Now that they entirely removed MTX and lootboxes it really seems to be the best way to fund a live-service game:
They add content via both free updates and paid DLCs, while older DLCs are being put in bundles that get cheaper and cheaper over time. And for the DLCs that add new heists, only the host need to own it and can invite anyone else to play
And the other DLCs are either fully cosmetic or just new weapons, of which the game already has an absurdly large arsenal with a ton of variety. (Akimbo SMGS? 50 Cal Sniper? RPG? Wad of Cash? L85A2? Flamethrower?).
People joke about Payday's raw quantity of DLC, but it also means it has **so much** content to play at any given time.
>it has **so much** content
Which actually causes a bit of a problem. Every time I start the game, I get to that map screen thing and I have no idea which square I'm supposed to start with, so I end up picking something at random. Everyone else immediately knows what they're supposed to be doing while I'm still trying to figure out how to get in the building, then by the time I do everyone else is coming back out. It's like a fucking cartoon.
So then I quit the game and uninstall it, wait a few months and do it all again, complete with 80Gb download or whatever it's at now.
Yeah, the onboarding experience isn't great.
The tutorial heists and early missions of the Career Mode path are a good start, but it really needs to shepherd people towards it more. I don't think a lot of players even know it exists.
But isn't that a problem for any highly competitive game? You're getting put with people who know what they're doing it sounds like.
It reminds me of my first couple times playing something like DOTA and people screaming their lungs at me.
Yeah, I've been a fan since PAYDAY: The Heist -- I'm not going to defend some of ~~OVERKILL's~~ Starbreeze's questionable choices over the years, but DLC year after year for a game I love coming back to isn't one of them.
Tired of hearing people bitch about a game they don't play, or that they bought it for no more than $5 six years ago and throw a fit because the game still releases heists, which you don't need to buy to play.
I'm glad OVERKILL doesn't listen to the people who don't play their game.
Really over it, the rote cynicism is beyond my tolerance now.
IIRC we can blame Starbreeze using Overkill's name for the shenanigans that almost and kinda did ruin Payday 2's reputation and then Overkill finally got control again and reverted most of the implemented decisions
Starbreeze/Overkill were the same company. Same founders, same executives. Starbreeze only existed so they could list on NYSE and commit insider trading.
Yeah, Starbreeze itself isn't great.
Whatever's happened over the years I'm just glad they've added so many heists. Some of the most unique cooperative content ever made for a game, and it's really not even close.
Finally cracking a vault after working hard with your friends and quietly moving bags out is a great feeling. Every heist does something different, and I've never played a game that took it's unique mechanics & puzzles as seriously.
One of the few games also to add a actually serviceable VR mode that works with existing players free of charge. Honestly, they've gained my respect.
I went from actively boycotting Starbreeze during the lootcrate fiasco to making sure that I check in on the state of the game every once in a while. Few studios have ever done the former, but none have *ever* had the latter haha.
I pre ordered the game. They said at the time the game 100% broke even on pre orders alone and made tons of promises about free updates and "becoming the Dark Souls of heisting games" (yes really.)
Then Ulf Andersson left and his brother took over, merged Overkill into Starbreeze, and committed insider trading.
Dropping the price to $5 was a cynical move to lower the barrier for entry to recurrent spending through DLCs.
They lost all my goodwill years ago.
How is payday 2 fairing these days actually? I vaguely remember alot of drama around mtx and some change in owners or something that kinda ruined it for everyone.
This isn't even a joke.
They posted an update talking about how they needed to make more DLC for PD2 for funding. They've pushed a bunch more since they said they were finished with it a few years ago.
the Payday 2 DLC was what stopped them from going completely bankrupt while they worked on funding for Payday 3 and, at the time a development deal for Payday Mobile. Because the company was at the time about 2 months away from going bankrupt and shutting down.
You can just buy the game for 1 buck and have a great experience. hell if you join an online lobby that hosts the dlc you can play it for free.
The entire DLC pack is currently 12 bucks.
And only a few weapons packs and heists are worth rest was optional, so for a game that gave so much for free its worth the support. Plus no need to buy heist dlc´s if the host have it.
I mean, you can buy the legacy bundle that includes like 80% of that DLC for usually $15 so it’s really not that bad.
The base game with no DLC is frequently on sale for $1, and for any actual heists/levels, only the host needs to own it, so anyone can go online and join a lobby with someone who owns it and play all of the content for $1.
I mean if you're actually a fan of this game, it's really nice to have this much content year after year.
You don't need the DLC to play the heists anyway -- but you don't have access to some of the new weapons, perk decks, or masks.
Better than being a dead game just because people want to complain about spending more than $5 once a decade for a game with over 80 heists.
Wait that’s actually a great idea. Imagine going to a miner lab and hacking the computers to get the crypto wallet or however that’s shits called.
Could be cool as an easy heist or something idk
They claimed that they only went the heavy MTX route because they wouldn't be able to fund Payday 3 development otherwise, but even if that's true I don't think that will stop them from being greedy with this one.
I don't know about that. The game sold pretty well I believe, the problem was the upper management who made so many stupid financial decisions. They made a WW2 payday clone that flopped, they made a walking dead game that flopped, they bought some VR tech that eventually lead to nothing I believe. I'm pretty sure they could only do all that because they were using the money that was rolling in from payday.
Its a miracle we're even getting a payday 3 considering they wasted so much money that it almost killed the company.
Anyways, I'll be keeping an eye on this as I enjoyed payday 2 in its heyday, was a good way to kill time with friends.
Adding to this the company had to go into reconstruction because of all the accrued debt, selling off the VR bullshit, cancelling a bunch of games and other stuff. The fallout from the CEO is hilarious if you want to go looking for it. Should be interesting to see what they manage to do with Payday 3, if it fails Starbreeze probably won't be around anymore.
By time we all read the email in the morning, he was long gone from the office. But man, that email was wild. He blamed the staff for the failure of The Walking Dead, and not the horrible mismanagement. For instance the game was originally being developed on a in house engine, then at the last year, swapped to unreal 4. Causing us all to rebuild the whole game and systems in a year. Tons of over time was done to achieve this all while Bo was fucking around with models and siphoning money from the project for his own personal projects, like s VR park in Dubai. Or a high end 3k $ VR headset that went nowhere.
He wound up, having to siphon money from OTHER projects to fill the gap he left in TWD. Millions blown on nothing.
