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.

Two bosses, two cities, two standards

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

The jobs you play by hand

Some steps refuse to be solved by your character sheet. Fourteen of the sixty-four 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.

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 and Untouchable as you work through more of it and more than one boss.

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.

Where this is going

Six 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 two, 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. The engine understands objective types that no live arc uses yet, and sixteen different mini-games are built into it while ten of them are currently in play, so new work can be written as content rather than as a rebuild each time. Adding a boss, an arc or a job is now a matter of writing it, which is exactly the position a story layer needs to be in before it can grow.

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, 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.