Yeah not good... texture res and LOD distance is awful (plus clearly no anisotropic filter) and looks somehow last gen on the whole. I'm usually the last to complain about these things but that image seriously looks like it's from a PS3 game (and not a very high end PS3 game either).
the main thing is the physics though, so unless you are blowing up the entire camp, it will look bland lol
I think it's fair to say that the engine this game uses is a bit dated. The game apparently has temporal SMAA but it is so poor that the game might as well not be using anti-aliasing at all. Also, lighting is fairly basic and there's tons of pop in and flickering shadows. I half suspect these are a result of optimisations to get the game running better on the ageing consoles. The PS4 version of Just Cause 3 was absolutely dreadful and despite aiming for a 30 fps framerate, rarely achieved it and just felt horrible to play with the janky framerate. The PC version wasn't that much better either. Oddly, I was far more impressed with the Mad Max game that came out several months before Just Cause 3. It looks far better visually, even the AA was better, and ran great yet it used the same engine! Not sure quite what happened between that game and Just Cause 3 but Just Cause 4 looks almost identical to Just Cause 3 in my opinion based on what I've seen of it, with things like water looking worse. I'll know for sure later on once the game unlocks but I'm not expecting to be blown away (no pun intended!) by this game's visuals.
It's the Apex engine iterated on since Just Cause 2 or maybe even the first game though the PC port of that was from the XBox version and not the XBox 360 thus missing several features. As showcased in Just Cause 2, Mad Max and Just Cause 3 it's been updated and maintained quite well although Just Cause 3 suffered from a lack of time more than anything and things are starting to clear up that something similar happened here as well. There's also the games The Hunter, The Hunter Call of the Wild and the upcoming Generation Zero all using the engine as well and then Rage 2 developed by Avalanche's Swedish branch. (This should have been developed by the US branch I think same as Just Cause 3 was.) The visuals are jarringly inconsistent here for some reason, water looks terrible (Just Cause 2 even without the NVIDIA CUDA water would look better and of course Just Cause 3 too.) the LOD is either broken or just weird with some objects just failing to load or popping in and out and the jittering and dither effects ruin any detail in the scene not really sure what happened with the game and then there's stability issues and Square having a clause about not showing cutscenes because they apparently weren't finished. That was two days ago. (The in-game cutscenes are terrible and the rendered ones are low-res and compressed so there's no quality at all remaining.) There are moments that do look good but even the particle effects and explosions are toned down from the prior game so I wonder what happened.
I bought it on GMG but now I wonder if it was such a good idea considering the graphical problems that people are talking about. I guess we'll see in a few hours.
surely some of the gfx issues are bugs? does not make much sense that they would intentionally make the water worse than jc2 lol. i dunno.
Well I've only played the opening section of the game - about 20 minutes - so I am only going to comment on the performance and visuals for now. The pros are: + Good performance at 2560x1440 at maxed out settings on a GTX 1080 Ti; seems to hover between 70 and 100 fps, although I haven't yet encountered any large fire fights outside the one in the opening section where you hack a remote terminal. Still it runs smoothly with no stuttering that I've noticed and controls feel responsive. + Plenty of cutscenes at the start so the developers seem to be making more of an effort to present a story even if so far it's nothing original... + Audio seems to be decent with decent voice-acting. And the cons: - … but the cutscenes are uber-awful. Not the direction or content, just the quality of the actual video. Seriously, I don't think Avalanche could have made worse cutscenes if they tried. For starters, these are FMV and not real time but so heavily compressed that they suffer from lots of aliasing (hair looks especially shocking not to mention distracting) and even colour-banding. Crikey, it's like watching early Bink videos from the GameCube or PS2 era, they are THAT bad! And it is so apparent when you switch from cutscenes to gameplay. I only imagine how horrifying they must look to people playing at native 4K!!! Why are the cutscenes not realtime? It looks to me like they've been rendered using the in-game engine but taken from the console build... the unreleased PS3 version at that! - Graphically the game is mediocre IMO. When the game actually started, the back of Rico's head was yellow and when I panned the camera around his hair turned bright yellow before going black again! lol There's lots of detail and overall it is a step up from Just Cause 3 but as soon as you start moving then poor aliasing, shimmering, flickering/glitchy shadows and poor LODs rear their ugly head. And the water looks like something from the PS2 era; it looks really, really bad with weak reflections. Seems to me that all this talk about optimising for the consoles has resulted in a game that has taken one step forward (improved detail) then two steps back graphically (everything else technically). Yeah, it's fair to say that I'm not impressed by the graphics at all. It's never a good sign when a PC loads up at 1280x720 which is what happened here. It's usually a sign for me that the developers haven't really put much effort into the PC version if it fails to detect the native resolution of the display or desktop. Still there's the gameplay. We can forgive shonky visuals if the game plays well, right?