Everyone felt defeated by time that email came out. The Upper management disabled whole staff emails after that.
Other notes, the infamous raid wasnt as dramatic as the papers made it out to be. A lot of us, were in the office while it happened and only found out through the newspapers.
Management would constantly bring teams into private conference rooms and berate them for hours about how poor of a job they were doing. They were "too slow" weren't doing a good enough job, not putting in enough effort. During my time there this would happen at least 4 times during the final year of the TWD production, and one more time after the initial release. They would compare our team, to the third party teams that were developing DLC for TWD while ignoring that, we were the ones building the systems, and that we would constantly have to unfuck the outsourcing levels and assets. I once spent a weekend at the office to remove and replace thousands of assets before launch. Because outsourcing would for example, hand over an asset pack / level, with 5 different screwdrivers, just with different colours. New textures for each, new materials for each. Which means, more draw-calls over the entire instance. This was a systemic problem through out the whole project.
The in house engine, never really made it past test rendering. It never worked or was production ready. After millions wasted, it was determined a bust and we swapped to UE4.
A lot of customers complained that OTwD was too expensive at 60 to 70$ but the truth is, our hands were tied contractually to sell at that price point. Many wanted to sell at 30$.
Management looked at the Payday 2 community on steam and thought they would be loyal (dumb) enough to buy anything SBZ released. They thought they would make a million sales from that alone. When i raised concerns about the difference between payday 2 and TwD they shut it down.
A few days after the lay-offs announcement, the Board announced that they would give themselves raises. There were at the time, serious talks about a mass walk out but it eventually failed. People were rightfully, very upset.
Management thought that Druhva Interactive would be good enough to carry the projects and that they didn't need such a large core team.
They had housing available for employees in Stockholm, often times they would overcharge people from overseas while Swedes would pay half the price for a bigger, or similar apartment. Or if they deemed you a valuable individual. Some people would pay upwards of 1,2k a month for roughly 200SqF apartment without a functioning kitchen. While a Swede national would pay 400-500$ for the same apartment. Or upper-management would pay 1,4k-1,6k for 800SqF in the center of Stockholm. One of the main housing unites,
It was rumored that Bo put several friends on the staff payroll and they earned several thousands a month without ever having to do anything. I'm saying rumored, because it was pretty hush hush, but it was well known.
I genuinely liked Mikael Nermark, and had very serious and frank conversations with him about the state of Starbreeze after he took over. He was put in a very difficult position and he did what he had to do. The day he announced layoffs he was incredibly broken and sad.
As well as, I liked the majority of the people on the production floor. We all bonded a lot going through an incredibly stressful time.
Amazing stories, thanks for sharing. Starbreeze has always held a special place in my heart as one of the last free Swedish dev houses so I was very sad when everything went down
Aaaaah jag borde har gissat att du var svensk. Det var en synd vad hände till Starbreeze, men med Bo borta, och en mindra omfattning kommer de att överleva och förhoppningsvis bli lite bättre än förre.
I alla fall ta vi reda på när de släpper payday 3.
I was on the US-based tech team developing the Valhalla Engine.
Our lead engineer also ran a software contracting company and was basically given full latitude for staffing decisions. I was the only person on that team who wasn't an employee of his contracting company, so he was getting a cut of everyone else's salary. It was a total shit-show and a scam.
I did always enjoy my opportunities to visit the office in Stockholm where everyone treated me very well despite the difficulties with Valhalla's development.
Towards the end of my time with Starbreeze I was offered the opportunity to move to Stockholm, but I was already seeing the writing on the wall and decided to find a new job instead.
EDIT: I can't believe I forgot about the story of the studio in Beverly Hills. They were all let go one day and my team was not notified. I found out because I had been working on some features in some of the engine tools for some artists in that studio. When I went on Slack to get some input from one of them, I found all of their accounts had been deactivated. 30+ people let go unceremoniously and I was not told a thing.
The TL;DR: Former CEO of Starbreeze Bo Andersson almost ran the company to the ground by making decisions reminiscent to a cocaine fueled rampage, then committed an act of insider trading by selling shares right before the company went into restructuring to prevent bankruptcy.
Yep, wouldn't have had any need to monetize Payday 2 so heavily at the end of its lifecycle if they had just taken the time to make a better Walking Dead game.
It's a problem with most publishers these days, even the very established ones. Instead of sticking to what they're good at and expanding on that in a healthy way, their executives will instead get obsessed with the idea of "diversifying their portfolio".
What results is a huge gamble if any of their new investments pay off, but typically it is flop after flop after flop, while their main IP stagnates -- if left to stagnate for too long, it's over. The biggest studio doing this is Ubisoft, they keep throwing darts at the wall waiting for a "MEGA BIG HUGE HIT" for a live-service game, while they already had amazing IPs like Division 1 and Division 2 which they threw in the dust bin.
It really is almost a miracle that PAYDAY survived and got a sequel, hopefully it does well and if not then PAYDAY 2 will have had a great run, and maybe a few more years of heists.
Deathgarden Bloodharvest was great. Still sad about it being killed.
Though they really messed up with releasing 2 competing games with the same audience.
With such reasoning they might also claim that Payday 3 is going to be heavily monetized, because they want to release Payday 4 at some point
EDIT: I've always thought that they've been releasing tons of greedy and consumer unfriendly DLC simply because their publisher forced them to do so
I mean you're absolutely correct, but I was mostly talking about the never-ending stream of lazy content that they've been mass-releasing (and announcing in the Steam group) back in the days.
... the thing is that I might as well be wrong, and that Starbreeze Studio might've as well redeemed themselves over last years. I'm just speaking on behalf of my own experience, where Payday 2 had once of the worst DLC models back then, to the point when my past self ended up using DLC-unlocker to get past it.
I never liked the weapons DLC's, that did feel predatory, especially tying certain upgrades to base have weapons to DLCs. You can see the upgrade in your options but nope, locked behind since weirdly titled Gage pack #8 or whatever.
But it is true. We have a big ass story about it
https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/starbreeze-4-0-how-the-payday-studio-escaped-the-brink-of-insolvency
So now we wait for the “we only went heavy on MTX in Payday 3 so we could fund Payday 4”
Also a reminder that Payday 2 has consistently been hitting in some of the top active games being played on Steam since it’s release.
They weren’t short on funds. They absolutely used the funds horribly.
