As expected, Rockstar Games released a new content update for GTA Online on Tuesday. However the nature of said content update ended up being a surprise — which, really, was a surprise in and of itself seeing as we were sure about what to expect based on recent developments.
Yes, it's true that the game got a new Adversary Mode, however that Adversary Mode isn't Top-Down which was teased in a recent post on the Newswire. Instead, we got what amounts to Turf Wars, but on foot.
The newly released Land Grab Adversary Mode borrows heavily from Deadline's Tron-inspired neon sci-fi aesthetic. Teams are dropped into grid-like arenas with the task of shooting people who are of a different color and walking over their areas to make them your own.
Every minute counts in Land Grab, where teams battle to control territory in an unforgiving cyberspace: shoot the other guy in the neck, grab his turf, reload and repeat. If you don’t do it, someone will do it for you.
It's pretty clear that we're looking at a 1:1 port of Turf Wars to a non-vehicular environment, which very likely required minimal effort to produce. Seriously, if I were to hazard a guess, a single guy could have put this thing together over the weekend. But why would Rockstar drop this on players instead of Top-Down?
Don't get us wrong — Turf Wars was great, and "team deathmatch with a twist" is generally a great place to start on a PvP concept. However, the idea of a throwback mode with a top down 2D perspective to evoke the GTA games of old sounds a whole lot more interesting.
It seems that our suspicions about actually creating a playable, 2D, top-down game mode in GTA 5 being darn hard were true. As a fully 3D title designed with primarily third-person perspectives in mind, going to top-down is a massive change. First-person works because many of the principles are the same — the camera more or less shows you what the character is looking at, or more importantly, where your gun is pointing.
The proposed Top-Down game mode isn't as easy as unlocking the camera and fixing it in an isometric or top-down postion. Aiming would be inhumanly hard, and outright impossible heightwise. Top-down games have fixed interaction heights for obvious reasons, and reticles that follow where your character is facing, as opposed to being fixed to the center of the screen.
In order to have fixed interaction heights, the maps would need to be level (before you jump on me, yes, many top-down games have elevation, but those games are specifically built to work in these environments, whereas with Top-Down we're talking about adapting a whole other game). Jumping would also have to be disabled, the control scheme would need to change completely and some solution would need to be invented for aiming.
We're fairly certain that Rockstar hasn't scrapped the idea altogether, but hopefully the time between the announcement and release will be shorter than the time between Rockstar's announcement of story DLC and its release (hint: it was teased in 2014 and we're still waiting).
Joking aside, we're fairly certain that Rockstar's team of devs will figure out a way to make Top-Down work in one or two weeks. After all, it's not like they gave a release date (beyond suggesting that it will drop before gunrunning does) and they have until Summer to deliver that update, unless they decide to delay — something that rarely happens with DLC.
However, in the meantime, we can all pass the time by painting the map our particular neon color in the new Land Grab Adversary Mode, which undoubtedly will soon be part of a new set of double reward bonuses.
