Ever since Grand Theft Auto Online debuted more than a year ago, Rockstar has been promising that players would be able to team up and go out on heists. And then kept promising. And kept promising. And now, finally, those heists have been revealed!
This comes complete with an interview over at IGN that gets into the Heists in detail, including why they took so long. The short answer? Rockstar didn’t want them to suck:
So we started working on the concept: a series of multi-tiered missions featuring diverse prep work, a range of different types of gameplay and a big finale, where team coordination and playing your own distinct role could make the difference between success or failure… As it turns out, creating missions of that complexity for multiple players at the same time was much more difficult than we anticipated and every time we thought we were close, something would send us back to square one.
As for the heists themselves, they play out a lot like the heists in the single-player campaign. You get together a crew; buy or steal what you need; get the loot; and run like hell. The main difference is that the prep missions have considerably more pyrotechnics. For example, instead of just finding a getaway car on the street, you steal it from some gangsters.
The idea is to make them as replayable as possible. If you’re the team leader, you’ll have a different experience than the getaway man or the safecracker, and each role has multiple choices based on what you steal and how it comes together. Which is a good thing, since there are only five Heists debuting next year. But it’s twenty hours of gameplay, for free, so there is that. We’ll be able to start robbing banks with our buddies in early 2015.