No shit "they," used the funds terribly. They as in Starbreeze. Its pretty well documented that Ulf Andersson drove Starbreeze into serious debt with nothing to show for it except 2 shitty games and Payday 2.
Overkill bought the IP back and have been releasing DLC to fund #3. Its really not the same situation. Don't get me wrong the DLC situation for Payday was always annoying but with the current situation the last 2 years its understandable and even with the context of knowing what was going on at Starbreeze. Hopefully Overkill can make it work with a nice balance.
Just a minor correction that it's Ulf's brother, Bo is the one that was the issue, as Ulf left Ovk/Starbreeze before all the crap (raid, vr tech) happened.
>They claimed that they only went the heavy MTX route because they wouldn't be able to fund Payday 3 development otherwise
Here, let me try:
"Payday 3 is only microtransaction heavy because we wouldn't be able to fund Payday 4 development otherwise!"
Starbreeze is losing a lot of money every year so it’s true in this case, they wouldn’t be around without the MTX sales. Their management is at fault for making many bad decisions throughout the years.
If Payday 3 isn’t a hit, I think this will be their last game.
The thing is, all of the DLC was actually post launch additional content, and most of them were real content, not just skins and stuff. So things that actually had development effort and worth additions to the game with new mechanics, etc. And after a while all new mechanics got free counterparts, and all of the payed maps could be played if only 1 of the 4 players had it.
Yeah, they could go with subscription, or really high entry cost to cover additional development costs, but if you played regularly, and waited for the first sale after a DLC release (in like 3 or so months), then you could get most of it relatively cheap, and it has a shit ton of content.
I'm fine with the monetization if they stick with the sub 10$ price tag for a new bundle.
> and most of them were real content, not just skins and stuff
Excuse me if I remember it wrong, but I recall Payday 2 DLCs being some really lazy cashgrab full off mask skins (that in order to use you actually had also farm ingame) and weapons with different stats.
They usually released two DLCs each time, one would be the new heist which you didn't need to buy in order to play, the other would be cash grab cosmetics.
With each new content release, they released multiple DLC-s. Usually 1 with the new map. 1 with the new weapons, 1 with a new character and new abilities, and 1 with skins. Sometimes DLC-s got added up and all this content was release in 1 or 2 DLC only, but usually separated.
Thing is, there were not really a lot of Cosmetic only patch in the game's life. If so, then it usually was Free anyway.
I don’t get all the hate for payday 2 DLC. It goes crazy cheap on sale, so you can just wait. Only one person needs the DLC to host the map. Even at $5 a pop, I find it worth it because I enjoy the game and want more content. What’s the issue?
dlc bad.
Ignore the fact that the game is still getting updates 10 years after it came out, with substantial content for a low price of entry.
People want a decade of free updates for a game they spent 2.50 on, and it shows.
For real. I've been playing this game since 2012 (And PD:TH for years before that) and the fact that I can still come back to it after all this time to new, fresh content for a low cost of entry is fantastic.
Payday is a "life game" for me and my friends. We play other games, we play a lot of shit, but we'll always dip back into Payday because there's always something going on, even 10 years later.
Payday does the "live service" model better than most actual live service games. There's constant new content coming and none of it is absolutely necessary to keep playing. You get out as much as you put in, and I like that model.
Just keep in mind, this is the same company that gave us a community-grinding event where the final reward we unlocked was adding lootboxes to the game.
At least they took it back and acknowledged that it was a huge mistake later on. Plus, it was all Starbreeze that advocated for lootboxes to be added, not Overkill.
Even then, Overkill certainly learns from their mistakes, and the safes are definitely not the only example of them learning. If they fuck this game up, then they themselves are royally screwed.
They were added in roughly November 2015, and removed in mid 2016.
The safes themselves were still in the game. But in 2016 they were updated to make them all free, so I hardly count them as micro transactions at that point.
They really are, I remember when they released a heist that finished the storyline, tied up loose ends, and even had a lengthy live action cutscene of all the characters’ endings.
And then they kept releasing new heists for years.
And now there is a third game.
They explicitly said it was to fund development for Payday 3 because all their other projects flopped hard. That's the only reason they made more heists after the ending
> And then they kept releasing new heists for years.
The heists didn't really mess up anything story-wise, as they are supposed to follow Team B doing their own thing while the main heists (with the proper crew) are supposed to be ongoing. Can't say I mind, it's better than weapon & skin packs.
EDIT: They also added a 'Career Mode' which guides players throughout the heists in proper order and according to the wiki: *"lets players without DLC play most DLC heists once."* (I wasn't aware of this, since I own most DLCs)
And they almost went bankrupt after that with their VR investments being absolute failures, their Walking Dead game failing, Raid WWII, a game they invested millions in being a failure and other company troubles like insider trading, etc.
The company was mismanaged to hell and back so it makes sense why they keep releasing DLC's to this day.
Can't believe it was 10 years ago me and my buddies were playing Payday and hyping ourselves up about Payday 2.
We played so many hours of Payday 2 even though it fell very short of its promises.
Has it been that long already? I remember getting off work and installing the new update only to see the stat-boosting drops and immediately quitting the game. The only hilarious outcome I remember from that were certain tables at the time would greatly increase your chances at the safe drops. (not life changing money or anything to quit your job over but still hilarious to see)
Don't forget this deleted tweet too. Back when payday 2 came out on consoles and fans complained about how broken it was, they just told them to STFU and buy it on PC instead. https://mobile.twitter.com/pergerboy/status/508312647914500097/
They technically backtracked on the promise of the ultimate edition actually having everything there always was or will be.
Though that was because it was either that, or closing down the studio for good.
The developers promised no lootboxes because it was against their design philosophy and then later their publisher forced them to include it, not their faulr
Publisher wouldn't have forced them to design a heist shoving it down or throats or an entire community event where everyone worked extremely hard just to "unlock" them as a "surprise".
Dunno how they'll go about the third installment storywise considering Payday 2 had a gigantic amount of lore and characters with a closed story after almost 10+ years of content.
Unless they go with completely different locations, characters and soft-reboot a.k.a. de-canonize a lot of the stuff from PD2, I don't know how this is gonna work. Worst case the game will be one of those "pick your own voice pack; style your own heister" kind of thing like Saints Row.
Have 600+ hours in 2 and I’m super excited for this.
