How Just Cause Was Ruined! And How To Fix It!

once upon a time there was a little series that could just cause a series that was tasked with doing the impossible compete with Grand Theft Auto during a time when GTA was well enough the only established sandbox series on the market it was an uphill battle but the series was able to strike its own identity separate from its contemporaries and eventually became an established brand with a high profile name but just as the series hit its peak it had a sudden and severe decline in quality and with a fifth installment all but confirmed it's as good a time as any to look back and really examine what ruined just cause foreign so the first just cause game came out in 2006 it was an ambitious title for the time and despite being somewhat crude compared to its later entries they were able to establish the tropes that would define the series for years to come the scent of scope for a start with one of the largest if not the largest sandbox map of its day although I can't seem to find an accurate measurement anywhere to verify that it also featured some elements that while nondescript would be later fleshed out to give the series its winning formula the unlimited use parachute a little more than a way to infinitely save your ass while bailing out of aircraft would become awesome later the grappling hook little more than a means to steal aircraft from the ground and cars from far away when either would have been impossible otherwise would become awesome later there were even certain things that they instantly knew exactly what to do with the stunt position on vehicles for example because you don't need much prompting to understand how cool it is to be able to Surf a moving vehicle or even more cool hang on the back of a moving aircraft the entire game had a sense of irreverence in design which was obviously intentional given the name of the game just cause both to mean a righteous belief or movement as well as a nonchalant dismissal usually to indicate not having a reason or not caring about the consequences was just cause one perfect hell no the standard Mission structure wasn't great and could be straight up frustrating at times the grappling hook was incredibly limited and reeling yourself in is slightly finicky you can't shoot while in stunt position getting around without aircraft is incredibly slow and I found the menus on the PC version to barely work but overall the game is still a quality time they also put forth their mission statement of screw story here's your plot you are Rico Rodriguez an operative of a covert branch of the CIA simply called the agency from there you find yourself liberating sanus burrito with nothing to distract you and only a few cutscenes they establish all they need for the Bare Bones context there were character interactions to be had but they made it clear very quickly that's not what you're here for and it worked really rather well just cause didn't leave the biggest impression for the time as it was overshadowed by bigger releases but it did what it did and paved the way for the game that would comparatively take the World by storm Just Cause 2 came out in 2010 and it was a step up in pretty much every way plus they stated their intentions almost instantly the plot is largely the same as the last game although this time you're liberating the island nation of panau but that's basically as much plot as you're given where the last game was light on plot heavy on explosions two almost has no plot to speak of and blowing up stuff is officially the name of the game literally where the last game had you make progress largely by doing slightly tedious missions here your progress is tied to how much destruction you can cause there are tedious missions to be had but the moment-to-moment gameplay is all about the chaos you go from settlement to settlement and Destroy key facilities to progress the grappling hook can now be used on anything either offensively by attaching to enemies and having fun with them in any number of ways or defensively as a means to get around quickly which when working in tandem with the parachute gives you an aerial advantage of the Press of a button well two but still the grappling hook could also be used to steal any vehicle like in the last game but now it's lightning quick in short the grappling hook is what makes this game kick ass it was also verifiably for the time the biggest sandbox of its type and boasted over a hundred unique vehicles including several planes and this was during a time where Grand Theft Auto 4 and its expansions didn't have any planes at all which disappointed people like me where are the fighter jets one might ask well the answer was in Just Cause 2. I remember first hearing about this game in mid to late 2010 and the way it was described to me seemed almost too good to be true and that just says it all it was one of the first games to truly understand what it means to have sandbox Freedom go anywhere do anything blow anything up and have the progress be tied to all the things you're doing while bumbling around the sandbox it was a great game and gained a lot of attention at the time for all of its groundbreaking features reminding many people just how plainly and Simply Fun Anarchy can be it did it so the likes of a Grand Theft Auto or a Call of Duty but those who played it loved it and the series gained a large profile off this success quickly becoming one of the new franchises to watch which is why it became a big deal when Just Cause 3 was announced and when it came out in 2015 it became one of the better selling Games published by Square Enix that year this time