Just Cause 3 is just days away, with a global launch on December 1 for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It's the first game in the series on current-gen consoles, and a lot has changed in the world of video games since Just Cause 2 launched in 2010.
Recently we spoke with Roland Lesterlin from Avalanche Studios, the Game Director on Just Cause 3, about what's new, improved and more explosive the third time around.
MMGN: Five years between Just Cause 2 and 3. That’s a long time. What do you think is the biggest thing that’s changed in the gaming industry in that time?
Roland Lesterlin, Game Director on Just Cause 3: The power of the consoles is dramatically different, and that allows the things you do in games to be drastically differently from five years ago. What we can do with physics today is amazing, what we can do with animation is very new, and AI, and all the real-time rendering effects. We can make worlds more realistic or more surreal or more whatever you want.
I also think the games industry is maturing a little bit. We’re all getting a little older *laughs* and we’re starting to see the genres expand outwards. There’s the blossom of indie, and the ground-swell of crowdfunding. That has been pretty awesome; we’ve seen creativity and risk-taking that you wouldn’t have been able to do before. That’s really influencing the bigger games as well, because suddenly it’s like: ‘hey, you can make a comedy game now!’ All of a sudden that sort of thing is okay and we know there’s an audience for it.
The other thing is the rise of YouTube culture. The ability to be entertained on the internet, and what that means when people stream and capture games, plus esports, this whole culture that’s about spectating video games. It’s pretty entertaining to watch someone who is really good at a game.
That’s been big for Just Cause, because Just Cause 2 had a YouTube feature, which everyone thought was pretty cool. We ended up with 12 million videos from Just Cause 2. That’s a lot of videos, and the top three all had over 12 million views. That’s crazy, that would be a massive hit on television. Nowadays you’re seeing YouTube videos easily crack those TV viewer numbers. That’s a pretty big shift in how we consume media in general.
From that YouTube community of players, did you ever look at anything and be amazed by something you never thought could happen, and take that as inspiration to top it in Just Cause 3?
It’s a sandbox first, yes an open world, but that’s a repercussion of it being a sandbox. We get out of the way of player creativity.
Oh for sure. We watch people do things we never even considered. I watched one where a person flew the small little personal jet under every bridge and ended it by flying through the casino, which was this tiny little space that was never built to have a plane go through it.
We realised Just Cause is not just like a regular game. It’s a sandbox first, yes an open world, but that’s a repercussion of it being a sandbox. Let’s create all these tools and system that work together, then unleash the player upon it and see what they do with it. We get out of the way of player creativity.
We looked at players in Just Cause 2 that wanted to spawn five busses and drive them all off a cliff. We think that’s awesome, and made sure they can do things like that in Just Cause 3. We changed our entire rebel drop system based on that, so you can get any weapon or vehicle you want and just throw it right in front of you. Boom! It’s right there in the world, you don’t have to worry about cutscenes or anything, and we even make fun of ourselves doing that with confetti exploding around it. It’s all good fun.
I wrote this down, because there was one great line that came with a trailer recently. It said ‘Just Cause 3 has explosions…and a story’. That sums it up so well. Was it a conscious effort to point out you’re taking the story, I don’t want to say more seriously, but placing a greater emphasis on it than in previous games?
Honestly, we started with the sandbox. We started with the gameplay first and foremost, with the player experience. We wanted to do a fun story and an action-comedy is super fun to write, as you get to write every great one-liner you can think of. Creating a great villain character is really fun and we got to work with some great actors doing it.
But, you know, Just Cause isn’t about the story. People don’t come to play Just Cause for the story, and we know that. But hopefully we’ve made a story where players will see there’s some heart and fun characters. It’s very much a character-driven story in a massive, ridiculous world…that you blow lots of stuff up in.
Last-gen there seemed to be a focus on ‘our world is bigger than that world’, but that seems to have gone by the wayside now. It’s more about what you can do in the world — are you finding that’s the expectation from players?
For sure. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Just Cause 3 is a really big game, it’s 400 square miles [about 1000 square kilometres]. It’s as big as Just Cause 2, but it doesn’t need to get any bigger than that. We’ve changed our technology so we can carve more into the landscape itself and now make giant caves and tunnel systems, because we wanted to make deeper bases inside the world and change how players approached it.
