I mean I'm pretty sure the cop spawning itself is a placeholder mechanism they just never got around to. If you think about, the crime-notification probably calls a "spawn law enforcement" handler which basically just runs the spawn economy and drops them in, with a comment along the lines of "TODO: waiting on NPC driving mechanics" (which are also missing).
> I mean I'm pretty sure the cop spawning itself is a placeholder mechanism they just never got around to
Is this meant as an excuse? Because it's not. Either they left it out because they ran out of time, or they didn't bother implementing it from the beginning, but the result is the same: they released a game without core mechanics fully implemented and the critiques are justified.
I think there's a difference between the game being half-baked (it is) and just genuine failure on the part of the developer. Basically I'm pretty sure the cop mechanic wasn't intended to be the way it is.
That doesn't really make it good, but I don't think it represents the feature design.
The whole game is a placeholder. What did they even do in all those years? By now you'd think that in a _released_ game that people paid $60 for, they would have "gotten around" to replacing those placeholders. If I buy a dish washer I expect it to wash dishes and not just that squirt them with a water gun because "washing is a placeholder that they never got around to implementing".
A) This system is suboptimal but works
B) Let's rewrite suboptimal system
C) Oh god, we forgot our rewrite to propagate, so it's combination of A and B
D) This system doesn't do anything let's delete it
And this is a very unexciting game. I.e. it uses 2D for everything. Imagine for a moment you now to deal with:
E) nVidia and rayTracing
F) unreleased consoles
G) consoles that are old enough to write
H) OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, Mantle, etc.
I) Marketing trying to hype gamers by promising Pie in the Sky
J) Multiple platforms
