Shown at E3 a few weeks back was, at that time, exclusive gameplay and demonstration footage of Square Enix’s upcoming title, Just Cause 3, but the exclusivity ended today. Posted just today on the official Just Cause 3 YouTube channel was the footage shown at E3 and a series titled Choose Your Own Chaos, a sort of spinoff of the original footage that expands on the features showcased in the original. You can find the original here, but the real treat is the Choose Your Own Chaos series.
Much like the Choose Your Own Adventure novels that saw their heyday over a decade ago, Choose Your Own Chaos is a series that cuts the original demonstration into smaller videos and allows viewers three ways to progress the demonstration in order to see the rest of the footage. The end of each segment features three annotations that represent the options available to viewers. For example, the original demo showed Rico destroying a statue, of the dictator ruling over the islands the game is set on, by tethering its hand to its head and engaging the tethers’ pull function to make it smack itself to bits. In the Choose Your Own Chaos series, the video stops before Rico begins this tether process and gives viewers three ways Rico can destroy it that they’ll see in the video they’re brought to. Each step of the way features one option that mirrors those shown in the original footage, but each of the three branching opportunities has two additional options that show footage not seen at E3, so check them all out!
If you haven’t played the Just Cause franchise, they all take place on semi-isolated archipelagos in tropical climes, and they all have some political military presence that’s set up shop all over the map in the form of bases and things like the statues and propaganda speakers seen in the demonstration. The games circle all of the over-arcing progression on a Chaos statistic, a sort of point counter, that goes up when you destroy the objects and buildings related to the antagonist of the game: the statues and military bases, etc. Just Cause 2 featured three factions to work for that each wanted to undermine not only the dictatorial presence, but each other. All these factors lead to a game based on zipping around a tropical island destroying everything with a horizontal red stripe.
For the upcoming Just Cause 3, the focus on allowing each player to craft their own personalized experience really shines through with improvements to maneuverability and a vast increase in the number of ways the player can go about blowing things up. Perhaps biggest of these improvements are the addition of unlimited C4 explosives and what the game calls the multi-tether. In previous games, Rico could fire one tether to attach two objects and that was it. The ability to make the fired tethers retract was also not around. Also in previous games was the stunt system that allowed players to hop atop moving vehicles and climb about between premapped points. For example, when stunt jumping onto a helicopter, Rico could hang from the landing rails, swing up to the pilots door, or crawl onto the windshield, but never could he move about after reaching those points. Each vehicle had their own set of possible movements, but no more with this latest installment. The demo footage clearly shows Rico freely walking back and forth atop the wings of a biplane.
If you haven’t played a Just Cause game, you really don’t know what you’re missing. Expect to see the next one released December 1st, 2015.