Holy crap is this game broken. Here are a couple things I have run into, having played about 5 hours (and it's only getting worse):

• Large amounts of texture and lighting flickering, especially in the cities
• Huge frame rate drops (down to 29fps from 60fps in the blink of an eye) - mostly from turning the camera and taking over military bases with concentrated explosions. However, frame rate drops are seen everywhere in Medici. I haven't held 60fps for more than 30 seconds.
• Complete freezes, especially when using the wing suit.
• Frequently dropping out of servers is a big problem.
• Planes (specifically jets) just explode for no reason. They will do bombing runs just fine until I am in their line of fire, and then explode when they get close enough to me.
• Texture and vehicle pop-in is frequent.
• Exiting the game creates a clicking sound and freezes until it eventually quits after 60 seconds.
• Calls from main story characters will stop abruptly if I'm fired upon, blocking me from advancing the story and requires me to quit the game in order to listen to the conversation again.
• And a number of other issues that I can't think of at this second.

How is everyone else doing with this game? Are consoles experiencing less texture flickering?

[PC Specs: i5-4690k, NVIDIA GeForce 970, 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Wired internet (60Mbps down)]

You can block Just Cause 3 in your firewall then choose "offline mode." Make sure you block the outbound connection and that should work. But yeah shits fucked.

Im having none of those problems and have played for maybe 10hours. I disabled "extended leaderboards" in the main menu becouse i got an literary endless stream of "your record of xx has been bla. bla." messages but disabling solved that so no problems otherwise.

@rethla: Thats the beauty of PC gaming! For some people it can be a broken mess because of some unholy trinity of hardware, driver and the phases of the moon that align in the perfect storm to mess up your game - for others it's smooth sailing. On consoles were all in it together and you can at least take solace in the fact that it sucks for everyone.

Yep... I just got back into PC gaming and, while I love it, I've remembered the downfalls. Fallout 4 is a crash-filled mess. I stopped playing it. I got Just Cause 3 on Xbone though (easier to travel with a console on the holidays). Frame rate seems pretty bad from the little I've played. PC is still probably the best option for this game at least.

No texture flickering on PS4 at all that I've seen, saw that you asked.

the latest game ready drivers fixed my fps drops, give them a try. http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

I guess I got lucky, no problems on my end.

I was so excited about this game and I was knocking on it's door on Monday night but then I heard about all the PC issues and console load times. The whole "it works for me" counter-point doesn't make me feel any better. I don't want to pay money to find out it's doesn't work for me. Really disappointing.

@handlas: I hear ya. I came back like two years ago and it was smooth sailing to the point where I almost forgot why I left, then I got Wolfenstein and man was that a herculean task to get that game running properly. Almost made me box up the PC for another ten years. Just like @lukeweizer said, the counterpoint to all PC problems of "works fine for me" doesn't help when it refuses to do the same for you - for reasons that are incredibly hard to diagnose at that.

Guess i will not be playing just cause 3 for a while.

My friend just bought a beast PC last year. Bought two 980 TI's.

He mentioned that Just Cause 3 doesn't support SLI and a lot of big games don't, feels stupid for buying two cards. I mention that it seems like Just Cause 3 is all over the place performance-wise on PC. His solution was to just buy the next set of high end cards that are released. What the fuck? Your solution to developers/ publishers not giving a shit and poorly optimizing their PC games is to spend another $1000 on cards that may or may not make the games run better? Scared the shit out of me and honestly just makes me want to avoid the platform all together if that's what I'm going to turn into.

You're taking the most extreme and ridiculous edge case possible and that's what you're scared of? That's like not going outside because you're scared of being struck by lightning.

I had a five minute load time on PS4 today... I decided I was going to play something else. I've also had the physics go all haywire, which kills me, which leads to another one minute load.

Hey, it could happen! The lightening that is, I don't know who is silly enough to SLI their PC these days with a ton of major releases not really taking advantage of it and top end video cards costing more than both consoles combined in some cases.

@humanity: I have two 980s.

@mike: Welcome to the edge case zone!

@mgard18 said:

Well, that's just a feature.

