Fix Just Cause 4 With This One Neat Trick

In the long tradition of clickbait titles, I lied. You won’t completely fix Just Cause 4 with this one neat trick. It would help a lot, though.

In Just Cause 4, a major mechanic is that you’re leading an “Army of Chaos” in an uprising against this year’s evil dictator. The Army of Chaos seizes territory from the Black Hand mercenaries employed by the dictator to uphold his regime, and in order to seize that territory, they need two things: First, for you to complete a side mission to weaken the territory, and second, for you to accumulate enough Chaos Points (don’t abbreviate that) to recruit additional squads to your army. You get Chaos Points by destroying Chaos Objects, which are red-painted stuff important to the regime like radar and fuel tanks and which are generally very satisfying to explode, so the game encourages you to both run around blowing stuff up and complete side missions. In friendly territory, the Army of Chaos drives around in hummers spraypainted cyan and magenta, while in enemy territory, the Black Hand drive around in tacticool black hummers and shoot at you. So far, so good – it’s basic open world territory control mechanics with a slightly novel method of shifting territory to friendly hands.

The problem is that there’s also a heat system where the Black Hand spawns reinforcements to chase you, and it’s totally unchanged regardless of what territory you’re in. And while you could fix this as easily as disabling Black Hand reinforcements completely in friendly territory, I think it’d be better to make a bit more nuanced change: Heat no longer increases from killing Black Hand in friendly territory, but does still go up from destroying Chaos Objects. So if you blow up fuel tanks and stuff, the Black Hand will show up to shoot at you, but if you’re in friendly territory, then you can kill all the Black Hand who show up and this will not spawn more/harder reinforcement waves. It’s still weird that the Black Hand spawn deep in friendly territory, but Just Cause is a destructive sandbox, so I think some narrative weirdness is fine. What’s mechanically annoying is that you can’t reliably get heat to go back down once it’s spun up except by running away and hiding out for a while, and there’s no obvious place where that’s effective. Making friendly territory into a safe zone where you can kill any of the Black Hand chasing you without spawning any more would fix this.

Also, it’s annoying how Chaos Objects respawn, especially in friendly territory. Respawning them in enemy territory is fine and helps hedge against it being difficult to find Chaos Objects to blow up to get the squads you need. You only need squads for attacking enemy territory, so if Chaos Objects respawn in enemy territory, then that means that there’s always respawning Chaos Objects lying around to destroy if you need them.

Also, also, the main story missions all require you to liberate the territory where they start from, which is a terrible idea. Being able to get some mild-to-moderate but not overwhelming advantages in main story missions by completing side missions first is fine – you’ll have an easier time completing the main story missions if the territory they take place in or near is full of friendly patrols who will help you instead of enemy patrols who will pile on with the enemies spawned by the mission objectives. Likewise, having some side missions be locked until you’ve completed a main mission is fine – this enemy fortress or that enemy city is involved in the main plot somehow, so we can’t liberate it until we’ve finished the relevant mission. But people shouldn’t be forced to interact with your side content. I guess this might be a “game journalists ruin everything” problem again? Like, maybe in order to get game journalists to review the game in the way it was meant to be played, you have to force them to do that, because if it’s possible to only play the main story content while ignoring the side content (the most important part of an open world sandbox, and that’s something the Just Cause series has traditionally been good at) then they’ll do that and review the game based on one of its less important, lower quality aspects.

I’m speculating, though, it’s also possible that the Just Cause 4 devs just didn’t realize this was a bad idea. After all, the Just Cause 2 devs did all the work of making a sandbox full of destructibles to blow up and then forgot to give any reason to do so nor to make them at all easy to locate, so there wasn’t really anything to do except follow the main story and blow up Chaos Objects whenever you happened to bump into them. They put in all the work to do the hard parts of making a fun open world sandbox but then didn’t do the much easier task of making the destructible objects easy to locate and provide some benefit for destroying them, so the game wound up as a mediocre linear third-person shooter instead. Just Cause 4 isn’t that bad, but it’s similar in how it could be a lot better with a few tweaks that would’ve taken less than a month to patch in, maybe even less than a week.