GTAOnline_Heists037 17 Dec

Rockstar has confirmed that the long-awaited heist missions for Grand Theft Auto Online will arrive in early 2015, and also released a trailer for the update.

In an interview with IGN, lead mission designer Imran Sarwar explained that heists took so long for the developer to build because they turned out to be more difficult that the team originally expected. The original idea was to build on the story mode heists to make an experience with a focus on cooperation, where each player would play to their strengths and have a stake in the outcome.

“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.”

Sarwar added that the new features added to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of GTA 5 also slowed down the progress of the heist missions. “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,” he said.

(via Polygon)