Over the spring break the Heists expansion for the online component of Grand Theft Auto 5 was released. This added a series of five new extended missions, each one taking around an hour to complete. These missions, while using the same fundamental game play as the base game, differ in how the missions are served and how you interact with your teammates. They stand as a stark improvement over the base missions both because of their more varied and complex scenarios, specifically in how they foster player interaction and cooperation.

The base game has a variety of missions ranging from standard death match to racing, but it is through the missions that you have the opportunity to participate in cooperative game modes.* Often these missions are anywhere from five to twenty minutes long and have objectives that range from clearing an area of enemies to capturing objectives. Often the longer missions involve a sequential blending of these goals.

Heists, on the other hand, are far more complex. The require four people, whereas the normal missions can be run with just one player. This is because of the more complex interactions that the missions demand. Often there are two to four simultaneous goals that need to be completed, often with overlapping interactions between players. For example, during one mission two players are required to break out of a prison, one is piloting an unarmed getaway plane and the last is covering in an armed helicopter. Through trial and error we found that the best method was for the helicopter pilot to divert from covering the plane and have it assist the escaping players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAzohYzBFr4

This kind of cooperation is lacking in the base missions. There, all the players have fundamentally the same objective, be it to take an object or secure an area. While this creates some interaction between players, the mission can be tackled by everyone involved lining up and shooting their way from point A to point B. Heists do not allow this and require diversification of roles.

This core difference highlights the gulf between a good cooperative game and a poorly designed one. In a poorly designed encounter, the players never diverge in roles or actions. The second player stands to double the damage output and health instead of contributing to the encounter in a meaningful way. The coordination in this kind of game is limited to enemy call outs and a word of warning when one player dies, if the game penalizes simultaneous death. A much better game calls for each player to participate in different but mutually beneficial actions.

The Diablo series as well does a great job of highlighting both side of a good and a bad cooperative game. Diablo is a top down action role playing game developed by Blizzard where the player controls a single character with a set of customizable attacks and gear in cooperation with up to three other player to clear dungeons of enemies. Diablo suffers from the same issue as the base modes in GTA 5 in that the objective for the players is largely the same. There is no difference in what each player is attempting to accomplish.

What Diablo succeeds at, however, is creating moves, attacks and abilities for each player that contribute to the power and effectiveness of each other player. While on lower difficulties a single character could clear a level, when things become tougher, a combination of different characters playing different roles is imperative to finishing sections of the game. In this case, a raid could use a variety of characters build for specific purposes, be it healing or dealing damage at the expense of health, to achieve the in game goal. While the design of the encounter is different from what was done in Heists, the end result, the stratification of team roles, is the same.

Games can achieve this stratification and differentiation of roles through two primary methods. The first follows how Heists approached the problem, which is to design the scenario to specifically require different roles. Alternatively, the game could increase difficulty, requiring specialization to overcome lopsided odds. Either method imparts greater fun and engagement than the single target, low difficulty method, making a more fun session for each player and improving replay value overall.

*Yes, there is also a survival mission format but it plays in a fundamentally different way and I am just sort of ignoring it for now.