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"A lot of people are using the open world as a big level and putting their single player experience through it," says Just Cause 3's director Roland Lesterlin as we huddle in the warmth of Avalanche's Stockholm offices away from the lashing cold of a January snowstorm. "That's great - I love playing open world games. Just Cause is something a little bit different from that, though. "I always imagined when I was 12 years old - I tell this story a lot - when you're 12 you're smart enough to understand adults, but you're smaller than them. People are big, cars are big, the sky is big and everything is new. Just Cause has that joyfulness of being 12, and that's something only games can give you. That's where I think it sits, off on its own. It really is a sandbox about creativity. It's a whole bunch of tools, all these weird ideas we've had that all interlink, and then it's, 'what do you make of it?'"
After 45 minutes of fooling around in Just Cause 3, the new instalment in Avalanche's boisterous open world series that's being built over in its New York studio, Lesterlin's point comes back to me again and again. First it's through the fumbling, the initial frustration at not being able to make this world bend to my will and then, when all those systems finally click into place and I'm able to propel myself from one point of the map to another, it's in the heady, giggling glee of it all. One thing's for certain, though. I don't recall being quite as much of a dick when I was 12 years old.
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