Pulling Off a Heist on Grand Theft Auto V is as Difficult as it is in Real Life

Thanks to recent update in Grand Theft Auto V, you can now officially partake in Heists, a way for you, your friends and any other rag-tag group of criminals to get together and rob banks and break criminals out of jail.

The update had been delayed by Rockstar Games and scrapped several times for fine-tuning’s sake until finally releasing on March 10.

Here’s the problem. If you don’t know people that are willing to play through the content with you, you’re stuck relying on random players who, for the most part, are not ready for the long road ahead.

There are five Heists and a few handfuls of small missions leading up to each Heists actual heist. They all add up to anything around twenty hours of gameplay, so it’s safe to say that a Heist can take almost four hours from start to finish, depending on your crew.

There are only two requirements for a Heist to go down – Your leader needs to have a high-end apartment and you need to be level twelve. Obtaining level twelve is easy and you don’t necessarily pick up in-game content skill in doing so.

As a leader, you’re allowed to pick and choose who comes along for the Heist. Regrettably, some people simply don’t have the time to dedicate to a Heist. This is when it becomes almost necessary to take anyone you can just to have a go at the Heist.

Level doesn’t always mean anything; you can be grouped with someone who is level three hundred and they’ll still mess up and could very well be outplayed by a level twelve.

If you play Heists, you’re in it for the money – this means you’ll most likely be playing on the hardest setting which offers more money and extra experience. If one person dies, the entire mission gets reset to the last checkpoint.

Someone could get into their car, drive towards you with intentions of picking you up and end up with their driver’s side wheels covered in your blood. You will lose all the effort you just put in.

People play music in their homes – it’s no surprise that people live their lives. Some, sadly, have terrible headsets that they have plugged in at all times. This will cause your entire crew to mute that player. Here’s the problem: that guy is the only one that knows exactly what to do. So now he’s screaming at the top of his lungs for people to go to point A and not point B. But no one can hear him, so he freaks out and rails his controller through his television set.

You could be exhausted after breaking a criminal out of prison and fighting off hordes of law enforcement, parachuting out of a plane onto a beautiful beach, while the sun sets over San Andreas, when suddenly, the pilot of your crew lands on a mountain and thinks they can safely land if they leaped off the side – effectively resetting a solid ten minutes of grueling efforts.

What could make this worse? Easy – A crew member getting fed up with trying time after time. Unlike your pilot taking a leap of faith, this doesn’t just reset to a checkpoint – it sends you back to the streets. Your entire crew disbands, as if one person leaving instantly makes everyone put their controller down and walk away as well.

As it stands, if you can manage to have a player queued, waiting to join the Heist as it’s a full four-player party, you have a slim chance of being able to carry on. However, the system for this isn’t the best – a spotty connection could render the queued player unable to join.

There needs to be a change.

The first thing Rockstar could do is implement a tutorial Heist that carefully explains to people the dangers of screwing around in a Heist. Make it funny but playable, but required so that you can’t just come off from robbing a liquor store and think you can hit a bank.

The second would be Rockstar having an option for the leader to choose whether the crew should wait on the matchmaking system to find a replacement so that all is not lost. This would significantly save time for everyone involved and give another player a chance to feel like they’re truly helping out – coming in and saving the day for a few others who were left high and dry.

While it’s unrealistic to have someone come from out of nowhere and pick up where a cowardly thief left off, it’s even more unrealistic to say that if you’re driving at a hundred mph and you crash and flip your car that you can simply pull a joystick and go from ground-to-roof to ground-to-wheels.

No one should have to endure hours of putting up with random people’s mistakes and find themselves in their thoughts, wishing there was a phone app for gamers seeking other gamers to play games within a one-night-stand kind of way.

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