GTA Online Drug Wars: The Last Dose Out Now

[Spider-Vice]

Dr. Friedlander has been added to the set of problems the Fooliganz' have to face, as has his FriedMind business ripping off the Fooliganz' special recipe. 5 new missions available to play:

• This is an Intervention
• Unusual Suspects
• FriedMind
• Checking In
• BDKD

 

Newswire

Spoiler

 

Haven't played myself yet so can't say much about them yet  

 

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/5125891458o3a5/los-santos-drug-wars-the-last-dose-out-now

Edited March 16 by Spider-Vice

[ajalkane]

It's good. And they've toned down the annoyance levels of the Freaks so I'm not pulling my hair out of my head in exasperation during the cut scenes.

 

[fluffball]

Pretty alright missions design wise, but anyone else think they were super short?

[BillsyLiamGTA]

Looking forward to checking out the missions when I get home tonight.

[Max96]

Made a run already, I'd say it's a good conclusion for Fooliganz story!

Spoiler

 

Friedlander's Virtue:

Spoiler

 

At least we could hold our phone in hand

Spoiler

 

Another trip:

Spoiler

 

And cargo plane flight, finally:

Spoiler

 

[Robin1996ify]

Interesting mission failed screen from one of the Last Dose missions.

 

[VitoCorleone1992]

6 minutes ago, Max96 said:

Made a run already, I'd say it's a good conclusion for Fooliganz story!

  Hide contents

 

Friedlander's Virtue:

  Hide contents

 

At least we could hold our phone in hand

  Hide contents

 

Another trip:

  Hide contents

 

And cargo plane flight, finally:

  Hide contents

 

WAIT WHAT?! WE CAN USE THE PHONES ON OUR HANDS NOW?!

[Max96]

1 minute ago, VitoCorleone1992 said:

WAIT WHAT?! WE CAN USE THE PHONES ON OUR HANDS NOW?!

Nah, just a moment from a mission

[VitoCorleone1992]

13 minutes ago, Max96 said:

Nah, just a moment from a mission

I was expecting you to say that but bruh...that's the thing...idk why they can't or don't do that for free mode. -_-'

[ajalkane]

37 minutes ago, fluffball said:

Pretty alright missions design wise, but anyone else think they were super short?

 

I thought they were quite comparable to ULP and most preps and whatnot. Of course Doomsday is kinda on another level, but always has been. To me it seemed pretty standard length, and taken as a whole - all of the Fooligans missions it's not short at all.

 

[Spider-Vice]

Seeing reports that both First and Last Dose missions are now available to replay from the Jobs menu and from the Freakshop?

[Max96]

2 minutes ago, Spider-Vice said:

Seeing reports that both First and Last Dose missions are now available to replay from the Jobs menu and from the Freakshop?

Yeah. The marker moves inside.

Btw, there's gonna be Hard Mode for sure.

[AUScowboy]

No new glasses?

[SpaceBeagle]

Welp, no free car for me after last mission... looks like it is going to be just as we had after Casino story missions free car - some will get it right away or very soon upon finishing (like I had back then) and some will have to wait a lot, or even few new sessions, like me now  

... but I have lots & lots of 'bounty award' phone messages, that's counts for something 

[Zak Ras]

1 hour ago, AUScowboy said:

No new glasses?

Unfortunately no. The rest of the trousers and cardigans are in, but no glasses.

[Spider-Vice]

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/5125891458o3a5/los-santos-drug-wars-the-last-dose-out-now

[Malibu Club]

The ending was a bit anticlimactic, but I still had some good fun.

Spoiler

Fighting hordes of my own character took me off guard lol I wasn't expecting that at all.

 

Edited March 16 by Malibu Club
spoilered for people who don't want to be spoiled

[jonhyosbourne]

 

[Malibu Club]

Just now, jonhyosbourne said:

 

Haha what's up with that wonky friedlander model in that cutscene? Is that just his in-game model? Doesn't even look like him!

[Lupo-Akane]

4 hours ago, fluffball said:

Pretty alright missions design wise, but anyone else think they were super short?

Short is good when it comes to this crap, these npc's are not funny and boring to be around for any longer then it takes already.

[AUScowboy]

GTA+ is pretty crap this month in the way of clothing and money bonuses, where them glasses at R*? Does the 2x$ on Fooligan jobs stack on top of the 1.5x$ that every gets this week?

[AgentPlum]

What an absolute pile of CAMEL DUNG that was.

