The Doomsday Heist Was Reportedly Single Player DLC First

The massive amounts of cash generated by GTA Online via microtransactions proved to be a huge incentive for Take-Two to prioritize multiplayer DLC. Since there are no in-game purchases affecting single-player, for DLC to be profitable and thus viable it would have to be a paid affair, and knowing Rockstar any single-player DLC they would have made would have been big enough to warrant at least a $10 price tag, if not more.

Now, only a small fraction of the whole player base would buy that. However, free Online DLC which is available to everyone, thus tempting everyone to buy Shark Cards, brings in a whole lot more revenue with a whole lot less invested, thus, more profit. Boom, single-player DLC went down the drain.

We've discussed this topic a multitude of times in the past, always drawing the same conclusion. However, we also totally called that the way forward would be adding narratively driven content to GTA Online, as a number of other MMOs also feature heavy story integration. And voila, now we got The Doomsday Heist.

However, it now seems that the connection between the canned single-player DLC and The Doomsday Heist is closer than that. Even though the mentioned single-player content never got released, we know for a fact that it was under development prior to cancellation — or, as it now seems, repurposing.

Over the course of the past few years, the community's most reputable leakers frequently allegedly uncovered single-player DLC assets. It always seemed strange that the guys who were always right with Online DLC leaks also always got it wrong with the single-player leaks. But looking back it seems they were right, Rockstar just changed things up along the way.

One of the best-known names when it comes to GTA leaks is TezFunz2. He has a near-spotless track record of GTA Online data-mining leaks and has also posted a fair share of single-player DLC leaks in the past. Turns out the leaks were accurate, as they ended up appearing in The Doomsday Heist.

Specifically, he posted in a single-player DLC leak thread on the GTAForums way back in 2013, when single-player DLC was first announced, that the jetpack was on its way and that there were references to "Clifford". He, at the time, assumed this was a new location. However as it turns out it's the name of the AI that assists players during the events of The Doomsday Heist.

Thinking about it, this fits perfectly.

The complexity of the missions in The Doomsday Heist outstrip anything we've seen in GTA Online before. It also delivers the most story content in the multiplayer mode of the game. Chances are it was originally Michael, Trevor and Franklin who would have tried to stop the calamity with Clifford's help, but then the 'Online DLC-only' prime directive was issued and work was suspended on the project.

We're guessing the single-player DLC progenitor of The Doomsday Heist was fairly ahead in its development cycle, and Rockstar would rather not waste the assets. If they can't give players the single-player DLC that the vocal elements of the community so desire, they might as well take the work they've done and make use of it. It's logical to assume that they'd repurpose the assets from the single player project and include it in The Doomsday Heist.

Whether or not the ties between the scrapped single-player DLC are truly as tight as TezFunz2's tweet suggests, one thing is for certain — this update delivered to GTA fans the first bit of story content since the release of the main game, and it's one of the most engaging and complex experiences presented to players.