When Just Cause 3 first launched on December 1st of 2015, many players reported a few technical issues with both the console and PC versions of the game. Glitches, bugs, and the occasional frame rate drop during massive onscreen explosions all detracted from the overall experience. Luckily, a post on the official Just Cause 3 blog promised to remedy these issues as soon as possible, and, for the most part, the development team delivered, with a patch releasing just two weeks later and improving the load times, stability, and frame rate of the game.
Nevertheless, an update in preparation for the first expansion pack, Sky Fortress, went out on consoles and PC in early March, and it seemed to render Just Cause 3 almost entirely unplayable. Ever since this incident there has been little to no information from developer Avalanche Studios about a fix. The frame rate suffers substantially on Xbox One and PS4, often dropping to 20 frames per second or worse in severe conditions such as during in-game rain showers. Load times are worse than ever; it takes several minutes just to start playing the game. On Steam, players have reported more serious optimization issues than ever before and user reviews have dropped from 67% positive to 62%. Just Cause 3 might have merely run poorly on PC before, but sometimes it won’t even boot at all.
High frame rates and resolutions seem to be increasingly important to gamers nowadays, with arguments over 30 versus 60 frames per second and 900p versus 1080p breaking out all over the internet and thus becoming key marketing ploys for video game software and hardware companies. Although I think that the necessity to uphold certain technical attributes is often times exaggerated, any video game must run well enough to be playable, and in its current state, a state which it has maintained for almost three months now, Just Cause 3 runs so badly that it is painful to look at, let alone to play. With two more expansions revolving around the land and the sea scheduled to release in the upcoming months, Avalanche needs to seriously buckle down and start communicating with its consumers in order to secure any future sales.
Tristan was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 51 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @tbogost.