And that would be a really fun thing if it wherent killer loadtimes. I got 10sec loads on a PC with SSD so i can only imagine what consoles must be like. Im glad i choose Pc for this one.

Just got to a missionstart where it loads you to a point on the map, then it loads a scene with an helicopter landing for about 3sec or so, then it loads into a cutscene of dudes talking nunsense and then it loads to start the mission, then i instantly died becouse i went the wrong way and it started loading again wtf?

Gamedesign like that is just all the way bad. Naughty Dog solved loading on discbased consoles 15years ago and still shit like this gets released...

@mrasshat: looks like you got all the graphics there. That stinks man

if I may ask, what are your system specs? I've toyed with the idea of getting JC3 but I've got little desire to have another Batman:AK type experience.

Breaking News: Games are buggy and glitchy at launch!

More at eleven.

It's not that edge case-y. I'm planning on buying my first good gaming PC next year for XCOM and VR and I'm dreading the whole experience. Like, I want to experience VR. That's a 980 for the entry level. I hear people talking about Pascal cards so do I buy a 980 for a lot of money, play VR when it comes out and have a very expansive, outdated card in 6-9 months or do I buy an ok card as I wait for an upgrade that may or may not come?

It's a mess and I'm kinda pissed I will pay all this money and have to put the whole thing together myself. The notion peddled by the GB crew that people would bother with this mountain of bullshit for a slightly better experience and just drop their $400 (sometimes $300) easy video game machine is insane. I'm gonna do it because I'm crazy but I certainly don't expect any normal dude Mc bro (a large part of the AAA buying public) to bother with this nonsense.

@pyrodactyl: Make no mistake, it can be a bit of trouble but when it works and in all honesty games usually work fine out of the box 85% of the time, the difference in fidelity is significant. The quicker load times alone can completely change your gaming experience not to mention the better graphics. Imagine Bloodborne on PC where the time between death and playing again is 2-3 seconds instead of the 18-27 on consoles. Imagine open world games where the worlds spans as far as the eye can see with no pop in or vanishing background. I have nightmare stories from back when I built PC's between the mid 90's to mid 2000's - back then it WAS a mountain of bullshit. These days, as long as you do your homework, read a few threads and buy all the corresponding parts carefully then the stuff is fairly simple to assemble together. They color code slots these days for goodness sake.

The pro's are really significant. The only downside is that when shit doesn't work, man does it NOT work. You'll sometimes spend hours trying to find out why with tons of helpful people online telling you that it "works for me" or "runs great!" while you struggle to even get to the menu screen - and make no mistake, when games fuck up you are on your own, no one cares and your problem could be incredibly specific to your particular build. That is the unfortunate price you pay for gaming at a significantly higher lever the rest of the time. It's also fairly expensive and can get ludicrously expensive depending on how far you want to take it. A guy like @mike who is passionate about PC gaming and doesn't care for consoles is willing to go overboard and get two 980's when honestly for most games one would suffice - but if he has the income, why not right? PC gaming lets you tailor that passion appropriately to your income. There is a minimum starting price but after that you're free to dump as much money as you want and between peripherals, monitors, cases and mods, there are plenty of things to sink thousands of your hard earned dollars into.

I am running it on a 3.9ghz amd fx-6350, 16 gig ram, windows 10, samsung evo 850 sdd with a radeon 260x 2gb v-ram gpu.

I am 100% sure this is a issue with my 260's drivers, i had to get the 15:30 beta drivers just to be able to start fallout 4, ironically while it fucked up my performance in some older games it did make fallout 4 run beautifully, so i do not want to revert to earlier drivers since that would fuck up fallout, so i either have to wait with just cause until i am done with fallout or hope that amd releases some drivers that are not completely fucked, so it's business as usual for an amd owner then. ;)

@humanity: I totally get all that and mostly agree although that bloodborne comparison was a little off base. Because imagining Bloodborne as a PC game is really unrealistic. The only reason that game got made was because it had big Sony backing. That's how they were able to make a great, truly interesting game. That's one of my grips with the modern PC landscape too. Without that big backing pushing interesting projects and because of piracy every exclusive PC game is a goddamn F2P multiplayer game.

