Keen to pick up Avalanche’s explosive sequel Just Cause 3? You may want to hold off for a while. Digital Foundry has published a video essay pinpointing the raft of technical issues in the open-world title, with everything from framerate drops to glitches affecting the gameplay experience.
Unlike Rocksteady’s turbulent PC launch of Batman: Arkham Knight earlier in the year, Just Cause 3‘s early problems are by no means exclusive to one platform, with scores of Reddit users reporting disappearing oceans, freezing and other spontaneous bugs. Early analysis claims that the Xbox One version appears to be the worse affected, where the framerate can reportedly drop as low as 17fps, while crashing is also cause for concern.
Per Digital Foundry:
“Avalanche pushes the boat out there with the Havok [physics engine] middleware, but this does cause performance issues on both consoles. Blowing up a bridge with C4 explosives causes a mid-20s dip on both machines as the structure crumbles into its component parts. Bearing in mind that not a huge amount is happening from a visual perspective otherwise, it does suggest that the Jaguar CPU architecture of both consoles is being pushed to its limit.”
At the time of writing, neither Avalanche nor Square Enix have released an official statement regarding these alarming issues, but we’ll keep you posted as this story develops.
Launching today across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, we found Just Cause 3 to be a rip-roaring thrill ride in our review, but one that isn’t without its technical faults.
