GTA V Online: A Year Without Heists?

[Something Amyss]

So....

With the latest DLC for GTA V Online having just come out, it's looking more and more likely that we'll see Heists, one of the supposed big features of GTA V, within a year of launch. There have been rumours that we won't see them until the release of the current gen and PC versions of the game in...Wait, does it even have a date yet? Anyway, I'm starting to suspect that this is true, even if the rumours have no evidentiary basis.

People defend the delay of heists in terms of Rockstar "getting it right." Given their track release with their online updates, I expect not only will that not happen, but there will be a ton of issues with existing content. More to the point, I suspect there will be some sort of "Waterworld" (or "Duke Nukem Forever," if you prefer) effect.

Which brings me to one of the reasons I bring this up for discussion. That is my opinion: that heists will never live up to the hype of over a year since the big deal was made and nearly a year since launch. That nothing will be good enough to justify a year's wait and such. I'm wondering how others feel.

The other point of discussion that comes to mind is the question "would anyone else get away with this?" I look at where we are in gaming with SEC and BBB complaints against Mass Effect and even a class action lawsuit because games aren't truly 1080p, and then wonder why there hasn't been a bigger deal made about this. I mean, yeah, I saw the bile on Rockstar's Facebook page and some complaints on their support site, but it's been fairly insular. The closest comparison I can come up with is "Valve Time," and I don't know. Have they ever released a game lacking advertised features and taken this long to implement them? I just don't play enough Valve games to know.

But again, you compare the response to general responses, and it's sort of baffling.

I know some people don't care about this stuff, and that's fine. But I personally don't think it's unreasonable to expect advertised features in a timely fashion for games you have taken money for. Heists, and to a lesser extent other features that were delayed and whatnot, were a large selling point to the game. The capacity to organise them with friends would be a massively cool thing and was a plus. There's a reason people are still eagerly anticipating them.

This isn't to say all complaints are valid. There are people who are pissed off that the flight school update didn't include the rumoured VTOL, something Rockstar never promised. While it's sort of disappointing that it's not true, I think that anger is the wrong response as they didn't promise or advertise anything of the sort. But heists? Heists have been there from the beginning of GTA Online. and with each successive release of content (often lackluster), I feel a little more lied to.

 

[Fappy]

Heists were the whole reason I got excited for GTA Online in the first place. No matter what they do, it will be too little too late. GTA Online launched as a broken, unfriendly, troll factory and heists being introduced won't likely fix that.

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

R* also doesn't seem keen on making any single-player DLC. Then again, I never held on to any hope that they would after they started doing all they could to frustrate people into buying those stupid shark cards. I had a feeling that they would focus all of their efforts on milking the cards as far as they could.

Sometimes I get a bit sad thinking of all the cool stuff I got in that game and how I have no incentive to go back and use it. My pink and blue dunebuggy, the authentic paint jobs on my classic cars, my "SHMILLSN" license plate (I LOOOVED that!), rocked-out fashion, a hot-pink armory, smooth jets... all that gone to waste.

Did you play on Xbox or PS3? I have Xbox and my brother told me the online was much better on Playstation because it wasn't as full of horrible little tweakers whose motto is "if it moves, kill it."

 

[MarsProbe]

R* also doesn't seem keen on making any single-player DLC. Then again, I never held on to any hope that they would after they started doing all they could to frustrate people into buying those stupid shark cards. I had a feeling that they would focus all of their efforts on milking the cards as far as they could.

Sometimes I get a bit sad thinking of all the cool stuff I got in that game and how I have no incentive to go back and use it. My pink and blue dunebuggy, the authentic paint jobs on my classic cars, my "SHMILLSN" license plate (I LOOOVED that!), rocked-out fashion, a hot-pink armory, smooth jets... all that gone to waste.

Did you play on Xbox or PS3? I have Xbox and my brother told me the online was much better on Playstation because it wasn't as full of horrible little tweakers whose motto is "if it moves, kill it."

I tried to get into GTA Online recently on 360 and despite my mental state being low (or stable I guess you could say) I always seem to end up in lobbies where the majority of the players have either already gone psycho or are just about to who will pick you off if you so much as move. It means I rarely explore the world anymore and just jump straight into missions or whatever straight from my apartment.

Not really sure when heists will be released - after all this time, it is kind of hard to care now, I think.

 

[josemlopes]

I still play it often and I expect it to come the same time as the next gen versions get released to promote the game even further.

Last time they talked about them they said that they would release them in the period of two months (the Spring updates), for them to say that is that they have it almost all wrapped up at that point (they wouldnt say two months if they were certain they wouldnt meet the deadline as people were already busting their balls a lot, they would keep saying "It comes when its ready") so for me it seems that the delay was a strategic move from their part (sucks for us though).