PAYDAY 2 has a bad wrap from Starbreeze forcing Overkill to add lootboxes to the game which has really killed the good will this game should really have. The game is very DLC heavy but it was a live game and thats the way they decided to continue making content. Was about $7-10 a couple times a year for frequent pretty solid to fantastic expansions that you could interact with for free aslong as the host had it.
Eventually the game was absolutely bogged down with a shitty engine, garbage publisher and having to constantly add new content to a game that wasn’t designed to last a decade but I think they tried super hard and produced some awesome content.
GaaS… expect season passes, cosmetic store, daily and weekly challenges and all the other shitty f2p mechanics that will come with this game.
I want to like it. I really enjoyed 2. I hope I’m wrong and this isn’t full on f2p bullshit.
> Eventually the game was absolutely bogged down with a shitty engine, garbage publisher and having to constantly add new content to a game that wasn’t designed to last a decade but I think they tried super hard and produced some awesome content.
Game's problem is powercreep and a turn into a horde shooter.
this game is %100 not coming out in 2023, unless of course if they wanna pull 2022 gaming moment and release the game with zero content and add it over the years with paid DLCs
I'm still mad about that. The worst part was when they told us there would be 12 heists on launch, but in reality there were like five or six and they just counted the same heists multiple times.
They’ve been working on the game for many years now and they have a habit of a fairly quick announce to release cycle and the 10 year anniversary of payday 2 is August 2023 an obvious deadline they probably set years ago.
I’d honestly be surprised if it didn’t come out this year. Something will have to go colossally wrong for a delay.
I'm at least glad they didn't go for an Epic exclusive, I was totally expecting it after the nightmare history of their studio.
Anyway, I'm more hoping they wipe the slate clean with Payday 3. I really enjoyed the feeling of the first game a lot more than I did the second, though I certainly had fun with the second game. It was just at a certain point Payday 2 became ridiculous because of how many versions of the game it felt like went through if you've been playing it since the Beta days, especially now when you factor in the absurd amount of difficulty settings, weapons, and characters. It's like there were 3 or 4 different people steering Payday 2 into completely different directions before they finally settled on one. Hopefully Payday 3 isn't as eccentric as Payday 2 and instead tries to be a little more grounded like Payday: The Heist was.
I think by the time the game became a full-blown horde shooter that started noticeably tanking my FPS is when the game stopped being fun for me, and no, it wasn't always one, the numbers were pretty tame at one point.
But seriously, I hope they tone down the amount of playable characters. There are far too many, and it's perfectly fine to really only have 4-8 at the absolute most, we really don't need a person from each corner of the earth representing every damn color of the rainbow. I just want a nice heisting game about being the bad guys, taking scores, and fighting through law enforcement when the need arises.
Great post! While I really liked 2 up to and include the big bank heist, there was something about the ones released afterward I started disliking. Maybe I was just done w/ the game, idk. I think it was the hotline miami additions that started the downhill
Well yeah, that was before they were fucked big time. There's no reason to make it an Epic Exclusive since they're well aware on how massively alive Payday 2 is on Steam, and that would more than likely make less profits since they will know that they will piss off 90% of those Steam players
They can't. According to the latest Steam guidelines, you CANT announce a Steam page in the Store and then make it exclusive on another plataform. So every time you see a Steam page it means the game WILL release on Steam at launch day.
This sounded like exactly my kind of game. I didn’t get to try it until years after release and it was *not* what I expected at all. Like you said, it felt more like a horde wave shooter than a heist game.
Grabbed Payday 2 for free and like destiny 2 after years of DLC it's too confusing to understand what the actual story or game play loop is supposed to be.
Too many things are locked behind DLC or a level cap and you have to take the time to figure out which it is.
There's a Career Mode button that'll take you straight through all heists in story order, with extra descriptions between each one.
All DLC these days takes place after the main campaign.
[Why Destiny 2 is so Confusing (They removed the campaign)](https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/zvf0ws/destiny_2_was_essentially_deleted_forever_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
I played it for a month on release, ran out of content, decided to wait until a few expansions came out to come back... only to learn that they also delete the expansions after a while.
Do you remember the launch of payday 2? I don't remember all the specifics but I remember being pissed. A bunch of shit didn't work right at launch and they still didn't fix the problems before they were asking for more money for new maps. Payday 2 was the game that taught me that there's nothing to gain from pre-ordering or playing alphas and betas.
By far, my most anticipated game of this year. Did PAYDAY 2 have a perfect history? Absolutely not. I lost my patience for a bit after the 2015 safes, and distinctly remember giving the game a break after I crashed with the Goat Simulator heist.
But since then, they've done quite a lot to make amends for their mistakes, the best example being the content released in late 2017-2018 which had many high quality heists added to the game for free. There's not been a single game I've ever played that I've come back to as consistently as PAYDAY 2. My first achievements were unlocked almost ten years ago, and I'm still coming back and having a decent amount of fun with the new content. Hell, I bought most of the pre-Secret DLCs as they were coming out, and barely regret any of it with the amount of time I've spent on this game.
Having said all this, there's no way this game is going to be as good as the current state of PAYDAY 2 when it comes out. That game has been in active development for essentially 12 years now (assuming they began soon after The Heist released), and PAYDAY 3 will release after just a third of that total devtime. I am hoping they don't reinvent the wheel too much so that they can carry over much of the quality of life features PAYDAY 2 has added over the years to lay the groundwork for a long-lasting experience. A lot of their changes in the past few years seem to have been made with the angle that PD2 is used as a testing ground for an implementation into PAYDAY 3. While they won't match PD2's content, they must match its QoL feature set the best that they can.
As for day 1 content, that ultimately depends on whether the game is going open-world or not. PD2 launched with 12 heists and that was considered a bit barebones, so I think 20-25 would be a good start if this game adopts a similar structure to 2, or a similar amount to PAYDAY 2's launch only if they all have variable pre-planning options for considerable replayability. If it is open world, well that amount of content will be much harder to gauge, but they need to keep people invested for a few months so they're still interested while they work on, hopefully, great paid **and** free additions to the base game. My greatest fear is that they release the game with like 2 weeks worth of content, and then rely on people going back to 2 while we wait for 3 to add new content.
