Daydreaming is fun. I’ve been a daydreamer since I was a kid. One of my favourite forms of daydreaming is coming up with ideas for games I’d love to play.
Below is my idea for a big new mode for GTA Online. It’s basically a full-priced game unto itself. I don’t expect Rockstar to make anything like it or even read this post. But I had fun writing it, and I honestly think my idea would make for an awesome game. It’s fun to think about it, even though it will never happen.
Have a look, see what you think:
Overview
GTA Online currently comprises two components: Free Roam and Quickgame, the latter being the broad name for all self-contained game modes.
I propose a third component called ‘Career Mode’.
Career Mode would be intended as the primary way to play GTA Online. It would be set in the open world like Free Roam but would provide a more structured and purposeful experience.
Before entering Career Mode, players must choose a ‘faction’. There are three to choose from, each encompassing the three broad career types in the GTA universe: Cops, Criminals, and Workers.
Each faction can access different clothes, weapons, personal vehicles, properties, gameplay mechanics, and jobs. Each faction also enjoys faction-specific privileges and is handicapped by faction-specific limitations.
Before I describe each faction in detail, I must first cover some other features of Career Mode.
Player Count
For Career mode to work, the player cap must be increased.
The current limit is 30. I imagine it would need to be raised to about 60 or more so that the maps were sufficiently populated.
Unlike Free Roam, Career Mode servers would not be used as waiting rooms for Quickmatch. Once in a server, there would be no reason to leave instantly unless one joined by accident.
Servers could then fill with people who intend to stick around and the map would come alive with purposeful activity.
Why GTA Online Needs ‘Purpose’
Driving and shooting are the primary means of interaction in the GTA universe.
Free Roam drops players into the open world and tells them to do whatever they want. So naturally, players drive around and shoot each other. Those who don’t want to shoot on sight will be killed by those who do, and after this happens enough, they either quit or become killers themselves.
Free Roam thus becomes an endless deathmatch on a map that is far too large for it. All structured content is sectioned off into heists and Quickmatch modes.
But what if the open world was combined with gameplay systems that incentivise purposeful behaviour and disincentivise the aimless behaviour that infests Free Roam? What if players were given goals, rewards for accomplishing those goals, and penalties for breaking faction-specific rules?
This is what Career Mode would strive to achieve: a more structured open-world experience that would aim to give players a purpose beyond mindless killing. It would try to focus everyone’s violent, impulsive tendencies towards engaging goals to produce a world of lively activity and varied player interaction. It would lay the groundwork for an ecosystem of players acting according to their chosen factions, almost like roleplay servers but less strict, having no roleplay obligations and relying more on systems of incentives and disincentives to get people to ‘play their part’.
Progression
Each faction has a progression system. Forget JP and RP, whatever those are. And forget Shark Cards. In Career Mode, there is only money and experience.
Every faction earns money by doing jobs. Money enables players to buy clothes, cars, property, and weapons. As there are no Shark Cards in my imaginary Rockstar game, every purchasable item is reasonably priced, as they would be in single-player.
Experience points determine one’s rank. What rank you are determines what level of goods you can buy. Certain clothes, weapons, vehicles, and properties will only be available to players of certain ranks.
As said, each faction has exclusive access to faction-specific goods in addition to universal ones. Each faction thus has unique items to anticipate unlocking and buying.
Certain items will only be available at locations exclusive to one or two factions. Only Cops, for example, will be able to access the police armouries and vehicle lots, and only Criminals will be able to access the underground weapons markets.
A player’s experience level would also determine what sorts of jobs they get offered. Low levels will get simple, low-paying jobs. High levels will get difficult, high-paying jobs.
Reputation
Every faction is bound by a reputation system. Breaking faction-specific rules causes reputation to decrease. For example, when Cops kill innocents, their reputation goes down. When they complete jobs successfully, their reputation goes up.
Reputation score determines how much jobs pay. Players will be reluctant to break the rules regularly if it means they will be stymied in their efforts to buy shiny new toys. This would hopefully reduce griefing on Career Mode servers, though of course griefers can never be stopped entirely.
Server Resets
To prevent power creep (a major problem in GTA Online currently, in which the ever-increasing wealth of the playerbase demands bigger and better cars, weapons, and properties), Career Mode servers reset occasionally, similar to Rust servers. This gives players time to progress through their chosen faction and experience the classic GTA rags-to-riches narrative arc.
Server resets remove all player purchases, money, and experience. This would enable the progression systems to be tailored to a more limited timeframe. The pacing of progression could then be fine-tuned, with a good balance between rewarding players for their work and teasing them with greater rewards in the future.
Emergent Gameplay
The faction system is intended to engage players in a diverse range of activities across a persistent world. The jobs available to each faction are unique and often conflict with the interests of the other factions, thus generating spontaneous emergent gameplay opportunities.
