Just Cause 3: Death of a Sandbox

I reviewed Just Cause 3 back when it came out a couple of months ago, and recently came back to it after seeing an announcement for the first major DLC drop due later this month and hearing about the multiplayer mod which is actually coming along pretty quickly. I've put about 8 hours into it since I stopped originally and while I'm having more fun with it than I was around launch, I'm still wondering what the hell happened with the series' "Chaos" meter in this game.

A quick refresher, if you haven't played the previous installment in the series - Just Cause 2. You're dropped into the island nation of Panau to depose the local ruler, Baby Panay. The game has you do this by destroying various military infrastructure throughout the country like fuel tanks, generators, propaganda machines, missile silos, refineries, etc. The game incentizes you to do this by locking missions, vehicles, and weapon upgrades beneath a requisite amount of "Chaos". This is an excellent mechanic in a couple of ways - not only does it give you a good and (at least somewhat) logical reason to run around and blow shit up, but the way the different levels of "Chaos points" capped out were entirely under your control. If you didn't want the story to advance, it wouldn't -- it was all up to you.

Just Cause 3 takes a different approach. While some of the story is still driven by the amount of destruction you cause, the unit of measurement has changed - now different areas of the map are divided and subdivided into regions and provinces, towns and settlements. I'm pretty sure I'm in the back half of the narrative swing here, but already I've played about 15 missions that either didn't have any pre-requisite or it was so low I accidentally went over it while just wandering around the map. Just having the plot of the game be independent from the open world stuff is fine, but there's another, bigger problem: Avalanche axed the upgrade system. Not only does that mean no vehicle/weapon/armor gears (which was a big part of why exploration in JC2 was actually fun and worth your time) it removes any sort of difficulty curve from the game aside from the "Heat" meter, which is fucked up in it's own way. Now, I'm not trying to say that JC2 was some sort of skill-testing gauntlet, but at least the way Heat build up made sense and you had the opportunity to gradually upgrade your favorite weapons and vehicles as you saw fit. Interestingly, that was all removed in JC3, while a weird type of location-specific (basically only for military installations) Heat called a "Combat Zone" was added. What's missing? Upgradeable anything, basically - health, weapon stats, vehicle abilities - these are all fixed values that you cannot influence, only attain buy unlocking and air-dropping, which is no longer based around a pool of cash that you have but rather based on a timer depending on the ... coolness of the item, I guess.

While all of these changes were probably done in the name of streamlining, accessibility and fun, they come together to create a gamespace weirdly reminiscent of Mercenaries 2 -- another much-hyped sequel that suffered from the classic open-world "lack of challenge" syndrome. Obviously an open-world time wasting simulator like this isn't where I should be looking for tough tactical decisions from, but the removal of player agency to affect the difficulty of the game, coupled with the weird way Heat dissipates almost instantly after conquering a town/settlement in JC3 definitely contribute to the game being more of a relaxed jog than a back-against-the-wall fight for freedom. But should it have been? I dunno.