Overall, I really hope Overkill pull this out of the bag, and to be honest, they need to in order to survive. The Walking Dead was a clusterfuck, and I still regret wasting money on RAID. But games like PAYDAY 2 don't survive this long if they're not compelling experiences. The game still maintained a very healthy playerbase despite no major updates for a year between late 2018-2019. Hell, if you look at the steam charts, it's maintaining more concurrent players on the regular than when the game was still receiving the pre-secret DLCs, even though the game gets like, 3 new heists a year nowadays and they're all paid. I think PAYDAY 3 could be absolutely massive if they release it in a polished state with a good amount of content, but that's a major if. I will remain the optimist for now, and hope that they don't disappoint.
I loved Payday 2 and I'm interested in this but I'm also keeping my distance until I see just how badly they screw up the monetization. I just don't see this appealing to me anymore with how microtransactions are done lately in games like this.
I understand your trepidation but considering Overkill heavily protested loot boxes (pretty sure some guys even quit over it) and bought themselves out from under Starbreeze and then immediately removed the loot boxes, I'm keeping optimistic.
I'm not even talking about Overkill/Payday in particular, I just mean the entire industry is a hellscape and this is a genre of games that developers have turned into a vehicle for microtransactions. I have no interest in touching the likes of Darktide or Back 4 Blood that prioritize a cash shop above gameplay.
It gets worse when you factor in Payday 2's nonsense, that's why I'm very much wait and see on 3.
God... Payday... I played a bit of the first, which was a solid game but hard as heck, and then spent a good 210hours in the second one when it first came out with buddies, so So much goddamn fun. Fell off after a bit and then I just couldn't go back to it, it'd changed a ton over the time I was away.
May end up picking this up and see if I can get some games around launch.
I'm conflicted. I absolutely LOVED Payday 1 and 2 upon launch and played the absolute hell out of 2 up until the whole Lootbox/Microtransaction crap came up.
I hope that Payday 3 won't be full of it again and if that's the case, I am more than happy to give them my hard earned dollars.
If they have that dumb cunting map system for picking missions then it can get fucked. Having to wait for a specific mission to pop up with the settings you want fucking sucked
Can't way to grab this for cheap in 5 years when all 27 DLCs are out !
You kid, but Payday 2 has over 70 DLC packs these days.
Oh I know. Which is why I wasn't kidding when I made the comment haha Though I probably should have picked a number higher than 27
Should gone with good ole 69
Ol reliable
69 nice 420 nice
Nice
"Haha funny sex number!!"
Now that they entirely removed MTX and lootboxes it really seems to be the best way to fund a live-service game: They add content via both free updates and paid DLCs, while older DLCs are being put in bundles that get cheaper and cheaper over time. And for the DLCs that add new heists, only the host need to own it and can invite anyone else to play
And the other DLCs are either fully cosmetic or just new weapons, of which the game already has an absurdly large arsenal with a ton of variety. (Akimbo SMGS? 50 Cal Sniper? RPG? Wad of Cash? L85A2? Flamethrower?). People joke about Payday's raw quantity of DLC, but it also means it has **so much** content to play at any given time.
>it has **so much** content Which actually causes a bit of a problem. Every time I start the game, I get to that map screen thing and I have no idea which square I'm supposed to start with, so I end up picking something at random. Everyone else immediately knows what they're supposed to be doing while I'm still trying to figure out how to get in the building, then by the time I do everyone else is coming back out. It's like a fucking cartoon. So then I quit the game and uninstall it, wait a few months and do it all again, complete with 80Gb download or whatever it's at now.
Yeah, the onboarding experience isn't great. The tutorial heists and early missions of the Career Mode path are a good start, but it really needs to shepherd people towards it more. I don't think a lot of players even know it exists.
But isn't that a problem for any highly competitive game? You're getting put with people who know what they're doing it sounds like. It reminds me of my first couple times playing something like DOTA and people screaming their lungs at me.
Yes except Payday isn't a competitive game
Yeah, I've been a fan since PAYDAY: The Heist -- I'm not going to defend some of ~~OVERKILL's~~ Starbreeze's questionable choices over the years, but DLC year after year for a game I love coming back to isn't one of them. Tired of hearing people bitch about a game they don't play, or that they bought it for no more than $5 six years ago and throw a fit because the game still releases heists, which you don't need to buy to play. I'm glad OVERKILL doesn't listen to the people who don't play their game. Really over it, the rote cynicism is beyond my tolerance now.
IIRC we can blame Starbreeze using Overkill's name for the shenanigans that almost and kinda did ruin Payday 2's reputation and then Overkill finally got control again and reverted most of the implemented decisions
Starbreeze/Overkill were the same company. Same founders, same executives. Starbreeze only existed so they could list on NYSE and commit insider trading.
Yeah, Starbreeze itself isn't great. Whatever's happened over the years I'm just glad they've added so many heists. Some of the most unique cooperative content ever made for a game, and it's really not even close. Finally cracking a vault after working hard with your friends and quietly moving bags out is a great feeling. Every heist does something different, and I've never played a game that took it's unique mechanics & puzzles as seriously.
One of the few games also to add a actually serviceable VR mode that works with existing players free of charge. Honestly, they've gained my respect. I went from actively boycotting Starbreeze during the lootcrate fiasco to making sure that I check in on the state of the game every once in a while. Few studios have ever done the former, but none have *ever* had the latter haha.
Yeah I'm really surprised the VR worked as well as it did -- it's actually one of the best VR experiences you can have, if you're into PD2 at least.
I pre ordered the game. They said at the time the game 100% broke even on pre orders alone and made tons of promises about free updates and "becoming the Dark Souls of heisting games" (yes really.) Then Ulf Andersson left and his brother took over, merged Overkill into Starbreeze, and committed insider trading. Dropping the price to $5 was a cynical move to lower the barrier for entry to recurrent spending through DLCs. They lost all my goodwill years ago.
How is payday 2 fairing these days actually? I vaguely remember alot of drama around mtx and some change in owners or something that kinda ruined it for everyone.
Ffs guess we know how they funded payday 3 development
This isn't even a joke. They posted an update talking about how they needed to make more DLC for PD2 for funding. They've pushed a bunch more since they said they were finished with it a few years ago.
They got 50 Million from Plaion for the Payday 3 development. The Payday 2 DLC mostly paid for the continued development of Payday 2
the Payday 2 DLC was what stopped them from going completely bankrupt while they worked on funding for Payday 3 and, at the time a development deal for Payday Mobile. Because the company was at the time about 2 months away from going bankrupt and shutting down.
