Alas, Just Cause 4 will not include an official multiplayer mode, developers Avalanche Studios have said following the drive-o-fly-a-shoot-o-explode sandbox’s announcement at E3 this week. None of the previous games in the series have officially featured multiplayer, so it’s perhaps not wholly a surprise. However, sanctioned-yet-unofficial mods did add multiplayer to the past two games – and in 2016 Avalanche hired the lead developer of Just Cause 2’s multiplayer mod. But no, it seems there’ll only be one Rico Rodriguez blowing things up in JC4, not hundreds of hooligans romping all over.

“Just Cause 4 will not feature multiplayer,” creative director Franceso Antolini told PCGamesN this week. That’s all. Ah well.

Hopes were cautiously high for multiplayer in Just Cause 4 after Cameron “Trix” Foote, the lead developer of the Just Cause 2 Multiplayer mod, announced in 2016 that he was joining Avalanche.

“I’ll be able to bring many of the things you know and love from JC2-MP into future Avalanche experiences, while reaching heights that a mere mod couldn’t facilitate,” he said at the time. That wasn’t a promise, of course, and didn’t even explicitly state an intent. But hope springs eternal.

After Foote’s team ended their efforts to make a multiplayer mod for Just Cause 3, another team stepped up and released their own in 2017.

The Just Cause multiplayer mods are a special kind of chaos, especially on busy servers. One Rico can cause a lot of trouble, but throw dozens or hundreds together and it can be a non-stop explode-o-rama with cars, jets, and parachutes all over. But they’re also full of races, antics, and plain ol’ banter.

Part of me hopes that Foote might yet semi-officially work on a multiplayer mod, or at least that the game will leave technical room for someone else to mod it up. Fingers crossed.

Just Cause 4 is due out on December 4th via Steam, priced at £45/€60/$60.

Check out our E3 2018 tag for more announcements, trailers, news, and goodness knows what else.