Just Cause 3 on Console Appears to have Bad Case of Memory Leakage

Just Cause 3 is out today, excitingly, and the game about grappling hooks, gratuitous explosions, and- oh, wait, I did this part already.

Regardless. It’s out today for the PS4, PC, and Xbox One… although the Xbox One version is proving to be less than desirable, unfortunately. You thought Bloodborne’s minute-and-a-half long loading times were bad? Try a fifteen minute loading screen--that’s right a quarter of an hour. And you have what appears to be a terrible case of memory leak to blame.

So what is a memory leak? Basically, in every piece of software, you need memory to store data, and the data stored in memory is labeled a certain way. When you need to call on that data, be it assets or whatever, you call on it by that label, then it’s erased. So, for example, you need an explosion, the game pulls explosion files from its memory, then that explosion data is erased after it’s done going boom. Memory leak is when it doesn’t get erased: it’s not exploding forever, it’s just invisible code that slows down the process.

That appears to be the problem on the Xbox One version of the game, where a mere hour of game time can cause loading screens as long as fifteen minutes and frame-rate drops all the way down to 17 FPS. The report comes to us from NX Gamer, who continued to say:
 

“Some of the AI goes mad, the physics can react really oddly and unfortunately on top of all these problems, the performance with a game that's totally designed around blowing stuff up and having this chaotic... world doesn't perform very well at all.”

So, while the NX Gamer hasn’t tested the PS4 version (Although Reddit claims it suffers from similar, albeit less pronounced problems), the PC version is apparently fine, so long as you have the hardware to deal with it. If you do get this problem, they say resetting the game will get rid of the memory leak for a time, but it will come back, so, you’ll be forced to play in hour-long stretches or so.

Not exactly a great launch, but at least it’s better than Batman: Arkham Knight.