they really pushed the envelope of what just cause could do allowing multiple grappling hooks at a time retractable grappling hooks a wingsuit for increased Mobility a much more detailed sandbox unlimited trigger explosives many quality of life improvements and so on Just Cause 2 was one of my favorite games of the time but just as it rendered the first game obsolete Just Cause 3 to me renders Just Cause 2 obsolete still a great game just obsolete Just Cause 3 is just a perfect time stink game I can spend hours just gliding around in the wingsuit getting into Random Encounters and seeing all the little ways I can play with the game's mechanics it is simply some of the most fun I've had with interactive media possibly ever if you've never played these games I urge you to check out at least just cause 3. though 2 is definitely also worth your time but even as fun as Just Cause 3 was there were some concerning trends that started to pop up first of all the story started to take center stage now as a story buff I can enjoy a well-crafted narrative but that is absolutely not what it come to just cause for unintentional pun they told a story of Rico Rodriguez defecting from the agency to liberate his home country of Medici there was some fun characters Dimas brings to mind immediately and some interesting ideas like whether or not Sheldon is really on your side the plot was inoffensive and had a real sense of humor about itself however it indicated that the original Vision had been lost somewhat because just cause is much more interesting when it's about Rico's work not Rico himself not once in my life have I thought to myself I can't wait to see the emotional development between Rico and a Supporting Cast then you also got the sense that gameplay wise it was about as far as they could go without really stretching for Content once you had a parachute and a wingsuit for getting around what else is there to add as far as Mobility then once you add multiple grappling hooks and every which way to use them on people and structures where do you take that to naturally escalate the mechanics and not overburden the game with disconnected or gimmicky crap they seem to hit a wall of diminishing returns that would be really hard to get away from that combined with the plot suddenly being a much bigger deal to the game overall as well as a personal Affair for Rico gave this game a sense of finality it felt like they were saying this is as far as we can go we got nothing left we can do we're going out with multiple bangs but nonetheless just cause 4 was made and I was no less pumped for it when it was announced but for various reasons I didn't get around applying it until 2021. I caught that dang sickness everyone was talking about at the time and I needed a long game to fill a week of sudden free time and throughout my playthrough I found myself asking what the hell happened to be clear I don't think just cause 4 is bad on balance it's a perfectly fine game as a matter of fact I would go as far as to say that it's a more playable game than the first just cause game but just cause 4 is also a game that came out after Just Cause 2 and 3 so it doesn't have the excuse of being the first in the series and in this regard it feels like a major step back in many ways had I not literally had nothing else better to do at the time I would have stopped playing after a few hours because the sheer frustration of how tedious this game gets sometimes actually made me turn it off more than once fundamentally the game still plays the same so it's still good but it's largely the same good as we already had and the surrounding package and Mission structure makes the same enjoyable core mechanics tedious and everything new they add to just cause 4 only serves to muddy the waters they added balloons and boosters to your grappling hook which makes for absolute gut-busting hilarity at times but it's not something that fits naturally into combat or traversal like the inclusions to the previous games which happened to be the two pillars of the sandbox genre which means they're just less efficient ways to do what you're already able to do so outside of the novelty or occasionally around I never bothered the same goes for the other major inclusion the weather effects you will occasionally run into artificial weather courtesy of the main villain and after what feels like an eternity you can take them over for yourself but either way it doesn't do much the tornado or the sandstorm are fun to play around with for a few minutes but even after you control them the weather has no practical use in the moment-to-moment gameplay making it all feel like one big series of gimmicks made for the sake of having something new to justify a sequel rather than because it was an idea that desperately needed to be executed the one thing that pretty well ruins the fun primary gameplay Loop for me is that the things you destroy more often than not don't stay destroyed some things do but a lot of things don't and I don't know what the variable is I destroyed this same radar dish three times and it probably still came back off screen you still level up through causing chaos but leveling up doesn't feel as rewarding when it doesn't feel like you're having a permanent effect besides the strongholds aren't taken over through destroying the government property anymore which is the fundamental sticking point of the game not under understanding what made the third and second game so much fun compared to the first going around from place to place destroying the government property until you've taken over the joint that was fun tedious stronghold takeover missions