I have theHunter: Call of the Wild and it is a great-looking game IMO. Just Cause 4 isn't. Goodness knows what they've done with the engine but it seems like the detail has increased from Just Cause 2 to 3 to 4 but technically the graphics haven't gotten worse with more noticeable pop in, weaker anti-aliasing (it was great in JC2 as that supported MSAA) and more in the way of visual glitchness such as shimmering and shadow flicker.
Damn, I was seriously considering this (haven't played a JC game since the first)... guess not. What the hell happened? Seems everything that could be f-ed up was and then some and I don't think the review exaggerates a bit, even. Plus in-line what has been told here too, so far. Side-note: I certainly hope they don't f up Rage 2 next... well maybe id will supervise the open world part a bit.
Played about an hour of the game now... sure looks ugly and glitchy... but... it *is* fun. You get most of the abilities within the first hour and the balloons and tethers are entertaining to play around with. Otherwise the game feels and plays a lot like Just Cause 3. A.I. and combat is almost identical and the vehicles still feel lightweight and almost pointless to use since it is easier to just zip around using the grappling hook. Also, after the introductory tutorials those terrible quality FMVs are replaced by realtime cutscenes. They're not brilliant or anything but at lease they match the quality of the in-game visuals. Quite why Avalanche chose to use FMV of such a lousy quality at the start of the game where first impressions last is beyond me as they could easily have all been realtime. Maybe it was a decision made to cater for less powerful consoles? Whatever, this isn't a bad game. Middling graphics aside, the physics are entertaining and there's entertainment to be had. How long it lasts depends on how varied the missions are for me. So far, the four I've done have felt sufficiently different which is more than I can say for the first hour of Just Cause 3 in comparison. Probably one to pick up in a Steam sale if I'm being entirely honest as there are much better (and cheaper) sandbox games around, though none of the others have balloons *and* tethers so there is that.
Does Just Cause 4 have the same repetitive 'liberate region to advance the story' like in Just Cause 3? I bought 3 at 5euro. It was a fun game but in short bursts.
Agree with what @Darren Hodgson said. I've played the game on 416.94 drivers. Let's deal with the bad first: - Strange, ugly FMVs at the beginning of the game. - Very mixed texture quality. Rocks for example look terrible, same with planks and some trucks, other textures look fine. - Some visual corruption on Rico (at some angles his head is slightly transparent). - Very strange key bindings in menus (Esc does nothing for example, you have to use the mouse to Confirm or Cancel). - I don't remember the map being bound to "1" in JC3 but that's the case with this iteration. - SSAO can be toggled but doesn't seem to work too great when enabled. - Performance is OK but could be better considering the visual quality. - Later when FMVs get replaced by in-game cut scenes there are some strange behavior with shadows. - When we're talking about in-game cut scenes, I notice very strange motion blur when a character in the particular scene is walking left or right. - Water looks worse than a PS1 game, absolutely abysmal! The good: + Destruction mayhem! + Some nice guns + Better overall handling of the character vs JC3 + Same type of corny story I personally felt that JC3 had a better overall visual presentation that was kept throughout the whole game, even in remote areas. If anyone is considering this game, wait a moment until it gets some patches. I would personally refund if I could and buy it in a few months. (PS. I forgot the water and a motion blur issue )
runs good and looks almost good AA is weird , motion blur causes frame drops and the world renders slower than normal i think here's a 4k video
I get around 70-75 fps in areas with a lot of vegetation, trees and bushes. 85+ in other areas. This is at 3440x1440 with max settings except Shadows at High and no AA.
well going off past history with deus ex and tomb raider the game will get at least ten beta patches so i reckon it will be fixed up nicely in time and tbh doesnt look that bad at all to me looking at kx11 video. Just Cause. Just be Patient. Just hold off for Sale.
Last JC i played was JC2, got repetive very quickly and i guess its not that different with 3 and 4 now. It was fun tho, but not very long...got bored very soon.
Well, the first two JC games were made by the main/original studio in Stockholm. JC3 and 4 were made by the new studio, in New York. JC3 was the New York studio's first game, and people were hoping that it's issues were just birthing pains that came with it being a new studio. But, to me it just seems that the New York studio needs to refining. As JC4 also came out in rough condition. While the original Stockholm studio made Mad Max, and released an amazing PC version. The guys in Sweden are currently working on RAGE 2, which gives me a ton of confidence in how that game will turn out.
