Missions are live in Street Crime

The city finally has people who give orders

Missions are live in Street Crime. For the first time in the game's history there are named characters inside the world who hand you work, judge how you do it and pay you when it is done. Until now every crime in this browser crime RPG was something you chose to do on your own. Now there are bosses with an opinion about it.

This is deliberately not a separate mode bolted onto the side of the game. A mission is a job in the world you already play. The objectives are the things you were going to do anyway: crimes, stolen cars, muggings, flights between cities, product moved from one market to another. The mission is the reason, the pressure and the payout.

This article was first published when the first two bosses opened their books. Moscow has since joined them, and brought with it a kind of objective the game has never had before: one you finish by talking. Both are covered below.

The bosses hand out the work

The Missions page does not open on a list of jobs. It opens on the bosses themselves, as cards with their portrait, their city and whether they are currently willing to talk to you. Choosing a boss is the first decision, and the ones who are out of your reach are shown greyed out rather than hidden, so you can see who you are working towards.

Don Vittorio Corleone runs New York and takes on every new gangster from the very first rank. His work starts with Welcome to the Family, where you draw first blood, get yourself properly equipped and prove you have a steady hand. Finish that and The Family Business opens the books to you: collection rounds, a list of cars that need to disappear and a message that needs sending. Blood in the Family follows, and it is exactly as pleasant as it sounds.

Rosa "La Diabla" Mendez runs Bogota and does not take calls from nobodies. You need rank behind you and the Don's work finished before she will see you. Colombian Connection puts you on her routes, La Diabla's Price asks what you will do to keep them, and Scorched Earth is what happens when somebody inside her operation gets greedy.

Nikolai "The Bear" Volkov runs Moscow, opens at rank four and will not look at you until Rosa's war is finished. Moscow Rules is his debut arc, and it is named after the way he works: assume nothing, verify everything, never let the other man pick the ground. Cold Welcome makes you earn your face in a city you do not know. The Clerk Who Counts is the talking job. The Dead Route puts a stolen container on stolen wheels, asks you to read the militsiya patrol beats on the way across the district, then asks you to keep the crew's story straight afterwards. War for the Corners is a corner-by-corner fight with a rival capo whose habits give him away.

Each boss speaks in their own register, and their face follows the job wherever it goes. The portrait of whoever you are working for sits on your active mission page, on the safe and bomb screens, and in every conversation from taking the job to collecting the money. You always know whose work you are doing.

How a mission actually works

You take a briefing from the boss, in their words, and then you go and play Street Crime. The objectives track themselves. There is no separate mission screen to babysit and nothing to claim: pull a crime, boost a car, win a mugging, buy a piece, fly somewhere or move product, and the job updates because the game already knows what you did.

Nothing ever completes quietly. When an objective goes green, the boss tells you so in their own voice the next time you open the page, including for the steps that happen somewhere the game cannot interrupt you, like landing at an airport or walking away from a mugging. Arcs are also gated on each other, so the story runs in the order it was written rather than whichever order you find it in.

• Travel to a city, and it passes the moment you are standing in it.
• Commit crimes, steal cars or win muggings, counted as they happen.
• Buy a specific piece of equipment from the weapon store.
• Hold an amount of cash, with a live progress bar against your wallet.
• Smuggle a named product into a named city on a run.
• Sit down and talk, when the boss has something to say.
• Play a mini-game, when the job needs your hands rather than your rank.
• Persuade a contact, when the only way through is the conversation itself.

The job you talk your way through

The Clerk Who Counts is the first mission in Street Crime you finish with words. Volkov wants a container manifest number. The only man who has it is Yegor Malenkov, the night clerk at Moscow's freight terminal, who logs every box that moves through the yard and is afraid of every man who knows it.

Yegor is not a dialogue tree. There are no options to pick from. You type whatever you want to say, he answers in his own words, and he remembers the whole conversation as it goes. He has a job, a life and a specific reason to be terrified, and he behaves accordingly: he deflects with paperwork, he stalls, and he will not hand a manifest number to somebody who merely says the name Volkov, because anybody can say a name.