So yeah, games that appear on all platforms are best on PC (when they work) but PC exclusives are just terrible IMO. Not terrible in the sense that the games are bad (although I don't really like playing them), they're terrible in the sense that they're pushing the industry as a whole away from games I actually like and turning those games into worst versions of themselves.

It's the fact that that's what his mind went to solve the problem. Spend another $1000+ on new hardware 16 months after you just spent $1000+ on new hardware.

I'd be terrified if I was trying to plan a PC around a brand new hardware feature that wasn't readily available yet. That's something I'd wait till a month after release and see what works best.

@pyrodactyl: Bloodborne is just an example of how load times could influence gameplay. A more realistic example is Witcher 3 which never exceeded 5 seconds on any load screen for me when I played it on PC and with all the fast travelling I did I imagine if each and every one of those loads was half a minute I wouldn't have played as much of it as I did.

idk i think you're blowing it up to be a bigger deal than it is. I built my PC in 2011, upgraded the graphics card a year ago and bought more ram 2 years ago and that's it. Haven't had to go through insane PC hijinks to play any game, and none of them were completely broken for me except for games that were completely broken everywhere (AC unity for example). I can run most games at medium-high settings at anywhere between 30-60 FPS (though admittedly I don't notice FPS drops unless they're extremely severe). Like if you buy a 980 now yeah it won't max out shit at 60FPS in a year, but you can still max out games and get a reasonable framerate or drop some of the more graphics intensive settings like Godrays or whatever and you'll be fine for years.

Like yeah things happen where games are insanely glitchy for some PC configurations over others, but it's not like consoles don't have their fair share of technical problems.

I will agree that the notion that a lot of gamers will drop consoles to build expensive PCs is a bit ridiculous though.

@dystopiax: Like I said, I'm buying a PC because of XCOM and VR so I really can't have a middling but functional machine because it won't be able to run VR. My assessement was totally fair for my situation. I either blow everyone's mind with VR when it releases early next year and get a very expansive, soon to be outdated card in the process or I wait for the next gen cards. Either way I still buy a computer because I want to play XCOM.

It's a mess.

@lukeweizer but how can you know ''what works best'', will still work one year down the line when there's suppose to be a new generation of cards just around the corner? I could see all new VR projects shifting to take advantage of new ressources (Pascal cards) on what is, by all accounts, very power hungry hardware. Anyway, they pretty much said what will work best at launch and that's a 980.

Everyone on AMD cards needs to switch to the lastest beta driver(released 30/11), any other driver causes texture/FPS fuckups.

@humanity: Well, I got a second 980 (on Craigslist) because I have a 1440p/144hz G-Sync monitor. A single 980 really isn't enough to drive many games at that resolution. For most people, I agree that two or more cards is usually unnecessary.

Don't be afraid of pc gaming because of that, some games are just technical messes and no amount of hardware will fix it. And apparently this game runs bad on everything(i don't own it or plan on buying it any time soon). Pc gaming is fine, people who spend like that typically want the highest quality and if anything dips below 60fps(or 75/144) they feel like their hardware needs to be upgraded. A single 980 will handle most games at 1080p, with performance varying depending on how well the game is optimized for pc. But if your a console gamer you've probably been playing 900p 30fps for the past few years anyway, a pc will give you higher graphic fidelity and higher performance even on mid range cards. You don't have to have 60fps with 4k resolution to game on the pc, honestly most people don't and still have better experiences than on consoles. Also when a game is broken on pc often times modders will find ways to fix it, console games are pretty much fucked. Good example was the xp bug in the witcher 3, there was a mod that fixed it the next day almost while console gamers were kinda fucked for a while.

I own a Gaming pc and a ps4 and i game on both, i usually get open world 3rd party games on pc since consoles typically have a harder time handling them. I get first party, sports, competitive shooters(I don't like mouse and kb) and most fighting games on console. I found building a pc from scratch fun, and i enjoy the ability to upgrade it while i know my ps4 will be the same always.

just tried to refund it. I had 5 minutes too much of gametime i guess. steamsupport page is broken. i guess i should have excpected invisible triangles everywhere? after the glacial load times im just stuck with this game.

