IGN: The big question, of course, is why has it taken so long for Heists to come together?
IMRAN: To be honest, they just turned out to be a lot more difficult than we originally thought.
Our initial idea was to build on the concept of Story Mode heists to make a new gameplay experience for GTA Online that was more focused on cooperation, where everyone could play to their individual strengths and feel like they had a stake in the outcome.
After many months of designing, testing, rewriting and re-testing, we settled on the four-player structure that you will experience in the game. It took a ton of work from our programmers and mission designers to make it work at the level we were happy with.
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. We also wanted each one to have a unique thread that brought you back in touch with some of the characters from the story.
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. Having already let players know of our intentions with Heists, every setback only increased the pressure to make sure we got them right.
One of the challenges is that unlike a heist in Story Mode, every player needs to feel central to the action at all times, and that’s much more challenging than it appears.
A good example is the classic idea of your getaway driver, waiting outside of a bank for the big score. A movie might not spend too much time focusing on that person because while they are waiting, we are watching the action going down in the vault. In a similar situation in Story Mode, we could use a character switch to make sure the player was always in the center of the action and switch back to the driver later. But to make this work for multiple players, we needed to create situations where the driver has something interesting to do at exactly the same time the rest of their team are locking down the bank and making their way to the money.
After many months of designing, testing, rewriting and re-testing, we settled on the four-player structure that you will experience in the game. It took a ton of work from our programmers and mission designers to make it work at the level we were happy with.
Even as we were working to solve this, the entire team was also throwing everything we could into creating the PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions of Grand Theft Auto V – adding First Person Mode, building the new replay editor for PC – as well as constantly working to improve the GTA Online experience. All of these projects are linked and require the attention of our core team at all times, so despite our best efforts, we simply wound up needing more time to make sure every one of these projects was as good as it could possibly be.
We never want to have to move a date but if something is delayed, it’s because it’s not at the level we expect of ourselves. And while we’re not there yet, we’re getting close and Heists will be ready early in 2015.
da kann ich auch jetz von PS3 zu PC wegseln mehr Grafik details. Das sie die PS3 früher oder Später Fallen lassen werden siehe Railgun ist nur PS4 nutzbar so wie mit andere dingen Später dann.
