to move it forward/backward. You can also reset it to the default position by pressing the left thumbstick. Any other button or trigger will exit the camera setup mode and return control to the game.

So, the typical drill when stealing (ahem, "acquiring") a new vehicle will be: enter the car/truck/boat; if the position does not look right, briefly tap D-Pad Up and move the camera with the two thumbsticks to your satisfaction; then accelerate away. The whole process only takes a couple of seconds once you've gotten the hang of it!

The camera setup can also be (ab)used to generate special camera positions that are not supported by the game itself, like a bumper cam or a bird's eye view. Just keep working the levers until the camera is at the place you want it :-D

VR conversion: everything should be working correctly, at least as far as it's possible with a mod. Gameplay is fluid, and combat (which is a fundamental part of the series) feels very natural, even when shooting from cover. As a matter of fact, I find that in VR I tend to play in a much stealthier and more deliberate way, which makes the missions a lot more interesting than they were in 2D! The crosshair is placed at the correct depth, as always with my mods, and the character points and shoots where you're looking.

Cutscenes have been fully fixed (FOV, camera, etc.), although as usual freeing the camera and widening the FOV reveals lots of broken animations, characters freezing or disappearing, missing props, misplaced objects, etc. Some cutscenes are prerendered and thus will appear in 2D on a virtual screen.

One big problem people had with this game when it first came out was the artistic choice for the color palette. It's very muted and drab, and I share the common opinion that it kills enjoyment. It might be more realistic, sure, but why go to the length of modeling a huge world full of beauty and then bury it under a thick layer of dullness? So, RealConfig automatically installs an excellent mod that restores the colors to their original glory. All credit for that goes to SlowpokeVG.

Hey, enough with the tease. What is the big surprise? Cheers to The Merote for guessing correctly in the comments to my previous post! There's a major improvement in this version that will allow you limitless freedom in customizing your image quality, not only for Mafia III but for all past and future games: ReShade presets are now fully supported and working in VR!!! I will probably make a dedicated post in the future, but for now you just need to mind a couple of things.

My modding framework, as you know and can read about in the "Legal" tab of the overlay, is based on the wonderful ReShade injector by Crosire. Initially I had to disable its built-in effect system, however, because it would operate on the backbuffer drawn on the display monitor instead of on the images sent to the VR headset. That means that when using the effects you would have paid the GPU performance cost only to make the image on the monitor better, with no visible improvement in VR.

Now I've made the many changes needed to have the effect system work directly on the VR images. What prompted me to finally take this step is that Mafia III is a blurfest. Even with antialiasing set to low (it cannot be turned off completely, because modern games), and even after I modded everything I could in order to remove the plethora of post-processing blurring steps that the game intentionally adds (seriously, developers, what is wrong with you?), the image quality was still unacceptable in VR and it begged for a sharpening pass.

So, when installing the mod for Mafia III: DE, RealConfig will now automatically drop in a CAS (AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) shader. By default it's tuned to quite a strong setting, with a Sharpening intensity of 4.0. You can tweak the setting at the bottom of the new "ReShade" tab if you feel it's too much.

If you're already familiar with ReShade, you will find all the controls you know in the usual places, except that the "Home" overlay tab is now called "ReShade" and that I slightly rearranged the "Overlay" tab to make it less intimidating for users who are only interested in the VR settings.

Important: do NOT run another copy of ReShade to implement further effects. If you know what you're doing and want to add more shaders or presets, just drop them into the existing folders. As a matter of fact, having another copy of ReShade hooking the game, especially for RDR2, is one of the most frequent issues that can kill your fps in VR and for which I receive lots of support requests.

Performance: If the game doesn't feel as smooth as you'd like in the headset, please try tweaking the "GPU Throttling" slider in the "MDE3" overlay tab. Dragging the slider toward the left will give more GPU priority to the game, which will increase your fps but might cause the VR compositor to hiccup and begin skipping frames. Moving the slider to the right will give more GPU priority to the VR runtime, which might hurt your game frame rate a little but could result in a more fluid experience. YMMV: each system has its own peculiarities and you might need to experiment a little. Different games might also need different settings.

Throttling is especially important if you want to capture or stream video, because then you introduce yet another competitor for GPU resources: the video encoding process. Move the slider to the right until you get a perfectly fluid mirror window. If even 100 is not enough (it might depend on the system load imposed by encoding and capturing), I also put in an additional slider which adds a custom amount of delay in milliseconds to each frame; it will really kill your fps in the headset but it should allow for perfect capture. Please give me some feedback on this if you can, as I'm always looking for ways to improve game capture by YouTubers and streamers.

HUD: Especially when you're on foot but not engaged in combat, the radar (minimap) and  info box in the lower right and lower left corners of the HUD can be quite distracting and/or get in the way of what you want to see. Unfortunately Mafia III does not provide any way to toggle the visual information on/off, so I modded the HUD and exposed the gamepad shortcut [D-Pad Left + Back/Select] for hiding the radar and info boxes.

Additionally, Mafia III comes with its own special, extra-annoying HUD item: the objective marker. It gives the distance from your target inside a white diamond, and it's positively HUGE and most of the time smack in front of your view. There is no option to turn it off from the game menus (what were they thinking?!?), so I implemented that option in the mod: you can find it in the "MDE3" tab, and it's selected by default because in my opinion the target marker totally kills immersion. It's also kind of useless, since the game already provides GPS routing and turn-by-turn signals directly on street corners.

Game bugs: One thing I'm sadly becoming quite used to is having to fix miscellaneous bugs that make it hard or impossible to properly enjoy the games in VR, and Mafia III is no exception. One particular gripe that I have is with AAA games that seem to forget option settings from previous runs: I mean, how hard can it be to save all options to disk and restore them when the game is restarted? Mafia III does it with subtitles: each time you launch the game, subtitles are automatically turned off. That is particularly aggravating when you start a new game, or if the game loads directly into a cutscene, because Mafia III "helpfully" hides access to the option menus when a cutscene is playing.

So, in the "MDE3" tab of my mod overlay you will find a checkbox that you can use to force subtitles on. If you're not a native speaker, you'll want to select it even before starting a new game, to be able to see the subtitles in the super-long initial cutscene which is quite fundamental for setting the story.

Mafia II DE: I made some improvements to the mod, especially as regards the DLCs, so you might want to update to the new release even if you're not playing Mafia III at the moment.

As always, I wish you lots of happy hours with the mod, and if you ever find the will to emerge from your headset again, drop by and tell me what you think in the comments!!!