I'm really struggling with a decision here. I'm considering buying this on PS4 instead of PC so I can play it on my big nice TV. I've heard mixed reports about load times and dipping framerates - how do you guys feel now that it's out in the wild? Is PS4/Xbox One performance consistently playable?

Take this as you will, because I've just played an hour or so without the patch installed, so I have no idea if it affects that much, but I've already experienced noticeable frame dips in just the early stages of the game, before I even get to the real good stuff. The biggest drops weren't even when there was a ton going on on screen at once. I haven't played enough to say whether or not it impacts the playability of the game, but it's there and it's a real bummer. The initial load to get into the game is long, but the subsequent ones were fine.

I've played it on PS4, the framerate takes a pasting when there is multiple explosions on screen, it's very disappointing because the game is great mindless fun.

Here's a performance analaysis of the PS4 & Xbox One versions by Digital Foundry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjDWu6dEuxA

And a link to the article where they discuss it: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-just-cause-3-performance-analysis

In short: PS4 is 1080p/30, Xbox One 900p/30, and neither console can maintain even 30 FPS if there are any explosions or lots of activity on the screen. The Xbox One versions seems especially bad, and holy shit look at all that motion blur.

You can always move your PC to your TV and use a controller. If you can't, order a long HDMI cable or a Steam Link or something. There are so many inexpensive or free solutions to this, why limit yourself?

I would just get the PC version as this game just seems to scream 'mod support' in capital letters.

The motion blur solution is terrible regardless of platform, I don't know what they were thinking on that front. Characters actively smear during something benign as talking only cut scene. At least I can turn it off on the PC.

I've played it for a few hours (PS4) and the load times are close to killing my enjoyment of the game. I'm literally not doing any challenges just because of the preliminary load (which I thought we were beyond at this point for this kinda stuff). Also the online integration is horribly implemented. It's the same shit that we had with Far Cry 3 where even if you're playing single player you have to log in first (which takes a good while) and if your connection drops (which it will because the servers doesn't seem to be able to hold up atm) it interrupts you mid-game, and all it does is give you leaderboard alerts... which keeps popping up constantly.

@korwin: It really is, this might be the worst implementation of motion blur I've ever seen. I always turn motion blur off, but I definitely feel for people on consoles who are playing this. I understand a lot of people either won't notice it or don't care, but man...I think this motion blur is excessive and poorly done. I mean, just look at this - I know YouTube will reduce visual quality a little bit, but still:

It's immensely disappointing on PS4, the framerate drops constantly when explosions occur which happens a lot in this game. The load times are also atrocious, i took time on different load screens and had one that lasted almost 5 minutes!

The game also has really weird design choices, like no minimap making it near impossible to tell where enemies and objectives are. Also bases/towns don't show up on the main map before you have discovered them, forcing you to explore the entire map.

I've been playing for a few hours on the PS4. It's not a solid 30 but it's around there most of the time. The real bummer is the inconsistent loading, sometimes I would get a 10 second load and other times I would get upwards of three minutes like that helicopter Vis Electra challenge, which shouldn't have been that big of a load since it only needed to replace all those destroyed assets! Makes replaying a challenege quite a hassle.

Now that I've played a bit more, yeah...the load times are horrendous. Simply getting into or out of a challenge is like a minute-plus load, depending on what it is. In any case, it's totally unacceptable and kills the momentum of the game.

Wow, I'm very glad I bought it on PC now. The motion blur was making me nauseated, which I don't usually experience while playing games. I can turn it off on PC, which helped a lot. Those load times sound awful as well, I almost certainly wouldn't do any of the challenges if restarting caused a minute long load.

Well this is a mayor bummer! From the talk on the latest Bombcast it seems the load times might be related to launch server issues. But the framerate on the consoles isn't likely to be improved significantly I fear. Good thing I got burned by AC: Unity last year so I didn't pre-order this game, will pick it up on a sale later when the price coresponds with the product on offer.

This whole thing, games coming out broken, makes me thing if those embargoes are really mainly about focusing the media attention to a single point in time (which might have been the original purpose) or decieving the pre-order happy portion of the crowd. And I am one of those guys, I am easily hype-able but I have had enough at this point!

God dammit. In the bombcast comments I sort of disagreed slightly about the load times, but then it happened and I sat over 5 minutes loading a challenge. I didn't time it but yeah, it must have been over 5 minutes.

To load into the world area I was literally exactly at. That has to be some server thing right? It can't take 5 minutes to load 20 or something checkpoint gates.

@mike said:

@korwin: It really is, this might be the worst implementation of motion blur I've ever seen. I always turn motion blur off, but I definitely feel for people on consoles who are playing this. I understand a lot of people either won't notice it or don't care, but man...I think this motion blur is excessive and poorly done. I mean, just look at this - I know YouTube will reduce visual quality a little bit, but still:

For what it's worth I haven't noticed that a single time while playing it. It seems to only happen when they turn the camera fast in that video.

