It's easy to forget what Steam was like ten years ago, even if you were there. Steam was still using the Greenlight program at this point, requiring that indie developers beg the Steam community for votes to improve their chances of being manually approved by Valve for sale on the platform. While the selection would start improving rapidly in the next couple years, I bring this up because I think Payday 1 benefited tremendously from the platform's limited catalog. If you were shopping for something like Payday, there wasn't anything else on Steam that would scratch that itch. It's easy to feel like Payday: The Heist got much more attention in 2011 than it would today, given that it's essentially a bunch of heist movie references stapled onto Left 4 Dead. Hell, one of the most popular levels from the original game is a Left 4 Dead level.
The sequel attempts to become more than that, to be its own game and improve upon the parts of Payday 1 that resonated the most with players. I started a job at a local grocery store the day before Payday 2 released, and I bought it immediately after they handed me a paycheck - and I was happy! The small selection of launch heists felt a little too "safe", but everything else was a massive improvement when it came to creating a personal connection with the game. Customize your own masks, your guns, the skills you want to take (separate from the heister you picked!) and play some heists in actual, real stealth.
This is not the game Payday 2 is today.
Ten years of updates has rendered the game horrifically bloated, each update adding new heists, heisters, masks, gameplay systems, cosmetic systems, progession systems, currencies, balance changes, enemy types, ammo types, melee weapons, weapon mods, grenades, and an arsenal of guns so large that I can't really think of anything outside of H3VR that beats it. The only way you can keep up is by being an early adopter, because the onboarding process for Payday 2 nowadays mostly relies on having a friend that will drag you through 2-5 hours of heisting before you start to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.
Many of the community's running jokes about the game's more unwieldy elements have a basis in reality as well. Yes, it "runs on a racing game engine" in the same way that DotA 2 can trace its lineage to Quake's engine. Yes, it's a "bag-throwing/drill-repair simulator". Overkill Software realized that the most popular heists in Payday 1 asked players to manage some other resource and introduced bags of loot that the cops can reclaim from inattentive players. This loop has been repeated in basically every mission since Payday 2's release, and while I think you could criticize this for being a lazy way to add gameplay to missions that should be radically different, in my experience the players of Payday 2 tend to feel like they haven't really done a mission if they're not managing some kind of tangible loot.
If you can sift through all the nonsense, though, the game has its allure. Payday 2's gameplay - in its current form - is about putting together a "build" with skills, weapons, and perk decks that synergize so you can clear some of the more sadistic content in the game. However, if you're playing on difficulties for people that leave the house, the possibilities open up a lot more and the game's variety really shines. Run a melee build, run a "summoner" build that uses turrets and converted cops to fight for you, sprint around the level at light speed using a shotgun to light everyone on fire. It's all fine, but it really takes off when you're playing this with a friend or three and all of you are engaging with these systems at the same time. Sprinting over to a teammate to revive them with a shout, keeping a lookout while they answer a guard's pager to maintain stealth - while some games are better at actively encouraging teamwork, each mission completed in Payday 2 feels like a bonding exercise through the little ways you're constantly looking out for each other.
So sure, you could play Payday 2 with bots, but even if they improved the lackluster AI you'd find that the game loses a lot of its magic. The game is at its worst when it's not doing anything to encourage collaboration (this is where that "drill repair simulator" joke comes from), but the reason it's still in Steam's Top 25 by concurrent players is because the rest of the game gets it right. Despite all the updates and the bloat, the allure of Payday 2 remains the same since its release: It retains the best parts of Left 4 Dead as a game bundled with a social space, letting you shoot the shit with friends or strangers in a purely cooperative environment, wordlessly providing assistance in the form of a trigger pull as you remove the helmets from an army of cops.
The sequel attempts to become more than that, to be its own game and improve upon the parts of Payday 1 that resonated the most with players. I started a job at a local grocery store the day before Payday 2 released, and I bought it immediately after they handed me a paycheck - and I was happy! The small selection of launch heists felt a little too "safe", but everything else was a massive improvement when it came to creating a personal connection with the game. Customize your own masks, your guns, the skills you want to take (separate from the heister you picked!) and play some heists in actual, real stealth.
This is not the game Payday 2 is today.
Ten years of updates has rendered the game horrifically bloated, each update adding new heists, heisters, masks, gameplay systems, cosmetic systems, progession systems, currencies, balance changes, enemy types, ammo types, melee weapons, weapon mods, grenades, and an arsenal of guns so large that I can't really think of anything outside of H3VR that beats it. The only way you can keep up is by being an early adopter, because the onboarding process for Payday 2 nowadays mostly relies on having a friend that will drag you through 2-5 hours of heisting before you start to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.
Many of the community's running jokes about the game's more unwieldy elements have a basis in reality as well. Yes, it "runs on a racing game engine" in the same way that DotA 2 can trace its lineage to Quake's engine. Yes, it's a "bag-throwing/drill-repair simulator". Overkill Software realized that the most popular heists in Payday 1 asked players to manage some other resource and introduced bags of loot that the cops can reclaim from inattentive players. This loop has been repeated in basically every mission since Payday 2's release, and while I think you could criticize this for being a lazy way to add gameplay to missions that should be radically different, in my experience the players of Payday 2 tend to feel like they haven't really done a mission if they're not managing some kind of tangible loot.
If you can sift through all the nonsense, though, the game has its allure. Payday 2's gameplay - in its current form - is about putting together a "build" with skills, weapons, and perk decks that synergize so you can clear some of the more sadistic content in the game. However, if you're playing on difficulties for people that leave the house, the possibilities open up a lot more and the game's variety really shines. Run a melee build, run a "summoner" build that uses turrets and converted cops to fight for you, sprint around the level at light speed using a shotgun to light everyone on fire. It's all fine, but it really takes off when you're playing this with a friend or three and all of you are engaging with these systems at the same time. Sprinting over to a teammate to revive them with a shout, keeping a lookout while they answer a guard's pager to maintain stealth - while some games are better at actively encouraging teamwork, each mission completed in Payday 2 feels like a bonding exercise through the little ways you're constantly looking out for each other.
So sure, you could play Payday 2 with bots, but even if they improved the lackluster AI you'd find that the game loses a lot of its magic. The game is at its worst when it's not doing anything to encourage collaboration (this is where that "drill repair simulator" joke comes from), but the reason it's still in Steam's Top 25 by concurrent players is because the rest of the game gets it right. Despite all the updates and the bloat, the allure of Payday 2 remains the same since its release: It retains the best parts of Left 4 Dead as a game bundled with a social space, letting you shoot the shit with friends or strangers in a purely cooperative environment, wordlessly providing assistance in the form of a trigger pull as you remove the helmets from an army of cops.