Grab your heartburn remedies, as Just Cause 3’s fiery entrance is expanded on
Recently, a cinematic trailer for just Cause 3 surfaced, and with it brought speculation. The trailer showed all kinds of destruction, and oh so much fire. In an interview with Red Bull, Just Cause 3 director, Roland Lesterlin, revealed a bit more about what fans can expect in Rico Rodriguez’s next dictatorship destroying journey.
Lesterlin joined Avalanche Studios in 2011 “as a fan more than anything else”, a year after Just Cause 2 was released. The new comers take on the game won’t stray from what we know though, as he states “we wanted to stick to the core pillars when we started thinking about how to make the game”. Rather than messing with a winning formula, they worked on how to progress the series in a way that won’t alienate the fans that love what already exists. Everyone knows that the stand out feature of the Just Cause series is the hook shot grapple and the parachute. When used in combination, these items are used for traversing the map quickly. Playing off of that iconic style of travel, the team looked more into the “three dimensional movement“, expanding on how you get around vertically as much as horizontally “ So we looked at all the activities, sling shotting, paragliding, freefalling, and wingsuits seemed to be a pretty natural progression for the franchise.” Wingsuits are certainly making a name for themselves in videos games, and with the trailer showing off this new piece of equipment, I can’t think of a more applicable game for such a piece of equipment.
Lesterlin went on to address the main theme of the trailer, which without any shadow of a doubt, is explosions. “Of course Just Cause is known for destruction and beautiful explosions, so we wanted to make sure we were really getting out in front of that one,” he says. “Thanks to our relationship with Havok, which has been amazing over the years, we’ve been able to really push our destruction to another level there and really push huge, epic explosions.” Havok have been supplying physics engines for years now, and it is fair to say that the series remains in good hands.
Lesterlin also revealed a slight tease about the plot of Just Cause 3, explaining that it is a “bit of a genesis story” that will explore the protagonist, Rico Rodriguez’s reasons for doing what he does. The series hasn’t really ever explored much of Rico’s personality, and at times he just felt like a receptacle for the mass sandbox destruction, so it will be interesting to see a bit more about this now iconic character.
One of the biggest questions that fans wanted answered is whether just Cause 3 will feature any kind of multiplayer, especially following the Just Cause 2 Multiplayer mods popularity, but it does not look good for fans hoping for a multiplayer mode to ship with the game on release. On the topic of multiplayer, Lesterlin said “How do you build the best Just Cause 3 console experience that we can? I think there’s some great lessons to be learned there and we want to encourage the modding community as much as possible, but Just Cause is a sandbox, it’s your sandbox. Sometimes if you want to create an epic chain of destruction, that really needs to be your sandbox so nobody will change that for you.” Though this may be considered as bad news for a lot of fans, it is important to remember that the modded version of just Cause 2 works in such a unique way that wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for such a solid single player experience, and the fact that Lesterlin has openly said that the modding community is free to develop it, it may not be such a long wait after the release.
The main thing that I gathered from this interview is that Just Cause will be returning with its former glory intact. The developers won’t be changing up the formula to any extreme length, but the hope is that they will be bringing the series into the current generation. we can expect bigger explosions, more destruction and a whole new way to create your own sandbox fun.