Everyone on the map will thus have their own short-term goals, long-term aspirations, dynamics with other factions, financial status, and progression status.
The effect would ideally be a world that feels alive, populated by players with a sense of place and purpose, a world in which conflict is neither random nor mindless but done in pursuit of clearly defined goals.
Such a system would generate spontaneous and dynamic interactions within and between players of different factions, causing emergent gameplay scenarios to arise naturally.
Now, finally, let’s talk about the three factions in detail:
The Three Factions
Criminals
The primary goal of every faction in GTA Mode is to earn money. Criminals, shockingly, earn money by committing crimes.
Criminals start as low-level thugs with crappy starter apartments, crappy cars, no weapons except maybe a knife or bat, and some cheap clothes.
As criminals progress through the ranks and earn money, they can afford increasingly nicer cars from car dealerships, weapons from ammu-nation, specialised weapons from the black market weapons dealers, such as RPGs, and properties ranging from shady dives to legitimate front businesses to high rise apartments and rural mansions.
Criminals have many illegal jobs to choose from. These include:
- Gang wars
- Street races
- Truck robberies
- Shop robberies
- Bank heists
- Kidnappings
- Drug deliveries
- Targeted vandalism
- Assassinations
- Targeted vehicle thefts
- Vandalism
- Deaddrop package pickups
- Drug sales
- Extortion
- And others
Criminals must go to ‘staging points’ (basically mission markers) throughout the map to receive jobs. Different staging points offer different job types. Car shops, for example, offer vehicle theft jobs. Phone booths offer assassination jobs. Some staging points may offer multiple jobs.
Staging points are not always active. This forces Criminals to take a variety of jobs rather than grind just one. Additionally, all jobs are procedurally generated, with none of the scripting of GTA Online’s heist missions.
It isn’t necessary to explain how every activity would work in detail. Most activities mentioned above are self-explanatory and have simple objectives. Van robbery, for example, tasks the player with robbing a van. Kidnap jobs task them with kidnapping a specific NPC and taking them to a dropoff point. Extortion involves smashing stalls and windows. Drug sales involves selling drugs to NPCs and maybe even other players, if they want to experience the drunk effect.
Vandalism could be a funny job, as it may require the player to smash up another player’s vehicle or steal it and drive it into the sea—a task Criminals may wish to leave for when the vehicle’s owner isn’t looking.
Gang wars and illegal street races are unique in that they require many players to be in the same place simultaneously. Clearly, some server-wide organisation would be needed.
To achieve this, the server could schedule gang wars and races at particular times. It could notify players beforehand and give them the option to join. Players would be teleported to the right place when the time came, assuming they weren’t in the middle of a job. The server would then lock everyone into the match. In the case of a gang war, they’d be divided into teams, given gang colours, and limited to a specific area of the map. Rather than spawn at a hospital after death, they would respawn in the deathmatch zone. Players not involved in the gang war or race would see this event play out on the same map and could interfere if they felt like trolling.
Mechanically, Criminals are almost identical to default GTA Online characters in terms of playstyle. Their goal is to commit crimes, make money, and buy guns, vehicles, and properties. They are enemies of the Cops and they victimise the Workers.
Many of the jobs Criminals do will earn them the attention of the police. This includes both NPC police and the human Cops faction.
Some jobs can involve targeting Workers specifically. The van robbery job, for example, may task the Criminal with robbing a Worker’s van.
To prevent Criminals from going on mindless rampages, as most do in Free Roam, Criminals earn no money or experience from killing players who are not their targets. This removes part of the incentive to kill without cause.
The reputation system also disincentivises unprovoked violence. Criminal reputations take drastic hits when they kill other Criminals. As faction allies, they should be discouraged from killing each other. If they must kill, they should prioritise Cops first and Workers second.
These incentives and disincentives would not wholly stop bad behaviour, but we don’t want to. Criminals should still be able to act like Criminals outside jobs. The point is to curb their behaviour enough so that Career Mode doesn’t devolve into the tedious chaos we see in Free Roam. By keeping theft and murder primarily within the context of jobs, the rate of theft and murder in the GTA world could hopefully be moderated.
Suppose a Cop responds to a Criminal taking a job. In that case, the Criminal will receive a bonus for completing their job as a reward for the added difficulty of their task. If a Criminal player does not want to deal with the attention of Cops, they can select low-stakes versions of each job from the job menu. They will then only have to deal with the usual NPC police for that job.
Cops
The Cop faction encompasses all jobs which maintain public order.