Hah, pupping.

The welcome return of young dog based words in place of expletives in thread titles.

The performance issues this game is causing people really seems like a YMMV type of a deal, which I suppose you can say about all PC games, but this one more than most in recent memory. I've been in a lot of Just Cause 3 performance threads over the last few days and there really doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for people's poor performance. My 980 Ti is running this game admirably at around 70-90 frames at max settings @1080p, while people with 980's and 970's, cards not all that worse than a 980 Ti, are struggling to keep a steady 40-50.

Glad to see Team Green is also experiencing lighting flickering, meaning it's a JC3 issue and not an AMD driver issue. I just replaced my GTX 760 with an R9 390. The 390 is definitely superior, but both cards ran the game in a very playable state (35-40FPS for the 760 with some settings turned down, 70+ with just about all the bells and whistles on the 390). I have noticed that disabling the in-game vsync boosts performance significantly for either card.

For reference I am running:

i5 4670K (OC'd to 4.4GHz)
16GB DDR3 1600MHz
MSi R9 390
Samsung Evo 840 SSD

I tried playing on a 750Ti (which is at the minimum). I'm upgrading to a 960 in the next couple of weeks (I don't have the money or the PSU for a bigger care), and I assumed that the frame rate drops were mainly due to the card. Nice to know that it's not just the card (because Mad Max runs pretty alright - I know they're completely different cases but JC3 had noticable FPS drops). It's weird because I am mainly a console gamer. I'm playing F04 on console and aside from Bethesda bugs, I don't have any real issues with its framerate.

Probably because in JC3 I'm meant to be really chaotic and zooming around in a wingsuit, when it slows down it feels really slow.

There's something very odd going on. Those fps drops a lot of people are experiencing. They look like load screens. In an open world game. All over the place including in the middle of cut-scenes. But you wouldn't make a game flush the GPU RAM, stall the GPU cores, and load in a new asset set. That wouldn't make any sense in a game like this. So it could be the thing is recovering a soft-crash?

The points where the GPU stalls (no core usage for an instant) coincide with when fps cratered in the game (moving from a solid 30+ to below 10fps - irrelevant of settings). They also seem to be flushing the RAM at the same time. That's really weird for an open world game. Also doesn't appear to exactly be loading the small 2GB of GDDR5 my card has. I'd also expect (from most games that can't hit 60Hz consistently) the GPU cores to be more than 70% active - it seems the game is constantly having issues feeding them. On a 4.5GHz i5-2500K that should be fine feeding the GTX760 GPU (hurry up Pascal, momma wants a new GTX1070).

Again, this is graphing a section of continuous gameplay so the stalls and RAM flushes are really weird behaviour and not linked to any particular setting.

The game is otherwise everything I wanted. I just want it to maybe aim for 60fps (the fps in the menus and occasionally in the game with the GameReady drivers) rather than seemingly being stuck on 30fps (most of the time) when v-sync is enabled on anything beyond the lower settings. And no random stalls where the screen gives up updating as it seemingly flushes the entire GPU pipe/repopulates the graphics RAM.

I know this isn't affecting everyone but it does appear to affect a fair number of both AMD and nVidia users so hopefully the developers have replicated the issue and are working on making sure it stops happening. Everything is so great when it isn't ruining a race (or occasionally crashing to desktop) that they really just need to get on top of this issue.

Have there been any substantial updates to the performance issues in this game? I got a refund the day after release when I realized Avalanche were going to take their time fixing it. At this point the only people talking about it are those for whom it worked so I have no idea whether it's been fixed at all.

I guess it doesn't matter anyway though, no way I'm paying full price after getting a 10% off pre-order price. An extra €5 for the privilege of downloading beta graphics card drivers and seeing the game run at 25fps on minimum settings on day 1? No thanks...

@rynox45: I think the opinions and excitement for the game have grown cold since release and not only because of the technical issues.

@humanity: It's a real shame. I went in thinking even if I hated the game I was okay paying full price since I got JC2 used and I wanted to support the developers, but to have it straight up not work was a metaphorical kick in the balls.