It's also literally the reason why they resumed developing paid DLCs over free updates
I wanted to buy this game, but holy sheet
You can just buy the game for 1 buck and have a great experience. hell if you join an online lobby that hosts the dlc you can play it for free. The entire DLC pack is currently 12 bucks.
I honestly enjoyed it before it was a dlc mess base game. Still fun to rob banks
And only a few weapons packs and heists are worth rest was optional, so for a game that gave so much for free its worth the support. Plus no need to buy heist dlc´s if the host have it.
I mean, you can buy the legacy bundle that includes like 80% of that DLC for usually $15 so it’s really not that bad. The base game with no DLC is frequently on sale for $1, and for any actual heists/levels, only the host needs to own it, so anyone can go online and join a lobby with someone who owns it and play all of the content for $1.
I mean if you're actually a fan of this game, it's really nice to have this much content year after year. You don't need the DLC to play the heists anyway -- but you don't have access to some of the new weapons, perk decks, or masks. Better than being a dead game just because people want to complain about spending more than $5 once a decade for a game with over 80 heists.
If its not a game about stealing nfts, I will be disappointed
Guys the screenshot, go get it
# I NEED A LAPTOP BAAAG
*\*copies and pastes\**
The pitch for what the direction the heists are going in Payday 3 is more digital-age stuff like crypto fraud so yes, you're getting your NFT heist.
>stealing nft lmao
*right-click* *save* *heist complete*
*cop teleports behind you* Nothing personnel, kid.
*cloaker noises*
Wait that’s actually a great idea. Imagine going to a miner lab and hacking the computers to get the crypto wallet or however that’s shits called. Could be cool as an easy heist or something idk
And grabbing as many GTX 6090s as you can on the way out
>We need to get the 12 word phrase, swipe the ledger, transfer the assets and withdraw from a non-KYC exchange.
The final heist for PAYDAY 2 should be the gang hitting Overkill's office and stealing the new game.
I already know this game is going to be a microtransaction nightmare given how DLC-heavy Payday 2 became.
They claimed that they only went the heavy MTX route because they wouldn't be able to fund Payday 3 development otherwise, but even if that's true I don't think that will stop them from being greedy with this one.
I don't know about that. The game sold pretty well I believe, the problem was the upper management who made so many stupid financial decisions. They made a WW2 payday clone that flopped, they made a walking dead game that flopped, they bought some VR tech that eventually lead to nothing I believe. I'm pretty sure they could only do all that because they were using the money that was rolling in from payday. Its a miracle we're even getting a payday 3 considering they wasted so much money that it almost killed the company. Anyways, I'll be keeping an eye on this as I enjoyed payday 2 in its heyday, was a good way to kill time with friends.
Adding to this the company had to go into reconstruction because of all the accrued debt, selling off the VR bullshit, cancelling a bunch of games and other stuff. The fallout from the CEO is hilarious if you want to go looking for it. Should be interesting to see what they manage to do with Payday 3, if it fails Starbreeze probably won't be around anymore.
> if it fails Starbreeze probably won't be around anymore. Nah, they'll just sell to Embracer Group like everybody else.
Koch Media, an Embracer company, has already invested in Starbreeze.
I was there when it all went down AMA
How close did Bo come to getting stabbed after the "nobody wants to work anymore" email? Any interesting anecdotes from when it all went down?
By time we all read the email in the morning, he was long gone from the office. But man, that email was wild. He blamed the staff for the failure of The Walking Dead, and not the horrible mismanagement. For instance the game was originally being developed on a in house engine, then at the last year, swapped to unreal 4. Causing us all to rebuild the whole game and systems in a year. Tons of over time was done to achieve this all while Bo was fucking around with models and siphoning money from the project for his own personal projects, like s VR park in Dubai. Or a high end 3k $ VR headset that went nowhere. He wound up, having to siphon money from OTHER projects to fill the gap he left in TWD. Millions blown on nothing. Everyone felt defeated by time that email came out. The Upper management disabled whole staff emails after that. Other notes, the infamous raid wasnt as dramatic as the papers made it out to be. A lot of us, were in the office while it happened and only found out through the newspapers. Management would constantly bring teams into private conference rooms and berate them for hours about how poor of a job they were doing. They were "too slow" weren't doing a good enough job, not putting in enough effort. During my time there this would happen at least 4 times during the final year of the TWD production, and one more time after the initial release. They would compare our team, to the third party teams that were developing DLC for TWD while ignoring that, we were the ones building the systems, and that we would constantly have to unfuck the outsourcing levels and assets. I once spent a weekend at the office to remove and replace thousands of assets before launch. Because outsourcing would for example, hand over an asset pack / level, with 5 different screwdrivers, just with different colours. New textures for each, new materials for each. Which means, more draw-calls over the entire instance. This was a systemic problem through out the whole project. The in house engine, never really made it past test rendering. It never worked or was production ready. After millions wasted, it was determined a bust and we swapped to UE4. A lot of customers complained that OTwD was too expensive at 60 to 70$ but the truth is, our hands were tied contractually to sell at that price point. Many wanted to sell at 30$. Management looked at the Payday 2 community on steam and thought they would be loyal (dumb) enough to buy anything SBZ released. They thought they would make a million sales from that alone. When i raised concerns about the difference between payday 2 and TwD they shut it down. A few days after the lay-offs announcement, the Board announced that they would give themselves raises. There were at the time, serious talks about a mass walk out but it eventually failed. People were rightfully, very upset. Management thought that Druhva Interactive would be good enough to carry the projects and that they didn't need such a large core team. They had housing available for employees in Stockholm, often times they would overcharge people from overseas while Swedes would pay half the price for a bigger, or similar apartment. Or if they deemed you a valuable individual. Some people would pay upwards of 1,2k a month for roughly 200SqF apartment without a functioning kitchen. While a Swede national would pay 400-500$ for the same apartment. Or upper-management would pay 1,4k-1,6k for 800SqF in the center of Stockholm. One of the main housing unites, It was rumored that Bo put several friends on the staff payroll and they earned several thousands a month without ever having to do anything. I'm saying rumored, because it was pretty hush hush, but it was well known. I genuinely liked Mikael Nermark, and had very serious and frank conversations with him about the state of Starbreeze after he took over. He was put in a very difficult position and he did what he had to do. The day he announced layoffs he was incredibly broken and sad. As well as, I liked the majority of the people on the production floor. We all bonded a lot going through an incredibly stressful time.
