Overkill pulls an “Overkill”.
PAYDAY 2 is a game that, while not especially near-and-dear to my heart, is something I still have a great fondness for. Back in 2013, myself and a couple of my high school buddies picked up the four-pack on release day and promptly played it into the ground. One thing that we loved doing were hybrid stealth-loud runs; we’d go in, run stealth for as long as we could, inevitably fuck up, and then finish up the heist with guns a-blazing. Overkill quickly patched the way that concealment worked, so that players wearing heavy armor would be spotted by guards within fractions of a second. Dominated guards started having their pagers go off, and clearing all of the security on a map would result in reinforcements showing up for no reason to muck up your routes. Stealth heists became all-or-nothing overnight. You either did a full suit-only, minimal-kill run and restarted when you got caught, or you didn’t bother doing them at all. I didn’t enjoy heisting in stealth after that.
Not too long after that, Overkill added a movie trailer for the then-unknown John Wick to the intro of the game, meaning that you got to watch an advert on every boot. Crimefest 2015 wrapped up with Overkill adding paid lootboxes containing guns with superior stats that you couldn’t get by any other means. I fell out of love with PAYDAY 2; the developers and publishers had jointly fucked enough of it up that I couldn't bring myself to play it any longer. The moment PAYDAY 3 was announced, I told everyone who would listen the exact same thing: “I want to get in on this before they have a chance to fuck it up”. Overkill were going to fuck it up, I knew that much. It was just going to be a matter of when.
I didn’t expect it to be on release day.
We arrive now to PAYDAY 3, a game that's a step down from its predecessor in nearly every way imaginable. Worse progression, worse soundscapes, worse music, bland heists, and always-online servers that are still struggling to function six goddamned days after the scheduled release date.
If Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t exist, this would easily be the most botched launch of the past decade. Back when Diablo 3 released — one of the most notorious always-online titles — Blizzard’s servers choked, serving players across the globe with the infamous Error 37. Memes mocking it were everywhere. You couldn’t escape them. Wherever you looked, people were talking about Error 37 like it was the Super Bowl; everybody was constantly going on and on about how it was a complete failure on Blizzard’s part. And it was, to be clear. But do you remember how long Error 37 lasted for? It was such a big event, and people talked about it for so long, so surely it must have been a while. Two weeks, at least? A month?
One day. Blizzard had it mostly sorted within 24 hours.
How sorry of a state we find the modern gaming industry in where PAYDAY 3 has been literally unplayable for most of its buyers for what’s coming up on a week now and people are still making excuses for it. Only in video games is it still acceptable — worth playing defense for, even! — to sell a broken product at a premium. Many have been pointing fingers around, insisting that it’s the fault of someone else; Overkill/Starbreeze are blaming AccelByte (their server provider) for not being able to handle the influx of players, the gamethinkers are blaming Deep Silver for presumably forcing some hands to make the game always-online, and people who have had to deal with Overkill’s bullshit before are saying that the fault lies squarely at the feet of the developers.
Here’s the thing: I don’t really give a fuck whose fault it is. What I care about is the fact that the game doesn’t work.
Even in the brief flickers where it does manage to suck down a gasp for life, though, PAYDAY 3 feels remarkably unfinished. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that everything that’s here was cobbled together in about a year and promptly rushed out the door; it’s got some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a game in recent memory, and getting anything to work feels like an active battle with the program. No longer can you pick a heist, set up a lobby, advertise that you’re going loud or stealthy, and let other players trickle in; everything is now relegated to matchmaking that’s split up by difficulty tiers, meaning that there are effectively 32 (eight heists by four difficulties) blind queues going at any given time. If you want to do, say, Dirty Ice on Very Hard stealth, you need to queue it up, hope you get dropped into a lobby with people in it, hope that other people show up before the five-minute auto-start goes off, and hope that every other person there is also trying to do stealth, since there’s no longer any pre-game chat or lobby tags to coordinate these things before the heist starts. Shop weapons (and masks, and suits) are no longer split up into categories and are instead dumped haphazardly into a single big list, making it difficult to tell what goes in which slot. Securing bags and loose cash no longer alerts you to their value, making it look like they’ve just disappeared into thin air; the first time I tossed a bag off a bridge and into a helicopter, it vanished without any fanfare and made me think that I'd thrown it out of bounds. For some ungodly reason, typing anything in text chat requires you to hit the enter key twice before you can start writing. Sometimes, while in menus, hitting backspace will send you back to where you were; other times, you'll need to hit escape.
