The moment you take control in Just Cause 4, you’re presented with an opportunity.
Against the stark white background of a snowy mountainside, your video game lizard brain
goes into overdrive at the sight of red; the universal signal for “shoot this thing”.
The story implores you to move forward, but you’re too busy making things explode.
You maybe also mess around with the grappling hook—you pull two things together and watch
the sparks fly.
You jump on a piece of metal and surf it along the ground, all while this bigger thing is
going that in other games would demand your immediate attention, but you couldn’t care
less and what’s more, you get the feeling the developers are on your side.
This is the Just Cause you’ve come to know and… love?
The franchise that, since its inception and perhaps moreso than any other open world,
has allowed, nay encouraged you to do whatever the hell you want.
Other games want you to handle this objective as subtly as possible?
How about you try blowing everything up instead?
Each instalment since the first has placed further emphasis on this kind of anarchistic
ethos, providing players more and more methods with which to move fast and make things go
boom, with the latest in the series providing new grappling hook modifications, allowing
you to customise loadouts with the kind of granularity that have it almost feeling like
the developers opened the debug menu and said “go nuts.”
Hell, you can even control the goddamn weather in this one.
The possibilities for causing untold destruction, it would seem, are endless.
All of which begs the question: why, after twenty hours of this unfettered freedom, did
I come away from the game feeling so… bored?
Why, despite giving me options other games wouldn’t dream of, does the game feel so
strangely anachronistic, like a relic of a past time?
Why is this game, for all of its best efforts, failing to set the world on fire?
It’s more than the game’s wild technical issues (which, even on my fairly beefy PC,
saw the game hard crash more than 60 times but, hey, your mileage may vary on that).
For a lot of people it speaks to a wider issue with the series—over the years I’ve seen
variations on the phrase “so much to do but no reason to care” attributed to every
game in the franchise thanks to their almost ubiquitously woeful stories providing no rhyme
nor reason to the activities you’re doing.
And while, as someone who has put a substantial amount of time into every entry, I wholeheartedly
agree with that assertion, I think the problem goes deeper.
I think it’s the way the missions themselves are structured, rather than the lack of story
propping them up, that are the main reason Just Cause has failed to gain quite the place
in the pantheon of open world franchises; less “so much to do but no reason to care”
and more “so much to use but no reason to use it.”
See, open world mission design is kind of a weird concept when you think about it.
As a genre, you think of open worlds as bastions of player freedom; a break away from the constraints
of linear progression.
But missions (perhaps the most obvious way of bringing structure to a game’s world)
almost always necessitate a movement from a start to an end point.
Of course some games handle this divide between free exploration and the rigidity of missions…
less subtly than they could, but many games will try and blur the lines as to what the
start and end points are through dialogue options, multiple routes or offering different
tools to get through various obstacles.
In terms of that last point, Just Cause 4’s customisation options should place it firmly
on top of the pile in terms of open world titles.
Like in Hitman, for example, where you’re trained to view NPCs less as humans and more
as clockwork AI clusters, Just Cause 4’s options are designed to get you viewing the
world in a fundamentally different way.
It’s not about taking and driving any car you want like in GTA; in theory, these mods
are about taking a car and changing it into something else entirely; a fighter jet, a
flying ball of death.
Actual fighter jets are rickety piles of pixels to be taken apart with a light graze; enemies
aren’t threats, they’re projectiles.
Explosions in video games usually cause things to disappear so as to avoid getting in the
way, whereas here the wreckage is proudly displayed; as interactable an object as the
structure it was so forcefully removed from.
Real world things become pure artifice—means of getting you from point A to explosion B.
The potential of such a shift in viewing the world is honestly tantalising.
Imagine the possibilities these tools could allow you in terms of mission design—you
need to get to the mainland quickly to stop a bomb going off, your parachute and wingsuit
aren’t working and all you have is a crate.
You’re defending a position without guns; enemies are approaching, and you have only
the materials around you to fend them off.
You know, the types of mission that could force you to play around with these intermingling
systems and hope for the best—at the very least drawing some comedy out of the tools
at your disposal, and at best making you feel like a genius for cobbling together a makeshift
solution that actually works.
But unfortunately, missions rarely play out this way.