 

In from work at 6pm (UK), hadf some grub and loaded up - finished all 5 missions without losing a life as every mission was p*ss easy in about an hour.

 

Got the free car which I suppose is actually OK (its fast), stored in a garage, logged off.

 

What's next? Anything original?

[Need For Madness Auto]

Did Rockstar removed the jungle wave where animals spawned in during the trip in mission 4 ?

 

I am getting Friedlander clones after the clowns instead of animals

[Lemoyne outlaw]

i thought the new missions were okay. it was some good time killing fun. but it wasn't anything special. pretty quick and easy. the characters are still mostly cringy. i wonder if we will see more of dr friedlander since he escapes. he was kind of a boring villain. i already killed him in story mode. and i feel like the mini story that he has in online is lame. is there going to be more missions with the fooliganz? once i did the last mission dax sent a text saying that he would be in touch. i thought this would be the end of their story. overall this has been another mediocre dlc. it's fun to mess around with for a few hours. but it's not very high quality like their story mode stuff. now to wait another half year to get more mediocre dlc.

 

 

32 minutes ago, Need For Madness Auto said:

Did Rockstar removed the jungle wave where animals spawned in during the trip in mission 4 ?

 

I am getting Friedlander clones after the clowns instead of animals

i had to fight the animals in my mission. so it must have been a glitch for you.

[Timsalabimbo]

I thought there were supposed to be flying cheeseburgers somewhere. Did I miss this or were they really absent?

1 hour ago, Need For Madness Auto said:

Did Rockstar removed the jungle wave where animals spawned in during the trip in mission 4 ?

 

I am getting Friedlander clones after the clowns instead of animals

Just like with the acid trip in the First Dose mission, that mission has at least two different variants. So sometimes you get the one with the animals and sometimes you get another version (although I do believe Friedlander clones occur in both versions).

[Zak Ras]

My Review:

This is gonna lean into a lot of negatives, but I've written this under the assumption that what has gone on with LSDW might likely be testing the waters for future updates/GTA VI's version of Online. In which case; all the more reason to voice what you take issue with now, rather than hold your peace only to B&M later.

 

In short: I would not have made people wait 3 months for 5 Contact Missions and some trousers & cardigans.

The Story:

Spoiler

I get the idea of trying to have an actual passage of time between story events within a single update. The idea was to have done sell missions via the Acid Lab so our LSD gained a reputation of its own, which resulted in market competition - but the scale of Last Dose's missions did not earn it the marketing hype of a "Two-Part Story Update".

1. Last Dose 1 - Bog standard shootout.
2. Last Dose 2 - Go to 3 locations, kill standard enemies, interesting to have enemies arrive at a HQ you're investigating not knowing you're there at first.
3. Last Dose 3 - Find a key in a texture flipped interior, surprise(?) villian reveal, drive back to base.
4. Last Dose 4 - You don't need to follow Dax, but my morbidly curious QA brain turned on and wanted to see how long it would take to follow him. Five minutes of following Dax made up 45% the playtime of this mission. It is fun to have another LSD trip mission, this time combat focused rather than driving. Awesome to fight an army of yourself - it was like the Halloween clone on steroids. I just can't ditch the feeling someone on the mission design team put the Dax NPC and Follow objective in, purely to bump up the playtime of Last Dose as a whole, not just this mission.
5. Last Dose 5 - 1/3 of the Doomsday Deluxo Setup without the flying cars, small shootout, followed by simply flying a plane unobstructed which is automatically landed in a cutscene. Clever little scene transition. The LSPD shootout started out simple, as if to say; "oh yeah, the LSPD exist" but then surprisingly elevated in intensity. But the conclusion was a repeat of the very first mission in this storyline, drive from Sandy Shores to the Freakshop in a slow truck while being shot at.

I was a little let down Last Dose only had 5 missions compared to First Dose's 6. As I was writing this I suddenly remembered; the Dax Fooligan Missions exist. I've only played those 14 times, way back in December, purely to both get the Acid Lab upgrade & play each one at least once. But I seriously can't remember a single one while writing this, that is how little an impact those left. If those not existing could've lead to more focus being put towards the main story missions - I would've opted for that.

 

Another storyline ending with a character car as a reward is nice (off-topic, the racing number & sponsorship logos take the shine of that livery - just have it be a company car)... but Friedlander's escaped and is totally fine. He's still a TV show celebrity doctor... he just won't be getting into the LSD game. It's not like Cliffford where we wondered who (or what) picked up the pendrive with the base code - Friedlander's still out there... returning later for a Michael DLC...? I doubt it, but I won't feign ignorance of the possibility. Him wanting our assistance was an interesting idea, along with our character ready to consider it... cut short by someone on the art team's Mucha Lucha OC the status quo of GTA Online... damn this scenario needed Trevor and not the Fooliganz.