The UI is similarly atrocious, and reeks of being made up of placeholder assets — ignoring, of course, when they are literally just placeholder assets. The iconic, flashing POLICE ASSAULT warning in the top corner of the screen has now been replaced with plain, white, 24pt Arial; every menu option is a generic white-text-on-black-box that inverts when you hover over it; the ability to close the game is buried at the bottom of the "More" tab in the main menu. It's hard to describe, but I can assure you that it's not the kind of thing you want to experience for yourself. Buttons and menus just feel vaguely squishy, like whatever you're trying to select wants you to give it a couple of tries before it'll take. It just feels like it was made in a hustle; a minimally-viable product.
We've got eight heists on launch, and heist number nine isn't scheduled to come out until sometime this winter; aware readers should begin hearing the sound of alarm bells ringing at this point, considering how PAYDAY 2 launched with eleven heists and had five more added in the time it'll take PAYDAY 3 to add one. Also gone are multi-day heists, shrinking the diversity and length of available missions down even further. Everything on offer here feels like little more than a retread of already-existing heists: Road Rage is Green Bridge without an explosion, Dirty Ice is a slightly larger Diamond Store, Gold & Sharke is a scaled-down Big Bank, Touch The Sky is a near-perfect copy of Framing Frame Day 3 but during the daytime. Easily the worst part, however, is how nearly every heist just amounts to "go to a place and steal a thing". It's so dreadfully boring. There's nothing here that even grazes the unique setpieces found in the earlier games, like the meth-cooking in Rats, or the deal-gone-bad in Undercover, or the property destruction in Mallcrasher. It's just break in, bag up some loot, throw it in a van or a helicopter, and then leave. Nothing we haven't seen a dozen times before already. Where's the creativity?
And speaking of, the new skill system is just as lifeless. Just about every option is some variation of "gain X% to [stat]", with almost nothing else on offer. Stuns you dish out last 20% longer, marked enemies are marked for 20% longer, getting ammo from an ammo bag gives you +20% damage for ten seconds, you can perform takedowns 20% faster. It's all just numbers buffs. While anyone who's played PAYDAY 2 on the higher difficulties knows about the importance of damage breakpoints, these are fucking boring boosts that do nothing besides make your numbers a bit bigger. Where are my Jokers? Where's Inspire? Where's Bulletstorm, or Graze, or Hostage Taker, or even just the ICTV? If you don't want to bring these skills back, at least come up with something new that can substitute as a meaningful upgrade. High-tier skills in PAYDAY 2 often drastically changed the way that you would interact with the game, adding new mechanics and playstyles to use in taking down the cops; here, they do little more than provide some damage and resistance buffs.
The progression system is terrible, top to bottom. It's one thing to make it move at a snail's pace — I only unlocked two guns in two hours of playtime, when launch PAYDAY 2 would have given me ten in the same amount of time — but it's another completely to make it purely challenge-based, too. Following in the much-maligned steps of Halo Infinite, heists themselves no longer offer any form of experience; the only means of leveling up is by completing challenges, all of which are some variation on "kill X amount of enemies with Y weapon" or "complete X heist Y amount of times". While challenges early on are plentiful and easy to complete, they swiftly devolve into mindless grinding once you get the initial handful out of the way. One challenge asks you to finish the first heist in the game one hundred and fifty times before it pays out the experience points. I cannot even begin to imagine how they decided that this was preferable to just giving a flat amount of experience points at the end of a heist; it's possible (and becoming increasingly common as more players get higher in level) to finish a heist where you steal every single piece of loot on the map and get ultimately rewarded with zero experience. With cash being as plentiful as it is, experience points are the gate to you accessing the rest of the content. Without experience, you can't actually unlock anything to spend your mountains of money on, unless you really feel like buying dozens of CAR-4s with differing paint jobs. Even then, half of the fucking paint colors are locked behind level gates.
