Hey, The Man: I intend to use theHunter: Call of the Wild [official site] for nonviolent video game tourism and you can’t stop me. Well, maybe you can; for all I know, players are locked into a tutorial where they need to shot a moose through each individual organ before being allowed to take a single step. Probably not though? I’ll soon see, as Call of the Wild is now out. It’s a first-person hunting sim, obviously, and a jolly pretty one – built in the Apex engine of Just Cause 3 devs Avalanche. Read the rest of this entry »
theHunter: Call of the Wild [official site] sounds almost like a game I’d adore. Pottering through countryside, woods, and wetlands (built in the same shiny engine as Just Cause 3) which teem with wildlife, through day and night, sun and rain, is very much my bag. I’m less keen on the ‘shooting animals’ part. Seems a shame to disrupt an afternoon stroll with bangs and blood, yeah? However, emboldened after reading Brendan’s ridealong with a real hunter through its free-to-play precursor, I think I’ll have a crack at Call of the Wild on its newly-announced release date of February 16th. Read the rest of this entry »
Ridealong is our monthly feature where Brendan travels deep into game worlds to meet, question and journey with the inhabitants that dwell within.This time, a real-world hunter takes him deer tracking and duck shooting in theHunter.
There’s a man making duck noises in the swamp. He raises a tubular horn to his lips and makes the duck sound again and again, looking at the sky as his spine cranes back at an unnatural angle. At his feet a sandy Labrador sits quietly. The man puts the horn away and gets out a shotgun. The next flock of mallards is coming in to land. Read the rest of this entry »
I find it difficult to resolve my playing of hunting sims: on the one hand, I enjoy their challenge and detail and often beautiful open worlds; on the other hand, I dislike that they’re about killing harmless animals. These thoughts are rushing back to the surface after seeing the announcement of theHunter: Call Of The Wild [official site]. It’s powered by the same engine as Just Cause 3 so it looks gorgeous, but the trailer below is about shooting an oblivious grazing animal.
What?! Didn’t Alice report just a few days ago that the Just Cause 3 Multiplayer mod was coming along nicely? Yes, but that was a differentJust Cause 3 multiplayer mod. The one that’s been cancelled is the one that was being made by the developers of the popular, trendsetting JC2MP. Although it might not all be bad news: its primary developer has gone to work for Just Cause creators Avalanche.
Never one for the conservative approach, Just Cause 3 [official site] is getting another batch of ostentatious DLC that’ll see protagonist Rico Rodriguez pilot powerful mechs and get to grips with an antigravity gun.
Mech Land Assault follows the Sky Fortress DLC expansion and marks the game’s second offering of additional content. Publisher Square Enix have now announced it’ll launch on June 3 (this Friday) for Season Pass holders, and June 10 for everyone else. Its big features include:
Just Cause 3 [official site] will be ready to blast off with a cracking-looking rocketpack in the Sky Fortress DLC on March 8th, Square Enix announced today, though only folks who pay for all the DLC up-front in the Season Pass will get to play then. Folks who’d buy it separately will need to wait until the 15th.
On the bright side, a free update is coming for all and sundry tomorrow, bringing performance improvements, faster load times, and more fine things.
You know those bits in the Iron Man movies where Timmy Stark rockets up into the sky then does fancy barrel rolls dodging missiles while blasting his shoulderguns? Great, aren’t they? Our lad Rico Rodriguez is getting into that game too, as publishers Square Enix have announced that the first big Just Cause 3 [official site] DLC pack is adding what is, pretty much, an Iron Man suit. (Without all the armour – Rico likes his chest hair rippling in the wind, you know.) Observe these antics:
Open-world explore ‘n’ explode ’em up Just Cause 3 [official site] has been out for a month now (it’s pretty great!) and the most exciting news around is surely that a multiplayer mod is coming from the JC2MP folks. All the game’s actual creators, Avalanche Studios, have to talk about is future patches and DLC plans. Pssh. Sure, yeah, I bet your performance boosts are great and all, but I’m far more interested in my PC grinding to a halt trying to render the antics of five dozen parachuting murdermaniacs. Ah! Pssh. Fine. Go on then, Avalanche, speak up.