Really, we wanted to look at how players moved in the world. We updated the animation system, rebuilt all the vehicles from the ground up and brought havoc destruction into the world, so entire bridges can be destroyed in unique ways and our whole train system can be derailed, you could even use one as a weapon. We spent heaps of time with jets and we did a whole buoyancy model with boats with a fully physicalised wave system.
Honestly, we started with the sandbox. We started with the gameplay first and foremost, with the player experience ... Just Cause isn’t about the story. People don’t come to play Just Cause for the story, and we know that.
People expect quite a lot out of games now. What’s fun about that is the bar gets lifted by every great game that comes out every month, and then I go back to work and we need to look to lift the bar even higher. There’s a competitiveness that exists between devs, and it’s a very friendly competitiveness. Developers are very open most of the time and it’s a small tight-knit community of people who make big games. It’s hard work and you spend years doing it.
There’s always that moment when you’ve spent years making a game and know someone might then only play it for six hours and think ‘that was okay’, and I’m thinking ‘oh my god, that was years of my life and you just thought it was okay’. So we really want to surprise people and make a game where it will be memorable and something they want to go back to.
You’ve got the player who will only play six hours, then the other side is those playing for hundreds of hours, and now you can watch live on Twitch. What’s it like as a developer to watch someone play this game you’ve spent years making?
It’s so much fun. The biggest thing I love is hearing someone play it. If you have two people together, one playing, inevitable they egg the other person on. ‘I bet you can’t do this or that’. Then I love watching them try and pull it off, and either they succeed with lots of cheering or fail and it’s hilarious. Just hearing people having fun playing the game is pretty rewarding, we had a lot of fun making Just Cause 3 and when you have a lot of fun working on something, there’s something special that sneaks into it.
We’ve been laughing and having fun with it for years and now I’m starting to see gamers play it and laugh themselves. That’s a very rewarding moment. It’s not easy to make such a big game, it can be very challenging, but now I’m excited to see all the videos and what everyone does in Just Cause 3, and I’m sure that will inspire us to make even bigger and better games in the future.
What’s the inspiration behind the wing suit? It’s a big step up from the iconic grapple hook and parachute combo, which was always awesome fun.
A couple of years back GoPro cameras were coming out and people were using them to film all sorts of things, like skiing and base jumping, and the wing suit culture was very, very young. We saw these videos of people blasting through canyons in France and doing some crazy stuff. I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie myself, but I don’t think a skydiving instructor is going to recommend you wing suit it, because that’s probably death if it doesn’t go well. So the alliterative is to make a digital version of it.
A big part of that was getting the wing suit right so it feels powerful, while also enjoyable to be in-flight. It’s something, I don’t quite know what it is, but I’ve always felt that I’ve wanted to fly.
When we were early in development of Just Cause 3, we decided we wanted to convince players to get up in the air more. To get people into this 3D vertical space, off always moving horizontal, we had to create something like a parachute that is slow, steady and easy to fight from. Once you got up into it, whatever we did needed to calm down so you can still shoot from there. But once we slowed the parachute design down, we lost the traversal technique from Just Cause 2 of combining the parachute and the grapple. You can still do that in Just Cause 3, but by adding the wing suit there’s a whole new vibe of moving through the world.
We wanted to make sure, with a world as big as Just Cause 3, that it’s really fun just to go from one side of the map to the other. The vehicles have to be really fun to drive around, and a mix of wing suiting, grappling and parachuting has to be really fun to almost convince the player not to use fast travel. It’s there, but a lot of the fun is on the way to a location through random encounters or finding a base or a town. We want to encourage that magpie syndrome; wow, shiny object, let’s go play with it. A big part of that was getting the wing suit right so it feels powerful, while also enjoyable to be in-flight. It’s something, I don’t quite know what it is, but I’ve always felt that I’ve wanted to fly.
Do you have any obscure facts about Just Cause? Something strange that happened in development or that you put into the game as an obscure reference?
Well, for historical nerds, there is a rebel base in the bottom of region two that exists that has an aircraft carrier in it that’s half-sunk into the ground. During World War II, one aircraft carrier sank in the Mediterranean. That aircraft carrier in the rebel cove is based on the real aircraft carrier that sank in the Mediterranean. Our game is inspired by the area, so we wanted to have something real and some nerdy references hidden in there about Mediterranean history.
Thanks for your time!
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