are not making the destruction inconsequential combined with the new pointless gimmicks makes it feel like just cause 4 is giving you dozens of toys to use but nothing worthwhile to actually do with them and it makes the whole world feel static and unreactive like yeah I can attach a balloon to an enemy or a structure and watch it fly away but what's it all in Ada so it feels like they're going out of their way to ignore or omit the fun Parts just cause 4's most majorly interesting feature is the front lines feature this game features a full-on war against the corrupt government of Solis so you can go directly to the front line and fight in a more intimate way than ever before and if you go Behind Enemy Lines you'll be faced with fighter jets drones helicopters and all the fun of the fair but the progression is balls rather than having you push the enemy back by fighting them on the ground level the chaos points you earn will give you more soldiers for the war but you you can't push the front lines until you've done the aforementioned stronghold takeover mission in that region so those obnoxious missions that used to be an inoffensive aside to the core gameplay are now suddenly not only mandatory but they're the primary means to make progress and these missions are universally about twice as long and twice as fiddly as they need to be they range from such thrills as freeing prisoners that walk to the waypoint at the speed of a three-legged cow to flipping switches around a map to painstakingly driving 10 armed Vehicles into the water such Thrills and Spills there's one mission in Del Rio 1A that genuinely took me 20 minutes you have to make your way from One console to five other consoles then you had to go into two power stations on the opposite sides of the map from each other and disable them but those two power stations could only be accessed by hijacking a specific vehicle then you needed to go to another part of the map to destroy a turbine then you needed to destroy a couple of boats and had I not already by coincidence been in a helicopter when the two boats spawned it probably would have taken longer every single time I thought this mission was about about to end it went on for even longer the only thing that made it bearable this time was the fact that I generally knew what I was doing and the entertainment value of my boat flipping out look at it go yeah this game's a bit glitchy but that's besides the point there's one Mission early on which started with having to hack a couple of consoles and anytime this game tells you to hack consoles they almost specifically designed it so that you almost get all the way before being interrupted and every time you get interrupted you have to start again which really feels like this game is Just deliberately annoying the hell out of me but this one culminated with this one section where you have to protect a transmitter you weren't required to use the anti-aragon but there was no other tool at your disposal nearby that could take out as many enemies in a quick enough fashion so you basically had no choice turning this into a glorified turret section look at this limited field of view countless enemies coming from every direction it takes a few shots to take out each enemy and the ones that don't are small and hard to hit who thought this was fun honestly anytime the game tells you to protect a transmitter it's always frustrating as hell for various reasons I think the king of tedious missions is one fairly late into the game in the desert where you have to painstakingly break into this prison go through multiple levels of the underground facility rescue a prisoner and then you have to painstakingly escort him out while clearing the way for him and having to deal with his pathfinding screwing up that's another 20 minutes not every Region's main mission is as obnoxious as these but they are all obnoxious if these missions weren't deliberately designed to be annoying it sure feels like they are here's the kicker too you don't need to take over every region to beat this game but you might as well I think there were three regions I left unconquered by the end of the game every new Story Mission will require you to take over another chunk of land and a lot of times the land you need to conquer in order to activate the mission you can't conquer until you've also conquered the land preceding it it's a nightmare that wasn't the case in Just Cause 2 or 3 you could beat both those games by doing like 40 of the game and that progress could be whatever you wanted missions or chaos plus I'm pretty sure a good chunk of that percentage was the story missions themselves suffice it to say the mission structure in Just Cause 4 just isn't Fun and there's a lot of it just just cause 4 is the type of game that does everything it can to prevent you from getting to the good part which is still there it's just buried under so many levels of fluff suddenly genuinely the core experience is still great and there's an organic excitement to the whole war zone thing with the Enemy ground troops and air troops all around you whenever you're near the front lines there were times when I was having a rip snorting good time and there were other times when I was genuinely laughing my ass off it honestly feels like two separate games because on one hand you have the great core experience which is basically just cause 3 DLC and then you have the game progression which is horribly tedious when I talk to the people who played the previous games they fall into one of two camps people who beat the game and people who just play the game to mess around but the fact is in Just Cause 