These jobs include:
- Arrest warrants
- Death warrants
- Bank/store robbery response
- Stolen vehicle retrieval
- Gang elimination
- Cartel assault
- Surveillance photography
- Helicopter surveillance
- Airspace protection
- Coast Guard duty
- Witness protection
- And more
Most of these jobs are self-explanatory. Surveillance photography involves taking photographs of suspects, while helicopter surveillance involves tracking a fleeing suspect from above for a certain duration. Witness protection is an escort mission, sort of like a taxi mission, but with NPC attackers or perhaps a Criminal player attempting to kill the witness. Airspace protection and Coast Guard duty involve taking out aircraft and boats, respectively. Cartel assault is basically like taking out a gang except they have fully automatic weapons and armoured vehicles – very dangerous.
The jobs open to Law Enforcement depend on their rank. Cops will start as patrolmen, limiting them mainly to arrest warrant calls. They will start with a basic uniform, patrol car, cheap property, and a baton.
As they level up, they will gain access to NOOSE, FIB, Police Helicopters, Coast Guard, Army, and Air Force jobs. Gang elimination, for example, is a NOOSE-level job.
Cops must buy their gear, weapons, and vehicles at the various law enforcement headquarters. These include police stations, NOOSE and FIB buildings, and military bases. Everything costs money to require and is experience-locked. Each headquarters offers a different selection of items. NOOSE buildings, for example, sell armoured trucks. The military base sells extremely expensive tanks and jets.
Cops can also buy Cop-exclusive properties to store vehicles and change uniforms. These properties are of decidedly better taste than the Criminal ones, regardless of how expensive they are.
The Cop faction includes a unique mechanic: arrest. This mechanic allows Cops to walk up to a suspect, grab, tackle, or tase them and put them in cuffs. Once in cuffs, the target is placed under the Cop’s control. To complete the arrest, they must bring them back to whatever station they are based in.
Of the three factions, Cops will be penalised most severely for unnecessary death. If they kill Workers without being attacked first, they will take a harsh hit to their reputation, and their jobs will pay far less. They will also be penalised for killing Criminals who are not in the process of committing a crime.
When a Cop responds to an arrest warrant but ends up killing the suspect, they receive a much smaller reward. This is to encourage the Cops not to start killing as a first resort but to make an effort to resolve arrest calls without violence.
While most calls will task Cops with situations involving NPCs, some calls will be triggered by player activity. When a Criminal engages in a job or just kills a lot of people or steals a lot of vehicles, their arrest or death may be added to the Cops’ job list. Likewise, when a Worker kills a bunch of pedestrians or steals one vehicle too many, they may also be added to the list.
Cops who accept such jobs are tasked with either arresting or killing the guilty player or retrieving a stolen vehicle and bringing it to a station.
Upon being arrested, players may become bored if they have to wait for their arresting Cop to put them in their vehicle and take them to a station. For human arrests, then, it may be necessary for the arrest to be considered complete the moment the cuffs get put on. At that moment, the human player fades out, reappears at the nearest station, and receives a financial penalty.
Arrest warrants would probably be most fun where human suspects are involved, as these instances would result in good old-fashioned police chases with no firearm usage to bring a premature end to the fun. Both sides could use a gun, of course, but they would be penalised for doing so, losing reputation and thus harming their ability to earn money.
Workers
Workers are the regular working Joes of the GTA universe. The only crimes they commit on a regular basis are breaking the speed limit and running over the occasional pedestrian.
Their jobs include:
- Taxi driver
- Delivery driver
- Tow truck driver
- Bus driver
- Firefighter
- Medic
- Cargo plane pilot
- Pizza delivery driver
- Valet
- Graffiti cleanup
- Dead body removal
- Hunting
- And more (not prostitution, although that would be hilarious)
Once again, I won’t go into detail about most of these jobs since most are self-explanatory. I think it would be cool, though, if Workers could answer calls for taxis, ambulances, valet services, and other services from other players.
The special abilities of Workers, such as the ability to revive people as a medic, depend on the job they’re performing at the time. Like the Cops, Workers must check in to specific workplaces to receive jobs pertaining to that role.
To become a medic, for example, they must go to a hospital. This changes their uniform and gives them an ambulance. They will then earn money reviving NPCs, healing wounded players, and taking wounded NPCs to the hospital. Likewise, if they want to be a delivery driver, they have to go to one of the warehouses, each of which will supply them with a different uniform, truck, cargo, and delivery jobs.
Money can buy alternative uniforms and vehicles and modify them, so late-game you’d see some very interesting-looking taxis and trucks driving around, with Workers wearing some absurdly impractical uniforms. They can also buy Worker-exclusive properties.
Workers are excluded from buying weapons, making them a mostly pacifistic, melee-only class. The intended experience for a Worker is to be much more relaxed and less combat-oriented than the other factions. The only exception would be when they are hunting, in which case they would use a rifle or shotgun.