Either way I still enjoy the game a lot, people seem to kill eachother less since the mental state thing and either way, the player can just crete an invite only session with his crew or friends, interacting with strangers simply ends up in killing eachother. I like doing the missions and fuck around since I dont care much about money so I just do them for actual fun.

Still waiting for a friend of mine to get the game for me to play with him in co-op, for now I have only done the missions alone (they remind me of the missions in GTA3).

 

[GonzoGamer]

Yea, at this point they at least owe us an explanation: why we're waiting, when it will Really be released.
But I haven't gotten pissed about it myself because every month they keep some other sort of free compensation that up until very recently has been very cool. And I say free even though it's a transparent push for shark card sales with the inflated in game prices they have for the new stuff.

Really what gets me to keep playing it is the content creator; making stuff and playing other people's creations. There's a lot of jobs out there way cooler than the R* & the verified jobs. To me it's become like a whole nother game. So even if/when heists do come out(unless it comes with Heist Creator; why it might be taking so long), I'll probably be just as excited as I have gotten with any of the other updates.

I think it'll be a while before we see any SP (pay-for) dlc but I think (well, I hope) that's because it's going to be big; like fly off to another city big.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I think R* didn't put enough afterthought or foresight towards the GTA:O popularity and just how many bugs can present themselves over large networks. It doesn't surprise me there haven't been any single-player DLC packs, not because they don't believe in it but because the GTA:O thing has taken precedence and been more than they thought. Its like buying a cat and ending up owning a tiger...

 

[josemlopes]

Disregard GTA V Online, acquire Payday 2. A small little studio with less than fifty people can put out updates every week, including new major DLC just about every other month, as well as constantly tweaking heists, skill trees, adding new enemies, weapons, and other equipment. I don't know why Rockstar has such a problem with it. The developers of PD2 don't have to make PvP and open-world considerations that anybody working on GTAV O has to, but at the same time, I doubt its that much of a delay, and while the studio behind Payday 2 is having all of their frequent updates they're also working on a new game at the same time.

I don't own GTAV, and really the only thing that got me interested in getting the game was the online mode, and missing the content that it does, I'm not interested in getting it as is. I've invested enough in games where they don't deliever on their promises in a timely fashion so that they can shove out unnecessary, expensive content in its place *cough* Mechwarrior Online[footnote]If you want a mech game, you're probably better off with Hawken or World of Tanks.[/footnote] *cough* so I'm not jumping for joy at the thought of dealing with this with yet another game. I will say though, that once they finally stop dragging their feet, there's an opportunity that the developers can use to either breathe new life into the game, or it just drops off and is worse than before.

Payday 2 is kind of shitty though, I liked the first one a lot but the second one felt like it was less since only with end game gear can you actually pull of the stealth and the levels arent as interesting for combat (the majority of the game). And didnt they promised stuff that never they delivered too?

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

I'm at a point where i stopped caring. Rockstar supports the online mode pretty well but on the opposite they constantly make it harder to get ingame cash by actually playing the damn game. It's like they try to force people into buying cashcards. My guess is that the release of the promised heists would either hurt their sales of those damn cards or create an bigger uproar if the ingame heist payout would be to low. The cashcards made them allready a ton of money and they still get more by playing the waiting game. They now have trouble finding the right balance, since i doubt that they couldn't have released the heists long ago. Rockstar doesn't want to loose their easy income.
My two cents on the matter.

 

[josemlopes]

I'm at a point where i stopped caring. Rockstar supports the online mode pretty well but on the opposite they constantly make it harder to get ingame cash by actually playing the damn game. It's like they try to force people into buying cashcards. My guess is that the release of the promised heists would either hurt their sales of those damn cards or create an bigger uproar if the ingame heist payout would be to low. The cashcards made them allready a ton of money and they still get more by playing the waiting game. They now have trouble finding the right balance, since i doubt that they couldn't have released the heists long ago. Rockstar doesn't want to loose their easy income.
My two cents on the matter.

You know, I once checked the prices out of curiosity and damn, are they high!

I dont understand of people can pay for ingame money like that, I mean, in around 15 minutes you make the same as paying 3 dollars or something, and that is if you are grinding, if you dont care about grinding and prefer to have fun its what? 30/45 minutes? Its 30/45 minutes of fun that people prefer to pay money to not enjoy that fun?

Dont they have friends to race with or do missions in co-op differently for the hell of it? Even deathmatch can be fun.

I just dont get it, I guess people just like it easy, I mean, do they even want the heists for the actual gameplay or just for the cash? Are they even playing the game for the actual game or just to buy shit they arent even going to use for the sake of completion?

 

[BoogieManFL]

GTA Online sucks. It's mindless grinding of the same few missions over and over - way more than any MMO I've ever played, and I've played a lot.

