Are there any specific reasons for the delay? What needed to be polished?

Technically there are a few things: the framerate isn't quite on the money yet. It's just the whole experience. One of the things we're spending a lot of time doing is focus testing. We're testing about twenty people a week. And it's getting that difficulty curve right. We want it to be hard, but we don't want it to be impossible like Mafia I. I don't know if you played the first game, but there was one mission when we shipped the game. Literally everyone failed until we released a patch. So we're really, really conscious about delivering a really balanced, proper difficulty curve. And then it's just bugs. It's an open world: ten square miles, fifty vehicles, a hundred environments. There were quite a lot of bugs in it!
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We only got to see a very small amount of police confrontation in the demo. How far does it escalate? What are some successful strategies for eluding the coppers?

If you go into an arrest status, that might trigger two or three cops to chase you. "Shoot to kill" status will go up to four, fix, six. When you're getting towards the end, the police are using tommy guns, leaning out of their vehicles to try and shoot you, there are stingers across roads, roadblocks across bridges, that sort of stuff is what you can expect. Obviously, there are no helicopters and stuff like that.

The system is based on line of sight. You have an immediate chase, but if you duck out of sight the cop doesn't know where you are and you lose your wanted status. But if the cop sees you at a close proximity, then he's going to fictionally radio in what you look like. So at that point, you're wanted by the entire force of Empire Bay, whether they see you or not. If you stay out of sight, then they're not going to be immediately chasing you. But if you come back into sight, then they're going to know what you look like and they're going to chase you. At that point, you'll have to change your clothes, or cleanse your car. There's different ways you can do that: you can change the license plate of your car, respray it, that sort of stuff.

A good strategy to use is -- if the cops are in cars, their cars are often faster than yours, especially in the '40s. One of the best things you can do is stop your car, jump out, and go jump over fences, stuff like that. They're not so hot on foot.