2 or 3 you were able to integrate these two play Styles because messing around was part of the progression but now you have this weird worst of Both Worlds thing where to the people who just want to mess around there's really not much to mess around with because the things you will destroy will more often than not come back and there are no strongholds to take over in the traditional sense then to the people who just want to beat the game you have to deal with everything else it's baffling how they somehow got it wrong on both fronts as for the story this one really wins the crown for missing the point there's an origin story about Rico's father an evil capitalist oligarch selling pre-packaged ecological disasters to the highest bidder the secret Corruption of the agency Rico becoming a symbol of freedom for the people of Solis oh yeah Sheldon's also there at first an uneasy Ally buddy wins over your trust a plot that's only been recycled from the past two games there's nothing wrong with it but I just don't care long Exposition dumps are not what I came to the series for did I care about whether or not the agency was corrupt back in Just Cause 2 no I just wanted to blow up did I care about Rico's father or even Rico himself back in the first couple games no it just feels so forced and I feel no emotional investment in any of this because the games were literally built on the premise that you shouldn't care about any of this but now apropos not thing they're saying otherwise to me just cause 4 is the game that ruined just cause for me or at least the things that I come to just cause for once again unintentional pun I guess when taken as a whole the thing that ruined just cause can be boiled down to two things losing the plot and diminishing returns losing the plot can be applied to so many things losing the plot of what made this series unique losing the plot as far as putting too much emphasis on things that don't matter or I don't care about losing the plot of the artistic intent behind the series losing the plot as to what made the game to game Edition so important losing the plot as far as what made the progression so much fun losing the plot in a literal sense they just completely failed to understand the appeal of these games after a while but then there's the diminishing returns this is something we see a lot in long-running franchises how do you continually raise the bar when there's only so much you can do with individual ideas you can only iterate on a formula so much before you hit the aforementioned wall of diminishing returns and that necessity to keep things fresh is probably why they felt the new need to start having these stories be more involved because theoretically you can only be sent to so many island nations to destabilize a corrupt government before it gets samey but did anybody really want this on the other hand the desire to expand to the story might have been a direct result of them finding it harder and harder to expand on the gameplay and needed at least something to be completely fresh to bolster the working formula I can't say for sure but it's as good an explanation as any but that still doesn't explain why they dropped the ball so hard on the gameplay front if it were only Just Cause 3 with a few extra toys and a progression system based around pushing back the enemy that would have been enough it wouldn't have replaced three probably but it would have at least been a game worthy of the plastic it's printed on but the boring Mission structure the insistence on having the front line only be moved by participating in said Mission structure as well as a static menu interface not leaving anything worthwhile in the game otherwise the chaos aspect taking a back seat and so on then there's plenty more to ask about this game why does it look like a later or PS3 game why the mission of triggered explosives and Hand Grenades why the insistence on undoing the destruction at times the thing we're all here for in fact why are there so many features missing in favor of other features nobody asked for those are only a few questions I have and for every single one of them the answer is the same I honestly don't know and everything about this game just makes me question why it even exists maybe it was to move the series forward maybe it was a mandate by squeenix it's entirely possible that Avalanche didn't even want to make a fourth game and maybe this was just what they came up with when they were told that they needed to make a new game because they'd done everything they wanted to do I can't say for sure it is the biggest string to Avalanche software's bow but surely they understood the series couldn't go on much longer so despite all the structureless fun moments to be had this just feels like a game that didn't need to exist and doesn't really want to exist so if they intend to keep the series going they have a lot to do to unfuck it they all but confirm that there's going to be a fifth game because Sheldon and you go say that they're going to take down the agency so what would I do to get the series back on track well I don't want the series to end despite its ups and downs it's still one of my favorite franchises and still one of the few video game series to truly understand the fun of anarchic chaos so here's what I think I think just cause 5 should be the last game in the current run of games because once you take on the agency there's nowhere to go unless you're expected to take on the entire United States government or something and that's another road of diminishing returns once that's over and done with they should consider a reboot take things back to basics