Games
Just Cause 4 takes the DNA from its predecessor and turns up the heat even more. We sat down with Avalanche Studios to find out more about their upcoming open world adventure.
The Just Cause series is all about chaos, whether it be from messing around with grenades and tanks to completing a variety of standard missions – everything you do will result in explosions, gunshots, and a heck of a lot of carnage. Just Cause 4 is just as wild in many ways, except now the map is actually tearing itself up.
One of the biggest new additions to the sequel is interactive storms, including the tornado or lightning storms that have been shown off, that the game's newly-redesigned Apex engine makes possible. “The tornado puts a huge amount of stress on the other systems we’ve built in Just Cause,” said game director Francesco Antolini. “But we’ve built it in a way where you'll see it in more than just missions, we want it to be part of the world. Even when you are roaming around on your own.”
The short bit of Just Cause 4 we played included a tutorial that highlighted our protagonist Rico’s new grapple mods and a segment of a mission that put us in the middle of an airfield as a giant tornado approached. We had to take out giant wind cannons that were actually holding the storm back, the reason we were told? Just ‘cause.
The demo brought back all sorts of classic Just Cause action including the wingsuit, parachute, and tons of mid-air combat. Just like Just Cause 3, Avalanche has put an emphasis on staying in the air as much as possible for combat and traversal.
“If you’re on the ground you’re going to get hit pretty hard,” Antolini said. “We’ve got new classes of enemies with drones and turrets – plus normal enemies can get more aggressive now.”
The combination of those new enemies, Rico’s new grappling abilities, and the new storms make the action incomprehensible at times. Our time at the airfield was full of bullets, high speed winds, and a ton of explosions. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
Grappling with greatness
Even though developers wanted to showcase the chaos caused by terrible storms, the highlight of the short gameplay session was Rico’s new grappling modifications. The grappling hook features a few different options including the Airlift Mod that ties a balloon to your target and lifts it into the air and the Booster Mod that attaches mini rockets to the side of your target thrusting it in whichever direction.
Messing around with the Airlift Mod was the most fun we’ve had in an open world in recent memory. Shooting every car, person, and object in sight, forcing them to float up into the air was simply hilarious – even if it isn’t the most effective way to cause chaos.
That’s something that Avalanche hopes to help balance this time around. Just Cause is known for its wild, do-it-just-because action – but Antolini wants it to be more than that.
“If someone plays for two hours and doesn’t accomplish anything, that’s OK,” he tells us. “But I want people to have the option to meaningfully progress, I want them to feel proud after playing for two hours. It’s about catering to all types of players.”
Antolini and his team are trying to make completing missions just as satisfying as messing around on the map. That means creating storylines that players can fill in on their own, with various playstyles, pushing them to do more than just goof off.
“We’re improving on the variety of the missions this time around,” Antolini added. “The people of Solis are more invigorated to fight back against the paramilitary group the Black Hand, making your encounters that much crazier.”
Cohesion over sense
In order to make Just Cause’s primary storyline interesting, Avalanche had to pump up the volume. That’s the main reason they’ve expanded the game’s wild weather, the challenge then was to mould those storms to the games narrative.
The mission in the demo featured giant wind cannons, the ones you had to destroy in order to progress, that actually prevented the tornado from tearing through an airfield. That’s some technology, and exactly what Antolini is going for with the world of Just Cause 4.
“Cohesion is incredibly important, more so than realism,” he said. “We try to be consistent across systems and mechanics, for example Solis has a much weaker field of gravity than our world does, so it’s easier to stay in the air.”
The cohesion that explains Solis’s weird gravity and weather anomalies is also used to explain how technology can actually contain natural disasters. Nothing needs to be even close to real in Just Cause, mechanics are probably better the further they get from reality. That design choice makes the possibilities for different types missions, enemies, level set-up, and even storm variety incredibly open to creativity.
Just Cause 4 is coming to PS4, Xbox One and PC on December 4.
