Just Cause 3 Offline Mode Decreases Load Times On PS4, Comparison With Online Mode Load Times

Just Cause 3 can have rather long load times on the PS4 and Xbox One. Some users have faced more than 3 minutes of loading before the game can resume after a death, while there are also reports of slightly moderate load times going as low as 30 seconds to more than a minute.

It has been observed that playing the game in offline mode results in slightly faster load times for the game, and we decided to see if this claims holds true for the game or not. We can confirm that the load times are indeed faster if we play in offline mode, even if they appear to be minor. These increased load times are likely due to the game communicating with the server or perhaps a weird bug in the game code, which can hopefully be patched.

You can see a comparison of the load times for the game below for both the online and offline mode. To start the game in offline mode, you need to disconnect your PS4 and then select offline mode as the option. You can connect your PS4 again and choose to remain offline in the game.

Online Mode Load Times

Loading Condition	Total Time
Start of game (1)	1 min 30 secs
Start of game (2)	1 min 30 secs
Start of game (3)	1 min 25 secs
Start of game (4)	1 min 38 secs
Start of game (5)	1 min 35 secs
After Death (1)	1 min 4 secs
After Death (2)	1 min
After Death (3)	1 min 4 secs
After Death (4)	33 secs
After Death (5)	1 min 5 secs
After Death (6)	3 min 22 secs
After Death (7)	2 min 10 secs
After Death (8)	3 min 57 secs
After Death (9)	36 secs
After Death (10)	1 min
After Death (11)	1 min 1 sec
After Death (12)	1 min 3 secs
After Death (13)	1 min 6 secs

Offline Mode Load Times

Loading Condition	Total Time
Start of game (1)	1 min 16 secs
Start of game (2)	1 min 29 secs
Start of game (3)	1 min 14 secs
Start of game (4)	1 min 10 secs
Start of game (5)	1 min 32 secs
After Death (1)	38 secs
After Death (2)	1 min 13 secs
After Death (3)	1 min 9 secs
After Death (4)	58 secs
After Death (5)	33 secs
After Death (6)	1 min 5 secs
After Death (7)	1 min 3 secs
After Death (8)	57 secs
After Death (9)	1 min 4 secs
After Death (10)	54 secs
After Death (11)	55 secs
After Death (12)	52 secs
After Death (13)	57 secs

The table above clearly shows that playing in offline mode does result in faster load times. Keep in mind that there have been cases where the loading takes longer than 3 minutes, but we can isolate it to a strange bug in the game code because once we started to get these long load times (2+ minutes), the game was stuck on a loading screen after one of the many deaths. We had to manually restart the game to get out of the loading screen, which seemed to get stuck right in the start. You can check the progress of the loading in the bottom right corner of the screen.

There is no disadvantage in playing the game in offline mode except players will miss out on the leaderboards and its various random challenges e.g flying using Wingsuit for X minutes. It is highly recommend to keep playing in offline mode until Avalanche Software manages to fix the load times on consoles.

Just Cause 3 will be available on December 1st for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One.