I have noticed motion blur when wingsuiting though, if you dive fast the screen will blur around a focused area around your reticule. It sort of gives a sense of speed, I think, but I'll bet it's primarily there to handle fidelity.

The framerate is dodgy, but it is the loading times that are killing me. Retrying a challenge seems to take longer than when you load into the world from boot up.

Im hitting 2 - 5 minute loads on ps4 when restarting challenges, loading cutscenes, or sometimes even just switching to the map. Its a real shame as I really want to play this game, but With those load times its completely insufferable. It's going to sit on my shelf until its patched. They will try fix it, right? Right?

I looked around a bit online, and I have seen several people claiming that playing the game offline (so you won't connect to the leaderboards) helps load times. So I guess I'm going to try that out.

Playing offline seems to help a little bit, but load times are still an inconsistent mess. I've never seen anything like this.

If they don't patch this I think I'll sell my copy (something I never do), because this shit is just unbearable.

@sessh: Is there any way to play offline other than pulling the cord ?

This is really disappointing - I was looking forward to playing it on consoles after being hooked on Just Cause 2 on 360. Guess I'll have to wait for a patch or just get that gaming PC I always wanted...

@ares42: Not that I've seen.

Also if you happen to get booted of the server and prompted with a "play in offline mode now?" prompt, it will try to reconnect you every time you hit pause/the map screen, which might take even longer than some of the load times. It sucks.

Oh and the improvement isn't great by the way. I'd say it shoves off maybe 10-15 seconds of loading while online, which isn't much when you are dealing with load times of 1:30 or so every fucking time.

I keep getting ambushed by loading screens and "server connection" screens that are taking upwards of 5 minutes each.

I am rapidly losing interest in this game. I mean these interruptions are insane. How did no one notice this?

OK, so there has to be an incoming patch for the loading screen issue, yes? I'm holding off on this game until some of these problems get a fix.

@sessh: I actually found it, in the PS4 network options there's a "connect to internet" option you can disable. And ye, it seemed like it might've helped a bit, if anything at least it got rid of the annoying pop-ups =)

It's a shame these don't hold up on the consoles better. Not only are the crazy destruction spectacles the whole point of this game, if these consoles are around for roughly the same period of time as the last generation then they'll have to last us until late 2020-2021 and this doesn't bode well for the future.

Right now I ended up at the login screen during a encounter called "Buggy Delivery", that was exactly what I was thinking...

@ares42: Oh, you meant on the console level. Knew that existed, but did not think of it, so thanks for the tip.

Is it really that bad? I really want this game, but I'll probably never have a gaming PC, at least not anytime soon. Should I still get it? Technical issues don't really bother me that much unless they're really bad (AC Unity).

I haven't noticed a ton of hiccups on PS4. Occasionally it gets chunky. My problem is the erratic load times. Usually just happens when I reload a challenge. Initial loads into challenges and missions aren't bad at all, but Crom save you if you die or want to restart.

Some of you are far too lenient on frame rate. I finally put a couple of hours into the game on Xbox and highly regret my purchase.

The game literally looks like it's in slow motion when you are in city areas causing things to blow up. It's just appallingly bad tbh. I may repurchase it on PC (got it on Xbox so I could travel with it over the holidays) because it's so fun to play but I can't handle how bad the slow down is.

As for actual bugginess, I've had it crash on me once. And, at another point, the game is going through the tutorial and it wants you to fly a helicopter to a location before a timer runs out. The first time the game didn't spawn the helicopter for me so I just had to sit and wait for the timer to run out. These two things were within the first 30 minutes of the game. Haven't had any issues since that though.

These consoles aren't going to last beyond 2017 lol

I'm not a PC snob and I am satisfied with console performance for most things but I find this game on PS4 to be unpleasant to the point where I might stop playing it because of the insanely long load times. It's kind of garbage.

Load times seem to have improved a lot for me (even when playing online), without rhyme or reason, really. Anyone else notice that?

Is the PS4 version really that bad? I have it on the way and that's really disheartening. I was really looking forward to this and the message I'm hearing everywhere is that it's near unplayable. Or is everyone being divas?

@ericjasonwade: unplayable is maybe a little strong, but it's not flawless by any means

Renting the PS4 version from Redbox was enough to make me put off buying it at all. Challenges, things you want to repeat for better scores and to get better gear, took so long to load, and that time spent waiting made me realize I wasn't having much fun with them in the first place. I'll probably pick it up on PC someday, but certainly not for a while.

I've got a bunch of hours on the PS4 version, and my subjective opinion is that the framerate has been just fine. It definitely dips from 30 when a lot of big, structural explosions are popping off simultaneously, but those moments are generally the ones where I'm not too worried about precision so it hasn't affected my enjoyment at all.

My only gripe with the controls on console is that it took me a long time to learn to tame the jumpy aiming reticle. Precise, split-second aiming is often necessary to pull off wingsuit grappling maneuvers and a mouse + keyboard and higher framerate would make that a bit easier. But again, nothing game-breaking for me.