When I received definitive confirmation that Just Cause 3 [official site] wouldn’t have any multiplayer support out of the box, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. If memory serves, I was talking to one of the game’s producers at the time so it’s entirely possible that I left the room wincing, with a wounded expression on my face. Later in the day, when I’d recovered, Avalanche told me that their dedication to modding support would allow for all manner of enjoyable shenanigans and, sure enough, the team behind the Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod have released the first footage of Just Cause 3 Multiplayer. Delicious.
Well, it’a a tradition now. As with Just Cause 2, and this year’s Mad Max, it is imperative that we gather together images of Avalanche’s central heroes not looking at the enormous explosions they’ve caused.
I’ve no doubt that Avalanche and Square Enix are well aware of what happened to Warner with Batman: Arkham Knight, which is why they’re taking a chummier approach to launch issues with Just Cause 3. The open world being-a-cool-guy sequel is beleaguered by visual glitches and wayward performance, and an AMD beta driver hasn’t fixed the issue for everyone.
A wider fix will, Avalanche have announced, “need a little bit of time”, but they’re using data gleaned from the playerbase in order to “recreate some of these issues and build fixes.” Read the rest of this entry »
Just Cause 3 [official site] is pretty great, you might’ve heard our man John Walker say. He’s been all over the parachuting, wingsuiting, exploding, exploring, and kissing a cow (we’ve all coughed politely and pretended our phones were ringing every time he mentioned the cow-kissing – boy has he ever mentioned the cow-kissing!), but some folks with AMD/ATI video cards are suffering graphical glitches. They’re finding nasty big holes in the ground, jagged polygons littering the landscape.
Switching to new beta drivers might fix it, and publishers Square Enix say they’re working with AMD on a driver update.
Avalanche’s Just Cause 3 is officially released Tuesday morning online and in something called “shops”. “Officially”, because it was apparently released early in a few naughty nations, prompting the developers to make a list of planned Day 0 fixes. Of course, that means the code we’ve been reviewing from for the last week also lacks that patch, making it tricky to know how many of the issues I encountered – in an otherwise stupendous game – will affect you. Bearing this in mind, here’s wot I think.
‘Nerdcore’ is that thing where people make rap songs but they’re bad at rapping and their songs are bad but the lyrics are about video games and movies from when you were young so it must be cool, yeah? If Kieron were still around, he might drop some musical science from a great height here, by which I mean make such a brazen declaration and take disagreement as proof that he’s right. Instead, it falls to me to post the launch trailer for Just Cause 3 [official site], which features some bad rapping about a video game (out tomorrow!) and its explosions.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Just Cause 2 [official site] doesn’t have a great mission in its entire running length, although it has some pretty OK ones. What it does have is a beautiful, diverse open world in which to wreak havoc of the most over the top kind, with land, sea and air vehicles, a re-usable parachute and a grappling hook.
I don’t normally like to watch introductions to games pre-release, but Just Cause 3 [official site] seems a fair game to make an exception for. I’m not expecting to play the wingsuiting, parachuting, grapple hooking action game for its plot. And so here: the first hour of the game is embedded below.
Oh aye, you enjoy your pottering around a nuclear wasteland, if that’s what you want. You know what’s cool? The fiery immediate consequences of giant explosions. You know what’s not cool? The grim long-term consequences of giant explosions. So you enjoy your fortnight in Fallout 4, just be ready to cause a billion cool-as-heck explosions yourself on December 1st when Just Cause 3 [official site] launches. A new trailer exists purely to show big explosions in 2160p resolution (or 4K, if you favour that misleading term). “Hey, we have explosions,” it’s here to remind you. “Look at them in high-resolution video. Aren’t explosions nice?”
Game series like Just Cause are a bit like Hollywood action movies. In order to be completely absorbed by their flash and pizzazz and glitz and glamour, we suspend our trust in common sense just a little, just enough, to allow ourselves to take it all in. Getting a sneak peak behind the illusory velvet rope can take away some of this majesty, but also offers the chance to see how a game comes together. The latest Just Cause 3 [official site] developer diary focuses on story and does just that. Grab the popcorn and let’s take a look.
