If you've been playing Grand Theft Auto V Online as long as we have (almost 13 years!) then you'll have stolen things from most places; cars from all over the place, (including from a submarine!), drugs from everywhere, cash from all over the place, gold and diamonds from the casino, a jewel encrusted panther statue from a cartel drug lord's tropical island hideaway... but strangely I don't think a museum has been done before…
The Kortz Center is a massive cultural and museum complex on the hill between Los Santos and Chumash on the west coast. It's only ever been used briefly previously and was always likely to feature at some point.
Mr. Faber and his motormouthed assistant Rafa (who you may have met during the Money Fronts DLC which saw you buy a Carwash, a weed delivery business and a helicopter tours company as fronts for less honest enterprises) reappear to offer you the chance to rob the Kortz Center‐the main target initially being a painting titled La Dernière Dèbauche. This stunning work of art will be forged by a young art student called Yong-Rae (Ray), so you can switch the copy with the original.
The latest heist is indubitably just "more of the same, but sufficiently different" for GTA faithful. As in previous heists, you have to scope out the target and then complete a set of required missions (weapons, hacking device, escape vehicle etc) with extras that supposedly make the job easier. There are a couple of new hacking mini games (the Diamond Casino fingerprint cloning game is reused), a couple of new and reused gadgets (like the plasma glass cutter), various recycled locations and assets are the name of this game.
Requirements to start this latest heist include ownership of a mansion (the cheapest one, "The Tongva Estate" costs a minimum of $9 million!) and the additional purchase of an Art Studio from the Prix Luxury Real Estate website which costs at least a staggering $4.7 million! This heist clearly isn't for n00bs, if there still are any, and Rockstar clearly expects you to be playing it at the very least until November the 19th to pay for all the "entry requirements".
Complaints about the heist being "anti player" and "bugged to hell" are rife, and the costs alone would tend to suggest they're not entirely wrong. I immediately noticed that one of GTA's oldest irritations–your character not operating a lever/switch/computer etc because you're not standing on the EXACT pixel required is present and oh so flippin' incorrect–you will get shot because your character didn't push a switch or swipe a card quickly enough, I guarantee it.
When the heist is complete you'll almost certainly have a 3-Star wanted level. There's no Oppressor MK2 available to zoom to the heavens and wait them out with (as usual, it's unavailable during the heist finale), but evading them with the choice of escape vehicles; a weaponized Caracara 6x6 truck, Sanchez dirt bikes or being piloted to safety in an Annihilator Stealth helicopter all seem easy enough after a patch. I highly recommend polishing up your off-road driving skills and keeping an eye on the minimap, the cops in GTA VI will be at least as hard to lose as the Keystone-like Los Santos PD and their hopeless roadblocks. Along with the heist comes a new group of vehicles, all of which cost crazy amounts.
As for bugs, the main ones I've personally come across are cameras not appearing on the minimap and dodgy camera sight cones, with one security camera spotting me through a closed, solid door!
And now the final horror–guards with X-ray vision and eagle/owl eyesight. So... you do a prep mission to get an EMP device to kill the museum lighting (as in the Diamond Casino heist), and the guards can see you perfectly without the night vision goggles that you had to work to obtain. These same guards can also see you through certain parts of the impenetrable maze hedge!
Other silly irritations continue, like the inexplicably nerfed take if you redo the heist too soon (within a week it's reduced to under $500k, with the same $100k entry fee just to start!) Or how about when you start the scope mission and you're dumped outside your mansion, you may quite possibly be without a vehicle and so you have to call your mechanic to deliver one despite being mere yards from your mansion garage–which you cannot re-enter because YOU'RE LOCKED OUT! Come on Rockstar, you can do better than this... We deserve better than this!gotrI've got to say that on reflection, while I don't exactly hate this heist, I much prefer the Diamond Casino job, and maybe even Cayo Perico. I seriously doubt The Kortz Center job will live in the memory, which is a shame as it's almost certainly the last DLC for GTA V Online.