The initial load time is around 2:00 for me, and challenge reloads vary from 15-35ish seconds. I saw a thread on reddit describing a memory leak somewhere in the game (at least on PS4), and I've seen the challenge reloads grow to a crazy 5:00 over the course of maybe 6 hours of play (spread across multiple sessions using PS4's Rest Mode). But restarting the console totally resets the load times. So while it's a bummer, know that restarting your console (or maybe just the game? I haven't tried) every 4-5 hours when you start noticing sluggish loads will bring them back down to a reasonable length.

Hopefully they patch whatever is causing the leak soon. I have to imagine that's a high priority, after attacking the XBone's framerate.

Doesn't seem like any version is running all that great but obviously pc is the way to go if you have a decent rig.

@mike said:

@korwin: It really is, this might be the worst implementation of motion blur I've ever seen. I always turn motion blur off, but I definitely feel for people on consoles who are playing this. I understand a lot of people either won't notice it or don't care, but man...I think this motion blur is excessive and poorly done. I mean, just look at this - I know YouTube will reduce visual quality a little bit, but still:

lol, well motion blur is the only thing that makes 30fps playable most the time. I don't mind it, but i have noticed that it makes me nauseous when gaming at 60fps so i turn it off most times now (30fps is usually fine for me though). Also i think the worst motion blur was the final fantasy type-0 hd for ps4 It did get patched though

Did people have problems with jc 2 on ps3? I replayed it last week and dear god that game runs at a barely acceptable fps a lot of of the times too.

I am have lots of problems with this game, it's like Assassin's Creed Unity of 2015, Lots of Frame Rate, long load times, keep on getting disconnected from the server and It asking me to play offline, But the biggest problem and is why I am putting the game down until they patch it is that when I call a supply drop the vehicles come destroyed.

I have the ps4 version, and the performance is not good, I honestly don't mind a little slowdown every now and then, I've accepted it as a console gamer, but JC3 is beyond that, I remember there being a lot of complaining about fallout 4's frame rate before it came out, and any frame rate dip in that game hasn't even bothered me once. But, Just Cause 3's frame rate is irritating the hell outta me. I've put in about 8 hours and I don't want to play it anymore because of this.

Forgot to mention that the game runs so poorly that even the map menu is sluggish and hitches up quite a bit. I'm not sure if it's that bad because of it being connected to some servers or what. Every time I try to play the game I get bummed out and have to stop after 5 minutes.

I've decided to just get it again on PC so I can actually enjoy it.

...actually I take that back. Looking at Steam reviews it seems half the people say it runs like garbage on their PCs as well. I thought it was mostly good on PC. Well this is very disappointing. I have a new PC but I've already been burned by Fallout 4 crashing every time I play it.

Yeah, I don't think this is simply a consoles can't handle this while PC can situation. Honesty, the whole game feels half-baked.

I will say, on the PS4 version, the framerate has only been an issue a handful of times so far. That part is more annoying than game breaking. I'd say of the 25 or so challenges I've done so far, 4 or 5 have had load times in excess of 15-20 seconds on restart. The challenge I just did was the worst. Twice on restart it took over a minute for challenge to reload.

Considering this has been a pretty damn good year for showing new consoles can run modern games pretty well, this one is extremely disappointing.

Those European devs made PC lead platform yet again.

Well I caved and just bought it on PC as well. It's night and day. What they have deemed acceptable on Xbox is a joke. It's nearly unplayable compared to having it run smoothly on a PC. Doing the parachute, grappling, wing suit while blowing things up on, most likely, 15 or lower FPS is very difficult. Also the menus are so much smoother and easier to use. They are so sluggish on Xbox; it's really terrible. I think Dan should of done his review like Jeff did on Fallout with console and PC versions being separate because the Xbox version (haven't played the PS4 version) just runs too much like garbage to deserve anything more than 2 stars. Well there's my rant... I wasn't 60 bucks but I blame myself.

I played Mad Max on both PC and Xbox as well and that game ran perfectly fine on both. Same studio, different team I believe. I would argue that game looks better than Just Cause 3. I guess I've learned my lesson and should jsut pick up all my stuff on PC. Though Fallout 4 has been a shit show on there for me as well.

@substance_d: New York, the capital of Europe.

That's really fucked up you bought the game twice because you were dissapointed by it! Don't get me wrong, I almost bought it on PS4, but the internet (like this forum thread right here) saved me from doing so. Also I went back to JC2 and after spending 10 minutes looking for the last thing to blow up in a settlement I just kind of realised I don't need that in my life - I understand that that is still a problem in JC3. What a shame, I had high hopes for this one!

It looks kinda rough on consoles. I want to rent it before I do anything crazy, so I can see if I can live with the performance as is. It's different to how I feel about Fallout 4's performance, because I can play Fallout 4 even when it seemingly dips below 20 fps, but Just Cause 3 is too fast-paced for me to easily look past these faults.