Just Cause 3 REALLY Wants You to Get Online

For those of you intending to pick up Just Cause 3, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, this game is insanely fun to play, and there are countless ways to cause massive destruction and explosions it’d make Michael Bay blush like a teenage schoolgirl. The bad news is, the game really wants you to connect to its servers.

When you boot up the game, the game will inform you that it’s trying to log you into its servers. Okay, it’s a little annoying and it’s taking quite a bit of time to log me in, but whatever. It’s just a one-time deal, right? So you’ll (finally) log in, and you’ll jump straight into the world of Just Cause 3! Awesome! Time for explosions!

But then 10 minutes later, the game will automatically pause as it brings up this screen:

Oh. Connection lost? If you click ‘Retry’, it’ll probably take awhile to log back in again, just like how it was at the main menu. Better to just play the game in Offline Mode. At least there’ll be no more interruptions, right?

So you’ll continue playing the game, happily indulging in your childish fantasies of grappling walls like Spider-Man. But you need to take a break, or you need to check your map, or you realize subtitles are disabled because you forgot to tweak your options in the pause menu. So you’ll bring up your map, and be assaulted with this message:

And then the game proceeds to take another minute or two to log you back in again. The vicious cycle continues. You’ll lose your connection, bring up your map or go into the pause menu, get logged back in, continue playing, and then lose the connection again.

I get that Just Cause 3 really wants you to challenge yourself by checking out leaderboards when you’re online, but when the servers are so volatile and when it takes so damn long to just log back in, it’d be nice to at least have the option to play offline. Too bad the game’s Offline Mode doesn’t even work as intended when the game just logs you back in the next time you pause anyways. As if the atrociously long loading times weren’t bad enough already.