It's not a drip feed. It's more like water torture.
There's more to complain about, but this is already getting a little excessive. There's more to be said about the loss of Simon Viklund and the subsequent downgrade in both music and gun sounds, there's more to be said about the fact that you have to wait in a queue even for single-player games, there's more to be said about how navigating the menus feels like fumbling around in a dark room for the light switch, there's more to be said about how they went back to obfuscating weapon stats instead of just giving you the numbers, there's more to be said about how the too-snappy reload animations look like they're sloppily aping Call of Duty: Warzone's, there's more to be said about how the inevitable microtransactions are going to fuck this game up even further. There's more to be said, but I'm exhausted. I don't want to think about this game anymore.
This is the kind of abject flop that I'm not entirely certain Starbreeze will be able to bounce back from. The company is already standing on Bambi legs after brushes with bankruptcy caused by Overkill's The Walking Dead and a full-on INTERPOL raid as part of an insider trading investigation, and another failure on this scale might not be something they can afford to suffer. PAYDAY 3 ads were plastered all over the front page of Steam the day that this dropped, and the game completely vanished from the list of top sellers within the first few days. At the time of writing, there are about 5,000 more players online in PAYDAY 2 than there are in PAYDAY 3, and those are really not the kinds of numbers you would hope to see not even a week after release. Starbreeze's stock prices have plummeted to their lowest point in four years, and the last time it dropped this far down was when Bo Andersson was getting walked out of the studio in handcuffs.
It's sad. I like PAYDAY well enough as a series. I wanted this to succeed. It didn't, and I doubt it will.
There is no reason to play PAYDAY 3 in a world where PAYDAY 2 still exists.
PAYDAY 2 is a game that, while not especially near-and-dear to my heart, is something I still have a great fondness for. Back in 2013, myself and a couple of my high school buddies picked up the four-pack on release day and promptly played it into the ground. One thing that we loved doing were hybrid stealth-loud runs; we’d go in, run stealth for as long as we could, inevitably fuck up, and then finish up the heist with guns a-blazing. Overkill quickly patched the way that concealment worked, so that players wearing heavy armor would be spotted by guards within fractions of a second. Dominated guards started having their pagers go off, and clearing all of the security on a map would result in reinforcements showing up for no reason to muck up your routes. Stealth heists became all-or-nothing overnight. You either did a full suit-only, minimal-kill run and restarted when you got caught, or you didn’t bother doing them at all. I didn’t enjoy heisting in stealth after that.
Not too long after that, Overkill added a movie trailer for the then-unknown John Wick to the intro of the game, meaning that you got to watch an advert on every boot. Crimefest 2015 wrapped up with Overkill adding paid lootboxes containing guns with superior stats that you couldn’t get by any other means. I fell out of love with PAYDAY 2; the developers and publishers had jointly fucked enough of it up that I couldn't bring myself to play it any longer. The moment PAYDAY 3 was announced, I told everyone who would listen the exact same thing: “I want to get in on this before they have a chance to fuck it up”. Overkill were going to fuck it up, I knew that much. It was just going to be a matter of when.
I didn’t expect it to be on release day.
We arrive now to PAYDAY 3, a game that's a step down from its predecessor in nearly every way imaginable. Worse progression, worse soundscapes, worse music, bland heists, and always-online servers that are still struggling to function six goddamned days after the scheduled release date.
If Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t exist, this would easily be the most botched launch of the past decade. Back when Diablo 3 released — one of the most notorious always-online titles — Blizzard’s servers choked, serving players across the globe with the infamous Error 37. Memes mocking it were everywhere. You couldn’t escape them. Wherever you looked, people were talking about Error 37 like it was the Super Bowl; everybody was constantly going on and on about how it was a complete failure on Blizzard’s part. And it was, to be clear. But do you remember how long Error 37 lasted for? It was such a big event, and people talked about it for so long, so surely it must have been a while. Two weeks, at least? A month?
One day. Blizzard had it mostly sorted within 24 hours.
