Some spoilers below
TL: DR - Heists are fun for a few playthroughs, but idiots often take the fun out of them, and the Heists are too one dimensional to allow for a lot of replay value other than for monetary gains.
I'm going to go ahead and call the Heists a major let down. Obviously, as previously guesstimated, nothing was going to live up to the hype of a 1 1/2 year wait, but even if you throw out the wait, the bugs, and the connection issues the Heists fall short imo.
First off, the Heists are plagued with way, way too much driving at times. Now, you may say "But I like driving in GTA!" Me too, but the driving doesn't feel fun in any way because you're set on a fixed course while you listen to some NPC give the same speech for the 15th time, you're not randomly driving around the city popping unsuspecting fools. Part of the problem is that many missions will occur in Blaine county, so if the Heist leader lives in south Los Santos you can expect a few minutes of mindless drive time every time you start a mission (Combined with the several minutes you probably waited for someone to join your Heist). Some of this can be averted if everyone has done the mission before and they all ride in the same vehicle, however that presents a few problems:
- Even if you run Heists with a buddy or two, 9 times out of 10 you probably have at least one random guy with you that hasn't done the Heist and can't skip it.
- Getting people to ride in the same car to ANYTHING is about impossible, even among friends. If driving must be done, most people seem to prefer their own ride and being behind the wheel.
- Your payout is reduced if the driving portion is skipped, so typically no one wants to do it anyway.
- Some people will get to the mission objective quickly and will have to wait, while others will take forever and may never get there at all.
Second problem: the leader of the Heist does not get paid on any of the setup missions. This isn't that big of a deal on it's own since the leader typically gets a larger cut of the final payout to compensate on the actual Heist, however this fact is not explained to the other Heist members and is completely lost on them. If you pay $100,000 to start the Heist as a leader, and every non-Heist leader receives $25,000 per Setup mission, that means the Heist leader has missed out on $225,000 through 5 Setup missions. If the final payout is say...$1,000,000 you would expect a fair payout to the leader would be $400,000 with ~$200,000 going to each of the other Heisters. In the end the leader still ends up with less cash, but that doesn't matter. People see that someone else is getting twice what they're getting and they bail or complain. Even if you try to explain the monetary difference it seems many people can't hear voice chat or they don't bother to listen. You wouldn't think it would be a frequent issue, but it happens almost every time I host a Heist and we get to the final day, and I've had people leave over it. I've also found that at least 3 out of 4 people don't have mics which makes communication in general a pain, setting up and completing Heists can be a chore if none of your other Heisters can communicate vocally.
Third problem: Heisters get locked into a role once a mission starts, they cannot switch roles unless you quit a Heist and start over from the beginning. This problem often rears it's ugly head when you're on a particularly long mission and someone ends up flying a plane or having to drive a car and they're horrible at doing such. A great example is the prison break out. One of the jobs requires a pilot to take a Velium plane and fly a holding pattern above an air field as a get away. Sounds like a boring job, so to add spice to it they decided to send Fighter Jets after you to bring you down. It certainly adds some challenge to a menial job, but it often proves to be too much challenge for most pilots. Try as I may to make suggestions that worked for me when I was in the same role, I've seen way too many pilots get nuked before we could ever get the prisoner safely to the airfield. The problem could be averted if the Heist leader could simply reassign the pilot role to someone else after the mission fails, but everyone is locked into whatever role they took when the mission began. If you do choose to restart to reassign roles, guess what? You're going to spend at least another 3-5 minutes loading and getting the crew back together (IF you can even get the same crew back together) and another 3-4 minute drive to Blaine County and you won't be able to skip it since everyone is going to different locations anyway.
Fourth problem: Roughly 3 out of 4 Heisters are going to do their own thing rather than work together with the group or take suggestions from people that have completed the mission before. It's certainly fun to try new things and figure a mission out yourself, but if you've failed a mission a few times it's probably a good idea to start asking for suggestions or trying something different. As we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. All too often I'll have some random Heister off doing his own thing, and to horrible consequences. The best example I have is stealing the Insurgents from Merryweather. The mission is designed to have 2 people jump in the one Insurgent with the gun and provide cover fire for everyone, the other 2 people jump in the second Insurgent. The mission works best if both vehicles stick together so the gun provides cover fire for both, but this doesn't always happen. One car invariably ends up going one direction while the car with the gun goes another, and with the way spawns go on Heists you really wind up with twice as many vehicles chasing you because both vehicles are on separate paths. I've even had idiots that decide not to ride in the Insurgent and bring their own vehicle which puts 3 targets on the road and it typically means that the Insurgent without a gun doesn't have someone to help provide cover fire. The "me first" problem can also come up on the final day of the Humane Labs Heist as I've often seen idiots plow ahead through the lab rather than work together, only to get overrun and shot down because they weren't watching their health.