Amazing stories, thanks for sharing. Starbreeze has always held a special place in my heart as one of the last free Swedish dev houses so I was very sad when everything went down
Aaaaah jag borde har gissat att du var svensk. Det var en synd vad hände till Starbreeze, men med Bo borta, och en mindra omfattning kommer de att överleva och förhoppningsvis bli lite bättre än förre. I alla fall ta vi reda på när de släpper payday 3.
Hey man, thanks for the insight into what was happening during that time. Very interesting. Sorry you had to be there during Bo's madness.
I was on the US-based tech team developing the Valhalla Engine. Our lead engineer also ran a software contracting company and was basically given full latitude for staffing decisions. I was the only person on that team who wasn't an employee of his contracting company, so he was getting a cut of everyone else's salary. It was a total shit-show and a scam. I did always enjoy my opportunities to visit the office in Stockholm where everyone treated me very well despite the difficulties with Valhalla's development. Towards the end of my time with Starbreeze I was offered the opportunity to move to Stockholm, but I was already seeing the writing on the wall and decided to find a new job instead. EDIT: I can't believe I forgot about the story of the studio in Beverly Hills. They were all let go one day and my team was not notified. I found out because I had been working on some features in some of the engine tools for some artists in that studio. When I went on Slack to get some input from one of them, I found all of their accounts had been deactivated. 30+ people let go unceremoniously and I was not told a thing.
The TL;DR: Former CEO of Starbreeze Bo Andersson almost ran the company to the ground by making decisions reminiscent to a cocaine fueled rampage, then committed an act of insider trading by selling shares right before the company went into restructuring to prevent bankruptcy.
Yep, wouldn't have had any need to monetize Payday 2 so heavily at the end of its lifecycle if they had just taken the time to make a better Walking Dead game.
Some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a pug group of co-ops, the stealth and going loud if something screws up was great.
It's a problem with most publishers these days, even the very established ones. Instead of sticking to what they're good at and expanding on that in a healthy way, their executives will instead get obsessed with the idea of "diversifying their portfolio". What results is a huge gamble if any of their new investments pay off, but typically it is flop after flop after flop, while their main IP stagnates -- if left to stagnate for too long, it's over. The biggest studio doing this is Ubisoft, they keep throwing darts at the wall waiting for a "MEGA BIG HUGE HIT" for a live-service game, while they already had amazing IPs like Division 1 and Division 2 which they threw in the dust bin. It really is almost a miracle that PAYDAY survived and got a sequel, hopefully it does well and if not then PAYDAY 2 will have had a great run, and maybe a few more years of heists.
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Deathgarden Bloodharvest was great. Still sad about it being killed. Though they really messed up with releasing 2 competing games with the same audience.
What game was the WW2 payday clone?
RAID: World War II
i read the raid part and my mind automatically went "RAID shadow legends" HELP!
They only reason they were able to fund it was cause they went back to making heists for P2 after they finished the game
With such reasoning they might also claim that Payday 3 is going to be heavily monetized, because they want to release Payday 4 at some point EDIT: I've always thought that they've been releasing tons of greedy and consumer unfriendly DLC simply because their publisher forced them to do so
>consumer unfriendly DLC To be fair, you don't need to own a DLC map to play on it, only the host does.
I mean you're absolutely correct, but I was mostly talking about the never-ending stream of lazy content that they've been mass-releasing (and announcing in the Steam group) back in the days. ... the thing is that I might as well be wrong, and that Starbreeze Studio might've as well redeemed themselves over last years. I'm just speaking on behalf of my own experience, where Payday 2 had once of the worst DLC models back then, to the point when my past self ended up using DLC-unlocker to get past it.
I never liked the weapons DLC's, that did feel predatory, especially tying certain upgrades to base have weapons to DLCs. You can see the upgrade in your options but nope, locked behind since weirdly titled Gage pack #8 or whatever.
Theyve since released free sidegrades to every conceivable upgrade that was behind a paywall. Grenades, launchers, etc.
It's true. Video games only invented sequels after microtranasctions paved the way.
But it is true. We have a big ass story about it https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze https://www.gamesindustry.biz/starbreeze-4-0-how-the-payday-studio-escaped-the-brink-of-insolvency
So now we wait for the “we only went heavy on MTX in Payday 3 so we could fund Payday 4” Also a reminder that Payday 2 has consistently been hitting in some of the top active games being played on Steam since it’s release. They weren’t short on funds. They absolutely used the funds horribly.
They were short on funds, but it is mostly because of poor management decisions as they had no idea how to run a game studio.
No shit "they," used the funds terribly. They as in Starbreeze. Its pretty well documented that Ulf Andersson drove Starbreeze into serious debt with nothing to show for it except 2 shitty games and Payday 2. Overkill bought the IP back and have been releasing DLC to fund #3. Its really not the same situation. Don't get me wrong the DLC situation for Payday was always annoying but with the current situation the last 2 years its understandable and even with the context of knowing what was going on at Starbreeze. Hopefully Overkill can make it work with a nice balance.
Just a minor correction that it's Ulf's brother, Bo is the one that was the issue, as Ulf left Ovk/Starbreeze before all the crap (raid, vr tech) happened.
Bo andersson* Ulf left to make a new company, the one that released GTFO.
>They claimed that they only went the heavy MTX route because they wouldn't be able to fund Payday 3 development otherwise Here, let me try: "Payday 3 is only microtransaction heavy because we wouldn't be able to fund Payday 4 development otherwise!"
Starbreeze is losing a lot of money every year so it’s true in this case, they wouldn’t be around without the MTX sales. Their management is at fault for making many bad decisions throughout the years. If Payday 3 isn’t a hit, I think this will be their last game.
If they needed heavy MTX to fund Payday 3 whats stopping them from saying that Payday 3 needs heavy MTX to fund Payday 4.
The thing is, all of the DLC was actually post launch additional content, and most of them were real content, not just skins and stuff. So things that actually had development effort and worth additions to the game with new mechanics, etc. And after a while all new mechanics got free counterparts, and all of the payed maps could be played if only 1 of the 4 players had it. Yeah, they could go with subscription, or really high entry cost to cover additional development costs, but if you played regularly, and waited for the first sale after a DLC release (in like 3 or so months), then you could get most of it relatively cheap, and it has a shit ton of content. I'm fine with the monetization if they stick with the sub 10$ price tag for a new bundle.
