The A sshole Team

The A sshole Team

If youre like me, then you love it when a plan comes together. Weve been playing the first three heists on GTA Online and its been some of the most entertaining and also most complex stuff Ive ever done in any multiplayer game. Most regular missions on GTA are pretty staightforward - go somewhere, grab a car/package/bike and/or kill a bunch of ballers/yakuza/rednecks. Stuff rarely takes more than five minutes to complete unless your team starts ten or so miles away from the action for some inexplicable reason. And then there are heists.

The Disciples of Kitten like to dress for the occasion.

In theory, its possible to just start a heist with any group of random strangers, who may only communicate in text using some foreign language - if that. And that shit isnt very likely to succeed, which is why the PC community is already begging for easier heists. So adorable. Always screaming for better balancing, buff this, nerf that... thanks, Blizzard. Thanks for turning a generation of gamers into a bunch of whiny, entitled cunts.

Like sex, heists are a lot more enjoyable in a group of people you know and love, especially when you can tell what everyone is into, what each member of your crew is good at, that sort of thing. Because unlike regular missions, heists require each and every member of your team to do a specific job - and they had better know wtf theyre doing. And it goes beyond the usual MMO-style holy trinity level of compexity, too! Nobody heals or tanks on GTA. Well, you can buy a tank, but thats a different story, entirely.

"Ill man the cannon, Felix gets in the plane, Claire grabs the bike, Peter... who the fuck invited Peter?"

One heist requires a player to steal a getaway plane, while another player protects said plane against fighter jets using a helicopter that comes equipped with with gatling guns and guided missiles. The plane is required to help the other half of your crew escape from prison. Its a massive clusterfuck, where you depend on each and every member of your crew - if you fuck up and one of your team mates dies with no team lives left, its game over. You dont just get to complete that shit with dead people on the team - you start over!
It was amazing to see how our team grew from a bunch of incompetent, retarded morons into a bunch of slightly less incompetent, retarded morons as we progressed from one heist to another.

We completed our third heist on the first try last night. Granted, I nearly fucked it up when I used up our only team life by introducing my face to the spinning blades of our getaway helicopter. But stealing a fighter jet and enjoying some sweet team-dogfighting whilst listening to a certain bit of the Top Gun soundtrack was easily some of the coolest shit Ive ever done online.

Meh, if youve seen one explosion, youve seen em all.

You can tell how intense heists and many of the setup missions to a heist are by the atmosphere in voice chat. Most of the time were so busy trolling each other, dicking around and doing stupid shit that at least one person is always dying of laughter. Im not even making this up - every once in a while youll catch one of our guys (or the lady) laughing so hard, theyll forget to breathe and then it becomes hard to tell whether theyre laughing, crying, having a seizure or a little bit of everything. Its amazing how such a bunch of dickheads can instantly switch into pro-mode during a stealth mission, where several targets have to be taken out simultaneously from stealth. You take this guy, I take that guy, on three, you get the idea. Ive never been so tense playing an online game before.

In between missions I like to drive around in a car with Haggy, who made his character look like Kid Rock. He likes to slow down his car to a crawl, so we can just stay in the car a little longer and enjoy some sweet reggae music. I always forget where hes from, but I suspect hes Jamaican or something. Asians, amirite?

We get shit done.

I hope theyll be adding more heists to GTA Online - and soon! We race, we play golf and tennis, dick around in free mode and kill each other with hammers, but nothing comes close to the adrenaline rush of a really tough heist, especially when youre doing it for the very first time and you have no idea what to expect.

I think aiming for the crotch deals more damage.

Im still suffering from some rather severe FPS issues, especially in busy areas, where stuff can start freezing and stuttering like crazy, while everyone else in our little crew plays without any problems whatsoever. There are threads all over the internet where people with hardware much beefier than mine have the same issues. I still cant figure out how to fix this. Felix runs the game on decent settings and at up to 60 FPS on his humble little GTX 660. Im jealous.

I like our crew emblem. ?

The really annoying thing is how I can change my visual settings to anything from bare minimum to ultra and absolutely nothing seems to change about the performance. It just stutters like hell, even when Im barely using 2 out of my 4 gigs of VRAM. Sigh. I probably would have given up on it by now if it wasnt so damn fun.

-Cat

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