Rockstar wants microtransaction money. That's why mission payouts are absolute shit, even missions that are lengthy and difficult. I believe that's also why they are sitting on heists for so long. Waiting on microtransactions to slow to a trickle before giving players even a half way reasonable way to make money.


No variety to the missions, only a few of them would even I consider good. If you really step back and look, GTA Online is just like another free to pay mobile game where time is your enemy. It takes ages to accomplish anything and you have to pay to accomplish things at a reasonable pace.

And to top it all off, the best way to lose large amounts of money is to play Grand Theft Auto Online like a Grand Theft Auto game. That is as open world sandbox mayhem. With hospital bills, ammo, armor, blown up personal vehicles, and phone call supports eating your money, a few hours of fun sandbox mayhem will cost you days of dull grinding to replace.

I'm not even counting the epidemic level hacking and cheating.


I really looked forward to GTAO, but it failed. I firmly hold fast to the belief that ANY game with microtransactions will never be great because the game is built around them, no matter what claims are made. The game play will invariably be designed to make those microtransactions much more appealing by willful and eager disregard to overall fun.


And don't worry, you know they will do something to limit heists as well. They'll probably make each player put in a bunch of money for explosives, vehicles, bribes or what have you and if the team fails I bet you just lose money like crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of cooldown or limit to how often you can do them.

Mark my words.

 

[prowll]

...There's an online part of GTA? Dear heavens, why?

 

[Racecarlock]

Are you good at payday 2? I've got it... and I'm not very good. I have to spend most of the time hiding, and I've failed some relatively low level jobs. Maybe we could heist together.

 

[Laughing Man]

You know what I've been a pretty regular player of GTA Online since it launched almost a year ago. I've built up a decent enough level 250 character and I am almost able to forgive the fact that heists haven't been released, mainly because I already have the cash and stuff I want so see little if any real benefit to them.

What I can;t forgive is the rampant issues this game has and they aren't getting any better.

Weapons are a f*cking joke, the auto aim is retarded, oh in theory it is a good idea for the console gaming but their are so many circumstances under which it either doesn't work, doesn't target the right thing or doesn't like the cover position so fails totally. Really I am in a shoot out with another player I hit the auto aim button and the game targets some random pedestrian who is running away from me because.... well I can't actually work out ANY reason it would do that.

Hit detection, match making, servers and peer to peer connections. The match making is a fucking joke, it seems their is next to no locational matchmaking function. You select to join a mission and the game seems to just stick you in any server that happens to be running a mission that matches your choice. You then add in the fact that the servers are peer to peer you suddenly find that your connected to some guy living in Mexico while your playing from Europe giving him and all his local mates a massive advantage over you. You notice this most in Deathmatches, you see a player hit roll but he kills you anyway, that's because he saw you a good second or two before you saw him. You shoot a guy ten times and he put you down in one or two hits, it's because he was shooting at you before you saw him. Yes I am aware that head shots give extra damage but since 90% of people use auto aim and the games auto aim doesn't auto target the head (assuming it targets fucking anything at all) chances are you died because of rampant net code non sense. The game needs a latency option for connections at least some way to control the region and ping of people connecting to servers, of course it just plain needs a dedicated set of servers but that's never going to happen.

Racing is still fucking broken, more specifically the catch up system is still broken. Slowing the leader is just plain stupid, you give a speed advantage to the folk behind and allow the leader to use his full speed, that way the guys behind still have to drive sensibly to catch up, GTAs system lets the guys behind drive like utter fucking idiots and still be in with a chance of winning at the end. LOL you do Grand Tour race and the entire 10 mile race comes down to whoever can shove the hardest in the last 500yards. It's a racing game that doesn't reward car control, tactics speed and control management in the slightest, oh and gravity in the game is totally and utterly fucked up.

Cheaters, the kick system and the reporting system as a whole. The game is seeing more and more folk using cheats or trainers or whatever you want to call them. The kick system is functionally broken, I have never actually seen anyone get kicked from a game as a result of it. When someone selects to kick a player the game should give a list of reasons you select a reason and then a message flashes up for all other players in the game saying, X is being voted for kick by Y for reason Z, kick yes or no. The current system is hidden behind to many menus, requires players to actually be in sight of a player to have any idea of why they are being kicked and requires that you stop playing to go in to the options to kick them. The report system is just daft does anyone know if Rockstar actually do anything about people reported using this system, also why can you only report / kick people once. What happens if their are two cheaters in a server (which is a more than likely now than ever) you can only report one of them and hope that someone else reports the other?

