So a month in, where does the game stand? In the exact same place. There have been no updates. There was supposed to be one, but it was pushed back weeks because of Playstation update verification bullshit. Cross platform and always online have been a disaster for this game. They never fixed the server issues, they just lost 70% of their players. It's player count is consistent lower than Payday 2, and not by a small margin or anything, Payday 2 consistently has ten times more players than Payday 3. Make of that what you will.

I've played Payday for 10 years. I bought Payday 2 in 2013 and loved it, followed the secret, finished it myself, did every heist on DSOD, I've done everything you can do in Payday 2. This was meant to be the follow up that would blow my mind. I was ready on release date to spend hours playing this with my buddies.

We got two heists in, the servers have been down for almost an entire day now. Starbreeze starkly defended the always online nature of the game, and now it makes them look like clowns. You can't even play the game solo, you have to matchmake for a game with bots. You also need a 3rd party nebula account to even play the game.

The UI is terrible. The menus feel like they were made for controllers with no account for PC. There's no lobbies or lobby browser (e.g. CrimeNet), you get booted to the main menu after every heist, no way to keep playing with the crew you were just with. All the weapons are just in a list clumped together, no filter of weapon type or primary/secondary. Weapon stats are shown in bars instead of numbers. Customization has been completely stunted as well as build variety. Most guns feel the same, abandoning the myriad of playstyles and builds available in Payday 2.

Melee bash does almost nothing, terrible damage and not even a stagger. There are no melee weapons, no lasers, no safe house to go to. The ping system is extremely bad, you are forced to use the ping button to shout at civs or mark guards and special units, instead of just using the interact button. Instead of a normal EXP system, you're forced to do challenges to level up. The skills force you to play around three boring buffs, most of the skills are built around this, and many skills are overall completely useless.

I wanted to love this game, but so much of it is super off-putting, feeling like it was released way too early. Stack on the fact the game also been mostly unplayable since release. I hope they can make this better, but for now I'm extremely disappointed.

Game is fun, not a master piece or anything, but not terrible. Bosses are designed well for the most part, every character feels like a different experience from the other (If you don't equip weapons they're not proficient with). There's multiple systems to allow increased challenge, variation, and progress besides solely doing things for the personal achievement of it. Simply a fun game, probably machine translated? You have to experiment with some stuff because some of the translations just don't describe what the items do. The characters are obviously made to be appealing to the eyes. If that bothers you, please stay away.

Played through The Telltale Definitive Series. Absolutely worse than the first two in almost every way. The point and click elements were worse, the world and characters looked worse despite clearly having better graphical fidelity over all, Clementine has become an insufferable bitch in the time between the last game and this one. No matter what choices you made in season 2 she is like this. Her choices at the end of the game are completely detirmed by the blackpack sequneces and not at all with how you treat her or help her throughout the game, which seems insanely stupid. I never cared about Kate, or David, or Tripp or Gabe like I cared about Kenny, Lee, and Clem in the first two games. Javi is a pretty cool character though.

Played through The Telltale Definitive Series. Characters act like I've not told them something quite a few times, instantly taking me out of the world. There's a lot of convenience in the plot, as well as a lot of stiff dialogue. I also have a bit of a problem with the way the the story doesn't really get changed based on your choices, there's only maybe 2 things that matter between episodes, with most "choices" resolving themselves sometimes within minutes to keep the story on it's linear track if you deviate from the choices the developers wanted you to make. The game is much more linear than it makes itself out to be, so it ends up just being a normal linear point and click game with long cutscenes.

Let's stop pretending this game is anything more than a frustrating slog fest, designed to be played in an era where if you didn't make your game extremely difficult or super confusing, it could be beaten in an hour, and this game is exactly that. It was made to be confusing, forcing you to grind for resources to put a bomb on every wall to see if it has a secret door, and use the candle on every shrub to see if it has a secret staircase, the candle which can only be used once per screen, initially I assume that's just some sort of tech limitation, but then you get an upgrade for the candle that lets you use it an unlimited amount of times! Seriously, this game was designed to waste your time.