Fifth problem: The suggested way to complete a mission often isn't the best way to complete it. Best example would be the Pacific Bank Heist that I mentioned a few posts back. You spend an entire Setup mission stealing bikes to do the job, but the bikes are actually about the worst solution to get to the end if you want the maximum payout and you want everyone to get through alive. I've yet to see an entire crew get through on just bikes. I know it's possible, but you're absolutely going to need a good crew that can communicate...and good luck finding that as good Heisters are in short supply. Good Heisters with a mic are even rarer. There's other examples of mission parameters/suggestions that don't work, but most of them are vague or aren't worth mentioning like Lester telling you how best to avoid the cops, or the unnamed contact from the prison break telling you that your payout will be higher if you get out quicker (It won't be, unless he's talking about the elite challenge, in which case that's a one time bonus and not always applicable. Also, a 4 minute escape is pretty ridiculous, even the better teams I've rolled with average 7-8 minutes).
Sixth problem: Online Heists are poor when it comes to replay value. Companies add DLCs and content when they want you to keep playing their games. Content is good if it's worth playing through more than once, hence it keeps you coming back and playing it more. Example: Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are two very good games by Bethesda. They're both in the Fallout franchise and similar in that respect, but both are very different when it comes to story lines and options, it's like comparing apples to oranges. However, whenever I look at hours spent in both games, most people show a tendency to spend more hours in New Vegas. Why? Options. There are multiple different ways to complete missions and factions in New Vegas, while Fallout 3 typically gives you just one option...maybe two, and there really isn't another faction you can join outside of the Brotherhood. Options give a game life, and there are no options in Online Heists unlike the Story Heists. Sure, in a few of the Heists you can take different roles on certain jobs, but some of these roles are pitiful and aren't worth mentioning. For instance, in the setup for the Prison job you have to acquire a get-away plane. One guys job is to get in the plane, fly it to a location, then park it at the airport. That's it. The role itself is certainly important, but unless flying gives you orgasms there's nothing exciting about taking on that role and you probably won't take it again unless nobody else will do it. The fact of the matter is that most missions don't have specified roles, it's typically everyone working together to achieve one common goal (Or rather, one or two decent Heisters working by themselves to achieve a goal while the others stand around picking their noses or fucking up). In summary, there's no variations in how jobs can be completed, and there's very seldom a chance or reason to assign different jobs to people on a mission, so there's little reason to replay Heists other than the need for cash.
There's probably a lot of other problems, but this is already TL: DR. Some of these problems can be overlooked, and maybe Rockstar will tweak things in later months, but I'm not going to hold my breath. More than anything the repetition is what drags Heists down. You often can't skip cutscenes that you've seen a billion times, you often can't skip the tedious driving portions for the various reasons above, and you can't skip the boring monologues that you've heard 100 times (If they did it via a phone call while in the car you could have at least hung the phone up so you didn't have to hear it again!).
I was hoping for something more like Payday 2 or even closer to the GTA V Story Heists, but the Online version fell short imo. The fact that the missions are completely linear hurt my perception. The Story Heists all had at least two ways to complete certain Heists giving the leader options in how to do it. The Online Heists provide no possible deviation from the plans given out, there's no options really. The Heists really don't feel like some epic addition to the game, they really feel like every other Online mission Rockstar put out, they just strung them together and added some cute cutscenes before each one (Cutscenes that quickly outlive their humor after a few play throughs, and they often can't/won't be skipped). The missions are useful for amassing cash, but beyond that I'm not sure there's a lot of replay value. Given the fact most of the resources were already there from the existing game, I'm surprised it took them this long to put out 5 Heists (One of which is so short it almost isn't worth calling it a Heist). Finally, I'd argue the ending to the final Heist is probably the most anti-climatic thing they probably could have done to finish the whole shebang, although anti-climatic is probably the best way to describe Heists when it's all said and done. You're left with a creepy Lester cinematic, and most likely half of the payout you were initially promised because idiots died all too often on the way to the finish.
Will I keep playing GTA Online and Heists? Yes, at least one day a week, simply because there's always a guy's night on Monday nights and there isn't much else for us to play unless we go back to Payday 2 or Borderlands, both of which have been played to death lately. Overall Online Heists don't feel like enough to resurrect GTA full time, there's other stuff to play.
So...the Heist remains unfinished.