or possibly remake the first game to make it more in line with the later games mechanically as for Just Cause 5 well first of all I would throw away all the design documents from Just Cause 4 and really examine what it is that made the earlier games so fun first of all the plot should be simple and straightforward I think taking on a US government agency would probably stir up some controversy especially considering the agency is a fictional branch of the CIA so I I would honestly have the plot be based around the agency defecting from the United States government and taking over like an Eastern European country using the technology they spearheaded or something give us the moral High ground and put us into a setting we haven't gone before so instead of liberating a country from a crazed dictator on behalf of the agency the leader of the agency themselves is the dictator then I would have the gameplay be something along the lines of this I would keep the front lines aspect of Just Cause 4 because it's an inherently interesting idea but I would also want the progression to be closer to that of Just Cause 2 where you have hundreds of agency-controlled settlements that you can take over by blowing everything up the further you go Behind Enemy Lines the stiffer the competition is but you can go as far as you want as long as you can take the heat the idea is the more you progress the more the agency settlements you take out the more resources of theirs you deplete and the weaker their forces become overall so the further the rebel Army can push that way progress is not made by any specific type type of chaos just chaos in general maybe you can even have it where every time you take out an agency settlement the civilians in that area become inspired and take up arms and it creates a new front line but if you're wanting to make hundreds of settlements that might be a little bit hard to balance so I would personally just stick to having an Ever moving front line and that way the front line almost acts as your game progress bar once you push to a certain point you can activate a story mission to progress the major narrative whatever that may be but don't make it too complicated gameplay is the focus first and foremost as for new mechanics well that's the tough part I think it would probably take some hectic brainstorming to be able to come up with enough things to expand the gameplay to justify the game I would keep the boosters and balloons but make them a side mechanic that you can activate in the menus make the primary use of the grappling hook to attach things and retract them together at your command and make sure to bring back handheld explosives to really help traversal I would honestly give Rico something like rocket boost for gliding because I admit when I'm trying to get speed up while gliding I have a habit of trying to Grapple too close to the ground and end up eating only have it to where they can activate for a few seconds at a time and give it a cool down like the jet pack and Red Faction gorilla as for the grappling hook I would maybe add a few extra modes of customization like if you grapple an enemy would you rather pull them like in two or fly in for a kick like in three and four or if you hit both ends of the grappling hook into the same enemy or whatever do you want nothing in particular to happen or do you want that contextual moment to result in the thing you grappled getting launched fun little customization aspects like that options are good for the structureless fun and there are also plenty of other little individual moments you can add to the grappling hook for example one of my favorite things to do in Just Cause 3 was to attach two grappling hooks to a single thing and retract them in order to slingshot them away what if we had a mode that automatically attached a grappling hook to two high nearby points so we can do the same thing but eliminate the TD of attaching a second grappling hook this is all just spitballing on my end I'm sure the average developer could think of 100 ideas better than this I just hope that whatever comes next for just cause that we're able to get things back on track because it's a great series that somehow manages to be underrated despite being popular and I want it to continue to thrive and I want Avalanche software to continue to succeed because they're great at what they do so we'll see what the future holds I want to be positive but I've been burnt before that's all from me I hope you guys enjoyed the video and remember if you're watching this because you yourself are a fan of the series remember we all just want what's best for the series and if you like this video and want to support the Channel please consider pledging to my patreon like these fine folks right here and also a very special thank you to user enutsu for going above and beyond and if you want to support me for free be sure to like this video subscribe hit that notification icon so you're always up to date on what I'm doing and leave a comment telling me what you think until next time I've been the king of snark style right here on Tactical Bacon Productions and I will see you next time peace

Channel: Tactical Bacon Productions

Views: 735,320

Keywords: just cause, from the depths, arma 3, just cause 4, just cause 2, just cause 3, just cause review, just cause 1, just cause 2 review, just cause 3 review, just cause 4 review, tactical bacon productions, tactical bacon productions god of war, tactical bacon productions just cause, battlefield 4, tier list, battlefield 6, square enix, elon musk

Id: G2LLATzsvG4

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022