The reason is that they aren’t so much individually designed as they are one of a few types of
mission placed on different parts of the game’s gargantuan map.
There’s an enemy base and you’ve either got to hack the things before hacking the
bigger thing, escort prisoners from one section to another or wait around defending a point
while someone else hacks something.
Setting aside the fact that this template devolves worryingly often into an unbearably
restrictive crossover of escort mission and turret section, the thinking seems to be that
as a developer, you’re not really providing missions per se because “missions” are
too constricting.
You’ve simply provided an instance, a temporary semblance of structure within a larger playground
in which players can experiment with the tools you’ve thrown at them.
In that sense, it doesn’t matter that every activity revolves around the same few types
of mission because with the sheer amount of options the game offers, the ways in which
you’re hacking the things or whatever else will play out differently every time, right?
Well, no, because in the same way as the missions see you repeating one of a handful of tasks,
thanks to their inconsistency and lack of usefulness in missions, the scope of possibility
afforded by your experimentation starts to shrink as you progress.
Your experiments are a useless means of traversal or they’re another opportunity to add to
the cacophony of explosions already on show; it’s one or the other.
You might see your balloon modifiers and rocket boosters and envision the creativity found
in Breath of the Wild.
However, where that game established its rules consistently - from your most minute interactions
to whatever crazy contraptions you could come up with - Just Cause 4 never quite allows
you that eureka moment, because a sneaky workaround you feel you can rely on one minute, will
suddenly have a completely different outcome the next, leaving things cascading comically
out of control.
And I do mean comically; it’s funny to see a car spin so hard you wonder exactly when
it’s going to cause the game to crash.
But again, unlike Breath of the Wild where your contraptions could actually save you
time or give you a leg up in combat given how slowly you moved and how relatively vulnerable
you were, Just Cause 4 negates the need for experimentation by giving you the answer straight
up—whatever wacky scenario you could come up with in your head, there is always – always
– a more effective, reliable option.
You could attach balloons to a crate and use them to fly across the island, hell you could
use boosters to turn your car into a rocket… or you could just use your parachute and grappling
hook which isn’t only more reliable, but faster and more mechanically engaging than
almost any car (many of which have nitro boosters anyway).
Managing to use your retractors to surf along on a piece of wreckage is impressive not because
of the fact it’s a particularly useful means of getting around (t isn’t), but because
the game’s unpredictable physics decided not to simply throw you off this time.
You could attach a couple of balloons to a barrel and modify it so that they follow your
cursor and wait for them to slowly move over to where you’re pointing before exploding
the balloons and hoping they moved close enough to your target to have an effect… or you
could just use the always-available guns and ammo strewn around every enemy base; not only
are they more precise, they’re arguably more visually exciting; a more direct means
of creating the kinds of explosions the developers seem to equate to chaos.
When I discuss the perils of allowing an optimal strategy to form in your game, like Metal
Gear Solid’s tranq guns or supply drops, the comments are always the same—“just
don’t use them”.
But I feel like telling someone to ditch Rico’s wingsuit and parachute, for example, is a
bit like telling someone not to swing in Spider-Man; it just feels wrong when the optimal strategy
is such a core aspect of the series’ identity, and the detritus thrown in to justify further
sequels feels like so much fluff.
More than that, however, the game’s missions simply don’t give you the opportunity to
mess around with this detritus.
They try to create pandemonium by throwing hordes of enemies at you, whose threat is
entirely determined by their numbers and inability to tell where the hell any of them are coming
from as opposed to their intelligence.
It forces you to react quickly for sure, but all I ever did was zip away to fire my guns
from a different perspective; making things play like a particularly janky version of
a Rockstar shooting gallery—explosions everywhere, things flying around nonsensically, but at
the same time all feeling so predictably dull.
Missions give you everything and require nothing; you can’t stand still and experiment with
your many different options for fear of being quickly blown to bits, but resort to guns
and the game more or less plays itself.
And so the biggest threat in the world, given how things will spin out of control and will
explode without warning, is often yourself.
It doesn’t seem like there’s any kind of wanted level here like in GTA, which on
the surface seems like a restrictive feature but is perhaps the key to giving your whimsical
actions in an open world any kind of weight or meaning—it’s the world responding with
growing intensity and challenge to your chaotic impulses, adding to the disorder of the world
while giving the game a means of resetting things to zero, so that you have a reason
to start all over again.
