So, what was the deal with the really low scores for Mafia 3?

[Seishisha]

Where did you get this idea? Mafia is known for having an open-world where you can literally do nothing outside of story, bar maybe screwing around with cops if you want. Hasn't stopped them from being chapter based linear narratives with no padding. The thing Mafia 3 did was actually just put shitty activites and grind into the series. (Leading to negative reception, from fans especially.)

Mafia was infamous for being anti-sandbox, the open-world was nothing but window dressing. It was not generic mcgtaknockoff crime game.

Sorry my bad for not articulating what i meant correctly, what i should have written is somthing more like this, removing the open world and have chapter based missions would have caused negative reception.

Hope that clears it up.

 

[Pseudonym]

Now, where the game falls drastically short is keeping the entire sandbox fun

If the majority of time spent with a game is not fun (barring cases where that is the intention like papers please or amnesia) that is a rather serious issue, that could easily explain really low scores. Whatever else might be said about the game, if it's not a good time, it's not worth much. The developers might have done basically good work with just some design flaws, but people don't necesarily judge it as a project but as how enjoyable it actually is.

 

[Strazdas]

Well Mafia 3 went from tightly story focused into open sandbox game so theres half of your fans gone right there. It also was riddled with bugs and perofrmance problems. Futhermore, at launch it had the gal to lock framerate to 30 fps for which the developer responsible should be barred from ever working in gaming industry again.