The last couple of months have been a vast improvement on 2014 when it comes to broken game launches, but not everything this year is as watertight as it could have been. One of those games is Just Cause 3, whose performance on consoles and PC out of the box has drawn some raised eyebrows and frowns this week.
The developers today reached out to their fans via a Steam announcement to ask for patience. They know things aren’t quite right. They want to fix them. But first, they need time.
In the post, Avalanche’s community representative says the studio isn’t able to give any information on when a patch that might correct some of the game’s technical woes just yet. “We know you’re going to want specific information on when a patch will land and what will be fixed – we would love to give you that information, and we will as soon as we have it,” they wrote.
“But right now, a little over one day since we launched, we have huge numbers of players in our enormous game world and we’re monitoring all the data coming in.” The post goes on to say that the developers need more time to recreate the issues players are uncovering, a necessary process if those problems are to be permanently rectified.
If you’re playing on PC, Avalanche recommends you hit up the Steam forums for advice from the community that “could improve or fix some of the issues that have been reported”. That’s especially the case if you’re experiencing stuttering, running an AMD card, or crashes relating to infinite loops.
Comments
12 responses to “Just Cause Developers Need More Time Before Issuing A Patch”
With Steam being able to give out near instant refunds, I would say developers need to make sure their launches are as smooth as possible. Consumers now have an effective tool to vote against developers who don’t conduct stringent quality assurance before releasing their products.
This was going to be an instant buy for me. But I held back to check out the reviews. And now i’m not that keen. Seeing “Mixed” on steam is never a good sign.
I wouldn’t base a decision on steam community reviews, the steam community seems to be spiraling into one of the more toxic and self entitled communities out there, if a dev does something they people dont like, they will bomb something with negative reviews, Payday 2 is a good example of this, just because they added microtransactions doesnt mean the game is bad, whether they said they weren’t going to or not.
Reviews are always subjective, if you think something looks fun, you may enjoy it even if others don’t (kinda like the second and third Matrix movies)
I can say that after i finally got the game working (the Nvidia Gameready driver seemed to fix the issues i was having) I have had an absolute blast (no pun intended)
Steam reviews are an excellent warning to actually pay attention.
I’ve bought and enjoyed plenty of games specifically after checking their negative reviews to see what the gripe was. (I don’t trust positive reviews.)
You learn to filter out the crap. Buggy launch two years ago? Ignore. Internet Politics? Whatever. Developer failed to properly [SEXUALLY EXPLICIT ANALOGY] kickstarter backers and make them feel like special little princes and princesses to be put on pedestals indefinitely, to lord their beta bonuses over the filthy post-launch casuals? That’s actually a plus.
Sometimes you see more worrying stuff. Content-related stuff. Duration-related stuff. Warnings that you should watch a let’s play because while pretty in screenshots, it’s garbage in motion. That kinda thing… You learn which negative reviews are actually useful and which to ignore.
The real problem with negative reviews on Steam is that unless the publisher paid Valve for some front page featuring, they won’t turn up on the ‘popular new releases’ scrollbar on the bottom half of the top of the page. So it’s death to indies to get ‘mixed’, if discoverability is their main problem.
What’s important is that the degree of hate you have for a game gets democratized out. Payday 2 as an example, moved like… five percent on its rating. It was enough to shift it from overwhelmingly positive to mostly positive. Ohnoes. This is only because it was already on the borderline. Literally tens of thousands of other people had already voted and stuck with that vote. If the move had been bad enough to piss off the majority of their playerbase, then that IS something that a new player should be aware of: “It used to be good, but it’s shitty now.”
”Sometimes you see more worrying stuff. Content-related stuff. Duration-related stuff. Warnings that you should watch a let’s play because while pretty in screenshots, it’s garbage in motion. That kinda thing…”
And also, the most important thing to me, you can find out if the game actually works. 🙂 I wanted to buy Batman : AK and, after reading the steam reviews/posts, I decided to wait (i’m still waiting 🙂 ). Same with JC3.
Im not having any issues on my rig (EVGA 780sc , i5, 8gb RAM @ 1080P)
Epic fun 🙂
You know I’m so tired of hearing about games that get released with game-breaking bugs or massive performance problems. Its absolutely outrageous on consoles, as you have specific hardware requirements that you know for a fact will need to be met.
It used to be that a game came out, and you would have people who had problems playing (cant get it 100% right), but it wasn’t such a big deal. But the fact that it’s newsworthy and those articles mention a ridiculous amount of people having the issues just boggle the mind? Surely if millions of people have the same issues, it would have come up in QA or even when the devs were building the game? But hey, lets not let a minor issue like the product not working in the first place get in the way of our release date schedule!
What other industry lets this sort of shit slide? If a book was missing a chapter and they sent it to everyone a month later with some tape, everyone would go apeshit! If you bout a car and one of the wheels was missing, but they said they would ship it out later, the company would go bust!
This post pretty much sums it up. The only time games might need to be patched is where there is (arguably) unforeseeable online or server issues, and even then modelling should be able to prevent most problems. Where it’s an inability to keep pace with contemporary tech standards though – that’s just sloppy dev work.
Usually I’d try and restrain myself from jumping to conclusions that others enable themselves and others to before considering how much information I actually have on the subject. The problem here with “asking” something like this is that people have already shelled out their money and wouldn’t have, had they known the attitude of the developers in relation to this specific problem. Action speak louder than words and no time frame given in a message addressing the brokenness of their game on the first day of release is pretty appalling. I didn’t even buy it and I’m close to being offended at the whiny tone of the message. How do you get to ask favours from the people who paid YOU?
Enjoying it too FPS at 5760×1080 drops to 30 on my 980ti at very high, but no issues at 1080p stable 60fps.
Ill have to do some tweaking to improve the fps in widescreen cause it looks so damn pretty.
Also on widescreen I have a niggling issue where I couldn’t put waypoints on the map. Had to change resolution to compete training. Also in widescreen lots of disappearing and reappearing objects as they reach the extremities of the screen area.
How am I to divide my time between FO4 and JC3?
But they need even more time before they start issuing refunds amirite
I’m sick of loading times! Now they are telling me to wait… MORE WAITING… for them to fix the issues?