What does work is in the briefing, if you actually read it. Volkov tells you three things before you go: the container came off the Tuesday train from Riga, the shipment belongs to the Vaziani brothers, and the Bear personally guarantees the clerk's name appears on no list. Those are your credentials. Produce them and Yegor starts believing you are who you say you are. Drop the name with nothing behind it and he gets more suspicious, not less.

If you cannot talk him round, you can buy him. Volkov tells you to walk in carrying seventy-five thousand in cash whether you spend it or not, and the price is negotiable rather than fixed, so a patient negotiator pays less than an impatient one. Threats are the one approach that will not work at all: he is already more frightened of the Vaziani than he could ever be of you, and leaning on him only makes him freeze.

Push him too far and he stops talking altogether. The door bolts for five minutes, a countdown sits on the chat and reloading the page changes nothing. When the time runs out he will hear you out again, wary but willing, so one bad conversation costs you five minutes rather than the mission. Use the wait to reread the briefing, because the way back in is in there. The manifest number itself is generated for your character on the server and never travels anywhere it could be read early, so the only way to hold it is to actually get it out of him.

The jobs you play by hand

Other steps refuse to be solved by your character sheet in a different way. Seventeen of the eighty objectives currently live are mini-games, and they are the parts of a job where the game stops asking what your stats are and starts asking what you can work out.

The safe cracker gives you a combination and a limited number of attempts, and tells you a little more with each failure until you either have it or you do not. The bomb defusal hands you a set of wiring rules and a set of wires and asks you to cut in the right order, which is a very different problem from it looking easy.

• Pick a pin tumbler lock without snapping the tension you are holding.
• Crack a password by narrowing down the word from what each guess reveals.
• Find the counterfeit bundle on a balance scale, with limited weighings and one accusation.
• Sweep a safehouse for a rat that keeps moving while you close in.
• Play a hand of dice against an enforcer, where the only stake is your standing.
• Case a joint by reading a pressure-sensitive floor before you cross it.
• Sit at a locked table of liars and truth-tellers and name the informant.
• Triangulate a burner phone across a district with wire taps, then call the raid on one block.
• Cross a district against patrols that sweep a fixed beat, on fuel you can waste by waiting.
• Lay the night's events out on a timeline from what the crew swear to, then tell the story once.
• Split your soldiers across three corners night after night against a rival capo who can be read.

Every one of these is decided on the server. The answer is generated where you cannot see it and never travels to your browser, so there is nothing in the page to read and no trick to peek at. Losing costs you nothing except the boss's opinion: throw the board away, deal again and try it a different way.

What the work pays

Missions pay in cash, honour, prestige and rank points, and the arcs carry achievements of their own: Made Your Bones for the first job, then Welcome to the Family, Family Business, Two Families, Rise Through the Ranks, Made Man, Untouchable, and now Three Families for working your way into the confidence of three different bosses.

What missions never pay, and never charge, is credits. That is a deliberate rule rather than an oversight. Story content in Street Crime is something you earn on the street, not something anybody skips ahead in by reaching for their wallet, and the engine refuses to hand out the paid currency even if a job were written to try. Talking to Yegor does not cost you anything from your daily click allowance either, so nobody has to ration a conversation.

Where this is going

Seven arcs is the beginning, not the destination. The ambition for missions is a story layer running into the many hundreds of missions, spread across far more bosses than three, reaching into every city the game already has and every system it already runs. Street Crime has nearly twenty years of world behind it and almost none of that has ever been told to the player as a story. Missions are the way to finally tell it.

The groundwork for that scale is already in place, and how quickly Moscow followed New York and Bogota is the evidence. Sixteen different mini-games are built into the engine and thirteen of them are now in play, so a new arc can reach for a new kind of puzzle without anything having to be built first. The conversation system is the same story: it went live carrying one frightened clerk, but the people behind it are written as characters rather than as one mission's script, and more of them are already sitting in the game waiting for the arcs that need them.

No dates are being promised here and no arc is being announced ahead of time. What is being said is the direction: more bosses, more cities, more arcs, more people worth talking to, and a version of this free online gangster game where a new player can be led through the underworld by people who live in it rather than left to work the whole thing out alone.