How sorry of a state we find the modern gaming industry in where PAYDAY 3 has been literally unplayable for most of its buyers for what’s coming up on a week now and people are still making excuses for it. Only in video games is it still acceptable — worth playing defense for, even! — to sell a broken product at a premium. Many have been pointing fingers around, insisting that it’s the fault of someone else; Overkill/Starbreeze are blaming AccelByte (their server provider) for not being able to handle the influx of players, the gamethinkers are blaming Deep Silver for presumably forcing some hands to make the game always-online, and people who have had to deal with Overkill’s bullshit before are saying that the fault lies squarely at the feet of the developers.
Here’s the thing: I don’t really give a fuck whose fault it is. What I care about is the fact that the game doesn’t work.
Even in the brief flickers where it does manage to suck down a gasp for life, though, PAYDAY 3 feels remarkably unfinished. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that everything that’s here was cobbled together in about a year and promptly rushed out the door; it’s got some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a game in recent memory, and getting anything to work feels like an active battle with the program. No longer can you pick a heist, set up a lobby, advertise that you’re going loud or stealthy, and let other players trickle in; everything is now relegated to matchmaking that’s split up by difficulty tiers, meaning that there are effectively 32 (eight heists by four difficulties) blind queues going at any given time. If you want to do, say, Dirty Ice on Very Hard stealth, you need to queue it up, hope you get dropped into a lobby with people in it, hope that other people show up before the five-minute auto-start goes off, and hope that every other person there is also trying to do stealth, since there’s no longer any pre-game chat or lobby tags to coordinate these things before the heist starts. Shop weapons (and masks, and suits) are no longer split up into categories and are instead dumped haphazardly into a single big list, making it difficult to tell what goes in which slot. Securing bags and loose cash no longer alerts you to their value, making it look like they’ve just disappeared into thin air; the first time I tossed a bag off a bridge and into a helicopter, it vanished without any fanfare and made me think that I'd thrown it out of bounds. For some ungodly reason, typing anything in text chat requires you to hit the enter key twice before you can start writing. Sometimes, while in menus, hitting backspace will send you back to where you were; other times, you'll need to hit escape.
The UI is similarly atrocious, and reeks of being made up of placeholder assets — ignoring, of course, when they are literally just placeholder assets. The iconic, flashing POLICE ASSAULT warning in the top corner of the screen has now been replaced with plain, white, 24pt Arial; every menu option is a generic white-text-on-black-box that inverts when you hover over it; the ability to close the game is buried at the bottom of the "More" tab in the main menu. It's hard to describe, but I can assure you that it's not the kind of thing you want to experience for yourself. Buttons and menus just feel vaguely squishy, like whatever you're trying to select wants you to give it a couple of tries before it'll take. It just feels like it was made in a hustle; a minimally-viable product.
We've got eight heists on launch, and heist number nine isn't scheduled to come out until sometime this winter; aware readers should begin hearing the sound of alarm bells ringing at this point, considering how PAYDAY 2 launched with eleven heists and had five more added in the time it'll take PAYDAY 3 to add one. Also gone are multi-day heists, shrinking the diversity and length of available missions down even further. Everything on offer here feels like little more than a retread of already-existing heists: Road Rage is Green Bridge without an explosion, Dirty Ice is a slightly larger Diamond Store, Gold & Sharke is a scaled-down Big Bank, Touch The Sky is a near-perfect copy of Framing Frame Day 3 but during the daytime. Easily the worst part, however, is how nearly every heist just amounts to "go to a place and steal a thing". It's so dreadfully boring. There's nothing here that even grazes the unique setpieces found in the earlier games, like the meth-cooking in Rats, or the deal-gone-bad in Undercover, or the property destruction in Mallcrasher. It's just break in, bag up some loot, throw it in a van or a helicopter, and then leave. Nothing we haven't seen a dozen times before already. Where's the creativity?
And speaking of, the new skill system is just as lifeless. Just about every option is some variation of "gain X% to [stat]", with almost nothing else on offer. Stuns you dish out last 20% longer, marked enemies are marked for 20% longer, getting ammo from an ammo bag gives you +20% damage for ten seconds, you can perform takedowns 20% faster. It's all just numbers buffs. While anyone who's played PAYDAY 2 on the higher difficulties knows about the importance of damage breakpoints, these are fucking boring boosts that do nothing besides make your numbers a bit bigger. Where are my Jokers? Where's Inspire? Where's Bulletstorm, or Graze, or Hostage Taker, or even just the ICTV? If you don't want to bring these skills back, at least come up with something new that can substitute as a meaningful upgrade. High-tier skills in PAYDAY 2 often drastically changed the way that you would interact with the game, adding new mechanics and playstyles to use in taking down the cops; here, they do little more than provide some damage and resistance buffs.
