Just Cause games always have a map that’s about 30-35 kilometers to a side. I think they picked this size because it’s big enough that you can fly a jet across it without breaking the illusion that you are flying across an actual country and not an area smaller than most respectably sized metropolitan areas (that illusion still requires fighter jets to fly about as fast as a Cessna, but that’s still much faster than a helicopter so it still feels like jets are fast and that’s enough to maintain the illusion). Maybe they did it semi-randomly in Just Cause 1, just kind of mindlessly pushing the limits of how big a playspace then-current hardware would allow, and now they don’t want to have a smaller game world in any of the sequels. However they arrived at that number, fact is that they never properly use all that space. Even Just Cause 3, which is easily the best of the series (so far, but word is that Just Cause 4 fell off), struggles to use about half of the map. There’s two archipelagos down south where the first two-thirds of the game take place that have a decent number of towns and villages in them, and then there’s the mainland to the north which has a few more cities on the southern coast and then actual miles of nearly empty land dotted only with military bases and outposts.
They definitely shouldn’t have stamped down any more of the same, because the game’s already getting a bit repetitive as it is, and the new military bases are often prison camps full of mines of the made up resource Bavarium, which is plot-relevant and has some unique doodads to blow up compared to previous areas. They do pack all the Bavarium mines right next to each other which is a bit of a problem, since if I just burn west to east across the map blowing up military bases as I go, I’ll end up doing like four Bavarium mines in a row. There’s a decent bit of gameplay variety between liberating a military base versus liberating a city, so intermixing them is good, which they did on the southern archipelagos but do less of on the northern mainland.
But the real problem with the game’s third act and its corresponding mainland is that there’s something like 3 kilometers between the two nearest points of interest. While there is something to be said for driving through a quiet countryside between assaults, this isn’t a small handful of remote outposts nor is this some kind of STALKER-style immersive experience. It’s half-ish (maybe even two-thirds) of the map with only one-third of the gameplay in it, and the distance made up with a commute. It’s not long enough to get really aggravating, it’s the kind of game where I’m listening to a podcast or talking to a friend or something anyway, but even a minor nuisance sticks out when it could’ve been got rid of by making less. Just take all your military bases and remove two of the three kilometers of empty land between any two of them and now your last act landmass is about the same size as the first and second and has about the same amount of content. And then maybe swap some military outposts out for some villages so they don’t get so repetitive.
Still a great game overall, though. Kind of nervous about Just Cause 4 ruining it somehow. Just Cause 3 nailed the basic formula, all you need to add at this point is new locales to liberate the shit out of. Sure, generating all those assets is expensive, but it’s not like there’s a design puzzle to solve here. Do Just Cause 3 but in Alaska or something, and ideally on a smaller map.
Also, this isn’t related, but I don’t want to make an entire extra post for this one paragraph: This game crashes like once every two hours. Luckily it’s got really good checkpoints and autosaves. It’s very annoying and flowbreaking to be halfway through blowing up an outpost only to crash, reload, and find I’m now half a kilometer away and all the enemy patrols are reset, but all the target objects I need to blow up to clear the outpost remain destroyed, so I don’t lose any progress, just get yanked outside to assault again. Depending on the outpost type, this sometimes makes things easier (some outposts summon continuous reinforcements while others have a fixed but very large pool of troops, and both get reset every time you close the game and reload, so a crash might clear a bunch of reinforcements as often as it will revive a bunch of guards). This might be related to my min-maxed processor and graphics card where my graphics card is awful but my processor is a monster, but Just Cause 3 is a 2015 game which the beastly processor can usually chew through even with minimal assistance from a graphics card, and word on the internet is that JC3 is generally a pretty unstable game. Good job on the autosaving, though, I never would’ve expected a game with crashes this frequent to be a mild nuisance rather than dealbreakingly frustrating, but they pulled it off.
Chamomile Has A Blog 