The Worker faction would probably be the least popular one. Most of the exciting gameplay would be between Cops and Criminals. The Worker faction is for those looking for a more laid-back experience. The sort of people who enjoy following the traffic laws, immersing themselves in Rockstar’s worlds, and playing games like Euro Truck Simulator would likely enjoy a faction dedicated to performing a diverse range of ordinary jobs in the world of GTA.
If players embraced this faction, one would see human taxi drivers, medics, firefighters, delivery drivers, and more going about their work across the map. This would give a sense of authenticity to the world and help lessen the overabundant presence of violence, making it a little more hospitable and, in theory, less likely to generate an attitude of kill-on-sight.
But the Worker experience won’t always be a chill, happy time. As said earlier, some jobs open to Criminals involve truck robberies, kidnappings, assassinations, and vehicle thefts. Most of these jobs will direct Criminals towards NPCs, but sometimes they may be directed at Workers who’ve had it easy for too long.
When taking a job, Workers have two options: low-risk and high-risk. High-risk jobs carry a high payout but include the potential for Criminal involvement. Low-risk jobs attract no Criminal attention except for what they naturally encounter in their travels.
If a Worker takes a high-risk taxi fare, for example, a Criminal may show up to kidnap their passenger. If they take an armoured truck delivery job, a Criminal may attempt to stop their truck and steal the gold from the back.
Some Worker jobs involve intervening in the affairs of other factions. The tow truck driver job, for example, could task the player with towing the car of a player who has logged off but left their vehicle on the road. Dead body removal could task Workers with removing dead Cops and Criminals from the streets. And, as said, players may call for taxi rides, health kits, and valet services, which would be added to the relevant Worker job lists.
Such interactions could lead to some interesting instances of emergent gameplay. A Criminal, for example, could request a taxi ride or valet service to a remote location, only to spring a trap on the Worker when they get there and rob them.
It would be boring if every Criminal intervention ended in the Worker immediately getting shot. The prohibition on Workers using firearms would often make killing them unnecessary. But to really dissuade Criminals from killing Workers for no reason, Criminals could be hit with financial penalties for unnecessary Worker deaths. Killing a Worker should be seen as a last resort. A Worker should be given a chance to outrace pursuing Criminals. Criminals should focus on disabling their vehicles and taking their prize without bloodshed.
The only exception is assassination missions, triggered by Workers taking the highest-risk versions of jobs available.
Worker ranks determine what jobs they can take. All Workers start with, say, taxi missions and graffiti cleanup. The later ranks could unlock high-paying jobs like medic and cargo plane flights.
Workers are prohibited from killing anyone except in self-defence. When they do, their reputation decreases, and they are paid less for jobs. Workers should focus on their work and take a break from the typical GTA violence.
Incremental Release
I’ve brainstormed a lot of jobs for these lists, probably too many for a day 1 release. If Career Mode were real, many jobs would most likely have to be added in updates. This would incidentally be a good way to keep Career Mode relevant; every month or so new batchs of jobs could be added along with new vehicles, outfits, and properties. The game would remain fresh and could theoretically be expanded for years.
Potential Issues
As great as all this sounds to me (and hopefully to you), I know it may not work out as well as I hope in practice.
Despite a system of incentives and disincentives, players may disregard the rules anyway. Trolls may not care about earning money in the most efficient way possible and will just go around killing people without cause. At worst, this would induce an atmosphere of paranoia in which players will kill each other on sight. Only Workers would be unable to do this easily, having no firearms – but this might only make them easy targets.
Another issue, in the opposite direction, is that the rules may be too strict. Players may feel stifled by the systems designed to encourage them to behave according to their faction and to refrain from spontaneous acts of violence. Some might even say it goes against the spirit of GTA.
Server resets might annoy players who do not want to regularly have to start from 0. It might particularly annoy people with little time to play. Such players may never be able to reach the high ranks or buy any of the best stuff. For their sake, servers with long reset timers could be offered. Some servers could even have no reset timer at all.
Some mechanics may be finicky, especially considering all this gameplay would occur online. The arrest mechanic, the body retrieval mechanic, and others might not work as smoothly as I’d hoped. Having seen people play on roleplay servers, animations involving two players interacting with each other tend to look very scuffed. But maybe if Rockstar wanted it to happen, it could work.
Conclusion
Almost 4000 words. My god. Even my nerd tolerance is reaching its breaking point. Someone give me a wedgie! Stat!!
I hope you enjoyed pretending this version of GTA Online will ever exist. Dreaming up imaginary games is weirdly enjoyable.
Now, when GTA 6 Online come out, I will be extra disappointed when it doesn’t live up to my incredibly high and specific expectations.
What have I done…