Last week, GTA Online added four-player cooperative heists. If you’ve been waiting until now to hop in and start playing, I’ve got a tip that will make it much easier to survive your first big score: Pack lots of snacks.
In some ways, GTA Online works just like the regular, offline GTA V. The map is the same, the guns are the same, the cops and civilians act the same. Sure, there are human-controlled psychos everywhere, and they will kill you as quickly as possible (unless you turn on Passive Mode), but for the most part: It’s GTA V, just online.
The one big difference is that your character now has an inventory. That means that you can store various items and access them mid-mission. To access your inventory, you’ll want to access the interaction menu, which you can do with the view button on Xbox One or by holding down the touchpad on PS4.
The two most important things you can carry are snacks and body armour.
You can buy snacks at any of the game’s many convenience stores, which are marked on your map with a weird-looking “store” icon.
Before you do any heist mission, head to the store and stock up on every type of snack you can carry. If you access your inventory while in the midst of a mission, you can wolf down snacks to replenish your health, which makes some of the longer heist missions much more survivable.
Two important sub-tips:
1) Eat snacks while in cover. If you do that, you won’t even have to wait through a snackin’ animation, meaning you can quickly pump your health back up. You can also eat a snack while riding in a car, with no animation.
2) Assign “eat snack” to your Action function. Then, you’ll be able to click both thumbsticks and eat a snack anytime. It doesn’t work while in cover (as far as I can tell), but it does work other times.
You can also carry unused body armour. Be sure you’re wearing as much body armour as possible (a full blue bar) before starting a heist, then go to Ammu-Nation and buy as many sets of body armour as you can carry. Then, in the middle of a mission, you can go into your inventory and re-equip your spare body armour to get your blue bar built back up.
One of GTA Online‘s loading screens helpfully tells you all about snacks and spare body armour, but it’s easy to miss. So, I figured I’d share, on the off-chance that some other newcomers don’t yet know this stuff.
Evan and I have been working our way through the game’s first few heists, and we’ll have more coverage and thoughts on Kotaku soon. In the meantime, if you’ve got any other tips for GTA Online heists (or actual real-life heists), I hope you’ll share ’em below.
Comments
11 responses to “One Crucial Tip For Surviving GTA Online’s Heists”
What kind of advice is this? You’ve always had an inventory and could carry snacks (I ate and smoked in the passenger seat a lot) the only difference now is that you can carry extra body armour.
But here’s some real, crucial advice.
EQUIP THE NEW BODY VESTS CLOTHING.
While doing heists, your health gains something like, 80% resistance and you don’t have to worry about cover. You lose the ability to sprint, but it’s a small sacrifice.
My group were all just sitting in the open getting rocked and we just walked it off.
So I just Googled BODY VEST and got nothing that explains what the heck you’re on about. Explain exactly what you mean by “body vest”
Is it just a new heavy body armour option??
There’s some new stuff under the Tops -> Tactical (I think), pretty sure that’s what he’s talking about. Had no idea they actually offered protection, so tactical helmet and vest are going to be standard issue for hard mode heisting if this is true.
Yep, the tactical vests provide insane damage reduction at the cost of sprint in heists only.
You don’t really get the option to use them all that often and the hard mode heists aren’t all that hard despite a few sections, I think I got to use it twice playing through on hard? Can’t recall.
If you want to avoid dying and don’t mind soaking up fire on point then they can be a lot of fun.
(I haven’t tested to see if using them in custom outfit choice still allows for the defensive bonus….might have to check that out later.)
No, wearing the clothing is just cosmetic outside heists. You can still sprint.
No I mean in the heist clothing options you can choose custom outfits, curious if the bonus works when you pick that option instead of waiting for a setup/finale that has the option available.
You don’t have to wait, you can walk into any store and buy the outfit.
Yes I know, but in heists the leader picks the outfits from set choices, let’s the team choose their own or there is an option to use custom outfits from the players own saved sets.
I’m asking if the bonus applies if you choose a custom outfit that has the vest when doing a heist setup/finale
Yeah that inventory has always been in, at least on the PS3 version I haven’t played PS4 version but I am assuming that was in by default
I do this all the time
This advice would’ve been great…early last year.
I have a hint…..work as a bloody team.
One heist I was on I had the role of Prison Guard and had to escort another player with the Prisoner role, first time through he just starts jumping when we got out of the bus, the second time he walks right up to an NPC guard and all hell broke loose.
During a setup with the prison bus the driver told everyone to get out which for some reason did stop the police chasing us, then he drives off with the other 3 team members chasing him around the windfarm….the Benny Hill theme should have been playing.