Avalanche Heads To Costa Rica To Collect Open-World Material

When a developer sets out to create a detailed, immersive open-world setting for a video game, there's often a lot of legwork involved.

Ask Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios. The team traveled to the Costa Rican rain forest this past spring in order to capture reference material for future projects.

Although they use a lot of Just Cause 2 footage in the video below, the developer says the material they gathered will be utilized in multiple upcoming sandbox games. That will probably include the third Just Cause , although we're not sure how this footage would be relevant to the Mad Max game scheduled for next-gen consoles. That's like…a lot of desert, right? But maybe there will be more diversity in the landscape than we think.

Anyway, this is the kind of necessary work involved when producing an open-world extravaganza.