In Just Cause, enemy encounters outside of these objectives are so surprisingly rare,
so easily escapable and so lacking in consequence that whatever anarchistic madness you inflict
upon the world reeks of a kind of “make your own fun” approach whose novelty quickly
wears thin when you realise there’s absolutely no utility to any of it.
It feels like you’re the king of a toybox but no one wants to play with you, so you’re
stuck smashing action figures together until you get bored.
You’ve eaten your mission-shaped vegetables in order to get to the empty calories of dessert.
In retrospect, the most fun I have in Just Cause 4’s missions comes when its world
begins to bend under the weight of its own insanity; in the game’s incomprehensible
mess, two rogue pixels will collide and suddenly the thing or vehicle or person you’re meant
to get from one place to another has their scripting fried; leaving you to pick up the
pieces.
An NPC’s pathing is broken?
Why not stick a retractor in their torso and drag them to the objective!
A mission-specific ancient boulder has disappeared with no way to get it back?
You could always just chuck some balloons on a different one and spring it over like
it was a goddamn space hopper.
It’s a similar scenario when the game’s weather effects come into play.
Sandstorms hinder movement and render your parachute wildly unreliable, forcing you to
get creative with your grappling hook, or take the risk of letting the wind carry you
where it will.
Lightning will strike down enemy helicopters but will just as easily wipe you out, forcing
you to move quickly while maintaining a perilously low altitude; making standing still aiming
a weapon less of a viable option.
And despite said weather effects only appearing in about half a dozen missions – a strangely
small amount given how prominently they featured in the game’s marketing - it’s here you
start to see a pattern.
In a game that presents itself as some blank slate playground for you to enforce your childlike
will on, these scenarios see systems intersect to provide interesting restrictions or roadblocks
that require some kind of lateral thinking.
Moments where the game isn’t encouraging you to cause chaos but instead forcing you
to navigate its chaos which always ended up engaging me far more than the countless missions
where I’d simply fill things with lead and have the joy of watching things blow up lessen
with every predictable explosion.
But then you begin to realise that these aren’t solutions to clever puzzles the developers
have carefully placed in your way.
Instead, the game is placing you in a position where you must actively fight its instabilities;
mission objectives are supposed to just work in a game but here they don’t—and it’s
your job to fix them.
And even then, like so much else the game throws at you, there’s almost always an
easier method to overcome it, where you’re probably better off just reloading one of
the many checkpoints and starting fresh.
A mission where you’re meant to sneak land quietly at an airport before everything breaks
and you’re forced to fend off enemies while grappling your teammate over to your objective,
all while the game still thinks you’re being stealthy is a funny situation for sure, but
it only occurs because the developers placed the hangar you’re meant to land at – out
of all the other available hangars I might add - right next to an enemy base meaning
you inevitably get spotted even before the prescribed ambush that occurs later in the
mission.
It’s all chaotic, sure, but it’s not too far removed from the kinds of “chaos”
you’d find in any number of b-games where the ways in which the software could break
at any minute leave you as curious as you are terrified or exhausted.
Just Cause 4 merely has the gall to turn that jank, that lack of attention to detail into
its USP.
With options like the ones Just Cause gives you, the possibilities should be endless but
thanks to the hands-off approach taken by the mission designers, their potential isn’t
even close to realised.
And it all comes back to the seemingly contradictory notion that in order to truly encourage creativity
in an open world, it isn’t enough to give players everything and hope that everything
gets used.
You have to impose even light restrictions through your missions that get players thinking.
Give players the freedom to do whatever they want with zero consequence, and they’ll
gravitate towards the most effective route over time.
Place unique roadblocks in their way, limit the tools they can use in any given scenario,
and that’s when you’ll start to see those tools put to good use.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Just Cause 4.
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Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Ali Almuhanna, Timothy Jones, Spike Jones, Laserpferd, TheNamlessGuy, Chris Wright, Ham
Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel,
Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas
Ross and Charlie Yang.
I’ll be back with my game of the year round-up before the end of December, but with that,
this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching, have an incredible holiday, be safe and I’ll see
you next time.