The progression system is terrible, top to bottom. It's one thing to make it move at a snail's pace — I only unlocked two guns in two hours of playtime, when launch PAYDAY 2 would have given me ten in the same amount of time — but it's another completely to make it purely challenge-based, too. Following in the much-maligned steps of Halo Infinite, heists themselves no longer offer any form of experience; the only means of leveling up is by completing challenges, all of which are some variation on "kill X amount of enemies with Y weapon" or "complete X heist Y amount of times". While challenges early on are plentiful and easy to complete, they swiftly devolve into mindless grinding once you get the initial handful out of the way. One challenge asks you to finish the first heist in the game one hundred and fifty times before it pays out the experience points. I cannot even begin to imagine how they decided that this was preferable to just giving a flat amount of experience points at the end of a heist; it's possible (and becoming increasingly common as more players get higher in level) to finish a heist where you steal every single piece of loot on the map and get ultimately rewarded with zero experience. With cash being as plentiful as it is, experience points are the gate to you accessing the rest of the content. Without experience, you can't actually unlock anything to spend your mountains of money on, unless you really feel like buying dozens of CAR-4s with differing paint jobs. Even then, half of the fucking paint colors are locked behind level gates.
It's not a drip feed. It's more like water torture.
There's more to complain about, but this is already getting a little excessive. There's more to be said about the loss of Simon Viklund and the subsequent downgrade in both music and gun sounds, there's more to be said about the fact that you have to wait in a queue even for single-player games, there's more to be said about how navigating the menus feels like fumbling around in a dark room for the light switch, there's more to be said about how they went back to obfuscating weapon stats instead of just giving you the numbers, there's more to be said about how the too-snappy reload animations look like they're sloppily aping Call of Duty: Warzone's, there's more to be said about how the inevitable microtransactions are going to fuck this game up even further. There's more to be said, but I'm exhausted. I don't want to think about this game anymore.
This is the kind of abject flop that I'm not entirely certain Starbreeze will be able to bounce back from. The company is already standing on Bambi legs after brushes with bankruptcy caused by Overkill's The Walking Dead and a full-on INTERPOL raid as part of an insider trading investigation, and another failure on this scale might not be something they can afford to suffer. PAYDAY 3 ads were plastered all over the front page of Steam the day that this dropped, and the game completely vanished from the list of top sellers within the first few days. At the time of writing, there are about 5,000 more players online in PAYDAY 2 than there are in PAYDAY 3, and those are really not the kinds of numbers you would hope to see not even a week after release. Starbreeze's stock prices have plummeted to their lowest point in four years, and the last time it dropped this far down was when Bo Andersson was getting walked out of the studio in handcuffs.
It's sad. I like PAYDAY well enough as a series. I wanted this to succeed. It didn't, and I doubt it will.
There is no reason to play PAYDAY 3 in a world where PAYDAY 2 still exists.
2 Comments
I tried the open beta for this and it was astounding how unplayable it was, the performance was miserable too. I'd tried a little bit of PD:TH back in 2015, thought "neat" and stopped playing after an hour. A friend roped me into PayDay 2 in 2018, and the game was such an unnavigable bloatfest I had no idea what to do while they just shouted random numbers and names in a mission that went from 0 to 100 in like 10 seconds. I could tell at one point there was something interesting here, but I'd missed it, and my friend(s) who were playing it were clinging to the last fibers of a remotely tolerable game for experienced players.
Excellent review and good writeup, I remember the D3 mess as it was right when I was learning about PC hardware and as such my first real exposure was friends all talking about that for like a week (despite as you mentioned, only lasting for a day).
Excellent review and good writeup, I remember the D3 mess as it was right when I was learning about PC hardware and as such my first real exposure was friends all talking about that for like a week (despite as you mentioned, only lasting for a day).
Spinnerweb
7 months ago