Tanks, god will Rockstar just fucking get rid of them? You get in to a good freeroam shoot out session with a few folk, you're have fun trading blows and just generally messing around and I'll bet you that some dick will turn up in a Tank to just totally fuck the fun up! Yes Rockstar have made them easier to kill, but I am in the middle of a decent fun shoot out with some folk and now I have to break off, go to the military base steal a jet and kill this stupid tank driving douche, yeah kinda ruins it for everyone and then I have to fly cap for ten minutes because that same stupid douche could just spawn another one and continue... get rid of them Rockstar, their used to be stupidly OP now they just rank as pure troll.

Finally, the genral stability of the game needs sorted. Still locks up my console (the only game that does) still too much staring at a blank loading screen, still too many connection issues, still too many instances of moving on to another mission with a group of people to find that you have been split from the group and every other update seems resolve then bring back the everyone leaves free roam at the same time bug.

So given the number of issues the game has right now, I would be happier if Rockstar actually release an update that fixed something rather than adding more content to the game.

 

[SquidVicious]

Are you good at payday 2? I've got it... and I'm not very good. I have to spend most of the time hiding, and I've failed some relatively low level jobs. Maybe we could heist together.

What's your steam ID? I've been heisting a lot by myself, but there are a few missions where it would be a lot easier with another 6 zipties and someone to shout at people.

 

[Shpongled]

Racing is still fucking broken, more specifically the catch up system is still broken. Slowing the leader is just plain stupid, you give a speed advantage to the folk behind and allow the leader to use his full speed, that way the guys behind still have to drive sensibly to catch up, GTAs system lets the guys behind drive like utter fucking idiots and still be in with a chance of winning at the end. LOL you do Grand Tour race and the entire 10 mile race comes down to whoever can shove the hardest in the last 500yards. It's a racing game that doesn't reward car control, tactics speed and control management in the slightest, oh and gravity in the game is totally and utterly fucked up.

How on earth did you get to level 250 without noticing that catch-up is a toggle-able option? I don't think I've ever played a race with it switched on - no one likes it. Slip streams are also an option though, is that what you're getting confused about? It adds tactics to the racing and gives those without suped up vehicles a chance to keep up. Good thing imo. I don't really see how you can level these complaints at racing - it's a fairly solid part of the game all round. And if you don't like the GTA5 vehicle physics why the hell are you playing it? Yeh the gravity is fucked up, but it's fun so no one gives a shit. Who plays GTA for racing simulation? I just don't see how you can say it doesn't reward car control - fact of the matter is the guy who crashes least almost always wins.

I mean, i agree with you on the rest of it. The combat is godawful, always has been. It's passable in single player but as far as competitive multiplayer goes i avoid it completely. I played a deathmatch once... and that's all i have to say on that.

As i say, overall i agree with you, i just quoted that specific paragraph because it appears to be ridiculous, misinformed hyperbole amongst a post of fairly valid criticisms.

 

[RicoADF]

Are you good at payday 2? I've got it... and I'm not very good. I have to spend most of the time hiding, and I've failed some relatively low level jobs. Maybe we could heist together.

I'd be happy to team up, got a few mates that play it as well. What timezone are you in?

 

[Something Amyss]

Did you play on Xbox or PS3? I have Xbox and my brother told me the online was much better on Playstation because it wasn't as full of horrible little tweakers whose motto is "if it moves, kill it."

I've played on both, because I could get the PS3 version cheap and play with friends. I am inclined to enjoy games a lot more by virtue of playing with my friends, and I'm actually sort of glad they're still playing this instead of shifting back to the latest COD (which is what usually happens).

Publics aren't much better in PS3. Worse, because I'm lower level, I have fewer toys to defend myself with.

The one thing I've found that's better in the PS3 version is that you're less likely to have total freezes (where you need to reboot your console entirely) and lose progress. There may also be fewer cheaters, but I've mostly played with friends.

Also, pink arsenals rock.

I tried to get into GTA Online recently on 360 and despite my mental state being low (or stable I guess you could say) I always seem to end up in lobbies where the majority of the players have either already gone psycho or are just about to who will pick you off if you so much as move. It means I rarely explore the world anymore and just jump straight into missions or whatever straight from my apartment.

Not really sure when heists will be released - after all this time, it is kind of hard to care now, I think.

A ton of people still do care, though. Enough to rage and anticipate each new update finally including heists and then rage some more when they don't show up.

As far as mental state, this is another thing RS screwed up royally. You're supposed to be matched based on your playstyle, so why does my buddy always get dropped in psycho lobbies and I get dropped in relatively clean ones, when we primarily play together and are about equal in terms of behaviour? Yeah, our group kills each other sometimes (it's GTA) and destroys cars sometimes (again, it's GTA), but it's weird that

ONE GUY

gets into the psycho lobbies and the rest don't.

Disregard GTA V Online, acquire Payday 2.

Not particularly an FPS fan. I tolerated COD, but only because I was specifically playing with friends.