Mafia: The Old Country – Man of Honor

Man of Honor was my first AAA expansion as UX lead. It added two story chapters set in 1905 Sicily, Salieri's Warehouse as a Free Ride hub, Jobs, high-difficulty Challenges, new weapons and Charms to a game thousands of players had already finished, each in their own way.

An expansion lands on players in every possible state: brand new, halfway through the campaign, or long finished. Each of them needs to find the new content naturally, and none of it should feel like a patch bolted onto the base game.

I led UX for the expansion across the main menu, chapter flow, Journal, map and onboarding, working with game design and UI art inside the framework my team had built for the base game. Development ran for roughly a year, from the base game's launch in August 2025 to the expansion's release on 14 August 2026.

• Redesigned Chapter Select and Main Menu flows around three player states. New players meet the chapters in the timeline, completionists reach them straight from the Main Menu, and mid-game players get context-aware prompts when the content unlocks for their save.
• Added a Jobs panel and a Challenges hub to the Journal, using the modular structure we planned for post-launch content during base-game development.
• Onboarded new weapons with Simple Tutorials on first pickup instead of pop-ups, and extended the inspect views so players can preview the effect of each Charm bead.
• Reused the base game's Medal and Star ratings for map icons, so Jobs and Challenges show status, medal thresholds and rewards at a glance.
• Made collectibles readable: handwritten letters and period receipts appear next to a clean transcription, so story clues never depend on deciphering handwriting.
• Gave the expansion its own entry in the Main Menu, so returning players find the new content in one step.

Released on 14 August 2026 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. The new content landed inside the existing menus and map without a layout redesign, and stayed visually consistent with the base game.

Expanding a game is less like building a new house and more like adding rooms to one that's already standing. The framework you plan in the base game decides how well those rooms fit.