 

But even if the only difference this update had was that Steven Ogg (Trevor), Anthony Cumia (Chef) & Matthew Maher (Wade) all returned alongside David Mogentale (who may as well have not even been called up to return given his half cutscene of screentime) - it doesn't negate the biggest problem with LSDW;

 

The Biggest Problem:

Spoiler

It's not worth replaying the story.

 

First time bonus of 100k per mission? That's $1.1m for playing through both First & Last Dose - The Full Dose. That's a brilliant payout... replaying Last Dose 1 only paid $15k and change. Multiply by 11 and that's around $165k... during a Double $ Event Week. On a normal week that's $82,500 for the whole story.

 

Last year we had the VIP Contract: Dr Dre as the main chunk of the December DLC, which pays $1m per replay - alongside the Agency Contracts & Payphone Hits. Not the greatest, but still a decent payout, even with that unskippable forced-advert of a cutscene. There was no branching mission strands like those in The Contract, but if this was planned to be to Trevor what The Contract was to Franklin, and if there's a similar style of update planned in the future for Michael De Santa, (as Ned Luke has voiced the same enthusiasm as Fonteno to make a return), then said Michael DLC is going to have a hell of a job to draw a straw shorter than LSDW. Don't get me wrong, the Acid Lab business is brilliant once upgraded, but all the marketing hype was put into this "Two-Part Story", much like how The Contract's marketing focus was on the Dr Dre Contract storyling - that's why I'm focusing on the story.

 

I won't pretend to know how the Job system works when it comes to dripfeeding them. But if it was an issue that prevented the whole story from following a heist-like linear structure, could they not have just made them two seperate heist-like structures with the payout given a 50/50 split, enticing players to playthrough both parts back to back?

 

After all, before Last Dose was released we could only play through First Dose via the yellow marker outside the Freakshop, in order.

 

Also: why do certain Contact Mission cutscenes still remove all your headwear & t-shirt PNGs? This is not a LSDW thing, it was part of the base game's contact mission "mission complete" cutscenes ever since launch in 2013... but, why was it ever a thing?

Edited March 16 by Zak Ras

[Spider-Vice]

Although the first couple missions are brief and more "introductory" in nature, Mission 3 inside FriedMind I think was pretty cool, and once again I loved the acid trip, I don't see any harm in GTA Online having some more ridiculous fun from time to time, I can't bring myself to overanalyse these kinds of missions honestly, with all these deep dives into the "AI this, other thing that", bleh.

I think the trip was as fun as the first one - having Friedlander's crazy ramblings tie into a new trip where you fight your own ego/copies of you and others, copies of Friedlander, tortilla/taco/burger heads and so on, got plenty of screenshots out of that  

 

Looks like our "favourite" therapist ended up escaping the plane incident, perhaps he still is going over to South America  

 

1 hour ago, Timsalabimbo said:

I thought there were supposed to be flying cheeseburgers somewhere. Did I miss this or were they really absent?

They're in, I got them. Might be RNG. I had a cheeseburger and eCola flying and circling around.

 

[Exsanguination]

Those were pretty fun. Can’t complain about a free car!

[fluffball]

5 hours ago, Spider-Vice said:

They're in, I got them. Might be RNG. I had a cheeseburger and eCola flying and circling around.

Those come with
 

Spoiler

Fast Food variation  so yeah 50/50 chance 

 

[Jamwes]

Why the hell is Friedlander the main villain? It makes no sense! The big bad should've been Epsilon. They would have the power and money to start a corporation and corner 80% of the supplies needed for the new drug.

 

I dislike the disconnect between the First and Last Dose missions. Last has new baddies that we've never seen before. R* should've worked in that private army all wearing white in some of the First Dose missions. Tease us with "who is this new private army" marketing. The Dax job with the Merryweather depot should've been the guys in white. The supply mission with the toxic spill could've been the guys in white. You should've stolen the Acid Lab from the guys in white in the final Last Dose mission.

 

Labrat being one of 3 people who knows how to make the medicine is dumb. Why does Friedlander kidnap Labrat to make the new drug when he already knows how to make the new drug? Story wise, they should've come up with a better reason for the kidnapping. 

 

I enjoyed playing the missions, but disliked the story. I'd play them again if they paid better than contact missions.