Just Cause 4's first big patch is "just the start of the work" planned to fix it
Stability, controls and textures semi-tackled
Just Cause 4 stuck its landing about as elegantly as a Victorian flying machine made from long-johns, strawberry shoelaces and seagull wings - here's John howling about its numerous misfires in our Just Cause 4 review - but developers Avalanche aren't giving up on it yet. Steam reviews currently average out to the dreaded Mostly Negative, with the vast majority of thumbs-downery prompted by the presence of more bugs than the family movie box office in 1998.*
Undeterred (well, probably quite a lot deterred, let's be honest), Avalanche recently pushed out the first big JC4 patch, which attempts to wrestle the most overt boo-boos to the ground - including fixing texture pop-in, making keys remappable and menus less miserable, and overall 'stability fixes'. They also promise that this is "just the start of the work we are carrying out," with more patches planned next year. They're also "very sorry to hear" that so many people have had a rubbo time with JC4, if that helps any.
The patch went live at the start of the weekend, but, on Steam at least, the reception has not been exactly rapturous. There's a certain amount of vengeful finger-wagging in there, sure, but numerous reports of crashes and weirdo glitches abound, plus some comments that distracting micro-stuttering has been introduced, suggesting that, yup, a bunch more needs to be done yet.
I can't imagining that fixing up a game that spins as many plates as JC4's big ol' sandbox o'silliness does is straightforward, so we're probably going to have to exercise more patience even though, clearly, the game shouldn't have been released in this state. As John's compendium of JC4 technical embarrassments ably demonstrates:
The (somewhat) specifics of what the patch does are these:
- Numerous stability fixes
- Improvements and fixes to menu navigation for mouse and keyboard users
- Support for remapping of movement keys
- Improved vegetation rendering and asset updates
- Fixes to some texture mapping issues
- Increased mouse sensitivity range
- Corrected specialised vehicle support for mouse and keyboard players
- Fixed issue with steering flying vehicles with keyboard
- Fixed the disabling SSAO option in Graphics menu, which resulted in broken Ambient Occlusion
Of course, for some folk the disappointment is as much about features as it is performance and whatnot, so happy endings are not necessarily guaranteed here. Oh, it's been a bit of a silly end of the year, between this and Fallout 76, hasn't it?
*Truly, we all still bear the scars of the great A Bug's Life vs Antz war