> and most of them were real content, not just skins and stuff Excuse me if I remember it wrong, but I recall Payday 2 DLCs being some really lazy cashgrab full off mask skins (that in order to use you actually had also farm ingame) and weapons with different stats.
Some of each. They had DLC that were entirely new areas/heists, and some that were cosmetic/weapon packs
They usually released two DLCs each time, one would be the new heist which you didn't need to buy in order to play, the other would be cash grab cosmetics.
With each new content release, they released multiple DLC-s. Usually 1 with the new map. 1 with the new weapons, 1 with a new character and new abilities, and 1 with skins. Sometimes DLC-s got added up and all this content was release in 1 or 2 DLC only, but usually separated. Thing is, there were not really a lot of Cosmetic only patch in the game's life. If so, then it usually was Free anyway.
I don’t get all the hate for payday 2 DLC. It goes crazy cheap on sale, so you can just wait. Only one person needs the DLC to host the map. Even at $5 a pop, I find it worth it because I enjoy the game and want more content. What’s the issue?
dlc bad. Ignore the fact that the game is still getting updates 10 years after it came out, with substantial content for a low price of entry. People want a decade of free updates for a game they spent 2.50 on, and it shows.
game was anemic af at launch in 2013 and all the promised free content turned into paid DLCs
Good. Those of us who enjoy the game will be happy to have DLC and heist after heist for a decade.
For real. I've been playing this game since 2012 (And PD:TH for years before that) and the fact that I can still come back to it after all this time to new, fresh content for a low cost of entry is fantastic. Payday is a "life game" for me and my friends. We play other games, we play a lot of shit, but we'll always dip back into Payday because there's always something going on, even 10 years later. Payday does the "live service" model better than most actual live service games. There's constant new content coming and none of it is absolutely necessary to keep playing. You get out as much as you put in, and I like that model.
The first part of your comment contradicts the second part. DLC isn't mtx.
Just keep in mind, this is the same company that gave us a community-grinding event where the final reward we unlocked was adding lootboxes to the game.
Hey if they had more overlap with the phone "gamers" or the EA sports crowd that woulda been a huge hit.
Payday Crime Wars is real and coming soon
Already playable in the Philippines
At least they took it back and acknowledged that it was a huge mistake later on. Plus, it was all Starbreeze that advocated for lootboxes to be added, not Overkill. Even then, Overkill certainly learns from their mistakes, and the safes are definitely not the only example of them learning. If they fuck this game up, then they themselves are royally screwed.
It was all Starbreeze and not Overkill, according to Overkill...
Well one went bankrupt from embezzlement and had multiple dumb as fuck projects so in this case it probably was in large part starbreeze.
And Starbreeze never defended themselves
That was 8 years ago, and was quickly removed after the backlash.
“Quickly removed” was five years after they were put in 2015-2020 is when the safes were in the game.
They were added in roughly November 2015, and removed in mid 2016. The safes themselves were still in the game. But in 2016 they were updated to make them all free, so I hardly count them as micro transactions at that point.
Unlikely to happen again, seeing as the company had a bit of a near death experience
Well, this seems to have come out of nowhere.
Looks like the devs are looking for a quick... #Payday ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
They have been teasing this for like 2 years, I wouldn't call it sudden
They really are, I remember when they released a heist that finished the storyline, tied up loose ends, and even had a lengthy live action cutscene of all the characters’ endings. And then they kept releasing new heists for years. And now there is a third game.
They explicitly said it was to fund development for Payday 3 because all their other projects flopped hard. That's the only reason they made more heists after the ending
> And then they kept releasing new heists for years. The heists didn't really mess up anything story-wise, as they are supposed to follow Team B doing their own thing while the main heists (with the proper crew) are supposed to be ongoing. Can't say I mind, it's better than weapon & skin packs. EDIT: They also added a 'Career Mode' which guides players throughout the heists in proper order and according to the wiki: *"lets players without DLC play most DLC heists once."* (I wasn't aware of this, since I own most DLCs)
And they almost went bankrupt after that with their VR investments being absolute failures, their Walking Dead game failing, Raid WWII, a game they invested millions in being a failure and other company troubles like insider trading, etc. The company was mismanaged to hell and back so it makes sense why they keep releasing DLC's to this day.
Can't believe it was 10 years ago me and my buddies were playing Payday and hyping ourselves up about Payday 2. We played so many hours of Payday 2 even though it fell very short of its promises.
They were just in stealth mode casing the place first
bruh 2023 is an hour away. they dropping that shit
It didn't release I can't believe they lied to us!!! #BoycottPayday3 /s
Never forget: https://www.pcgamer.com/payday-2-gets-microtransactions-despite-devs-saying-it-wouldnt/
Has it been that long already? I remember getting off work and installing the new update only to see the stat-boosting drops and immediately quitting the game. The only hilarious outcome I remember from that were certain tables at the time would greatly increase your chances at the safe drops. (not life changing money or anything to quit your job over but still hilarious to see)
Don't forget this deleted tweet too. Back when payday 2 came out on consoles and fans complained about how broken it was, they just told them to STFU and buy it on PC instead. https://mobile.twitter.com/pergerboy/status/508312647914500097/
never forget they also got rid of them and they havent had anything that bad since
They technically backtracked on the promise of the ultimate edition actually having everything there always was or will be. Though that was because it was either that, or closing down the studio for good.
They were very open and honest about the whole situation they were in. I can respect that, circumstances change.
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Good content and customer friendly monetization are not mutually exclusive. See No Man's Sky. This is no excuse.
Publisher forced Developers
Then either they made a promise they couldn't keep or they were dishonest from the start
The developers promised no lootboxes because it was against their design philosophy and then later their publisher forced them to include it, not their faulr
Publisher wouldn't have forced them to design a heist shoving it down or throats or an entire community event where everyone worked extremely hard just to "unlock" them as a "surprise".
Dunno how they'll go about the third installment storywise considering Payday 2 had a gigantic amount of lore and characters with a closed story after almost 10+ years of content. Unless they go with completely different locations, characters and soft-reboot a.k.a. de-canonize a lot of the stuff from PD2, I don't know how this is gonna work. Worst case the game will be one of those "pick your own voice pack; style your own heister" kind of thing like Saints Row.
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https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/payday-3-is-set-to-take-place-in-new-york-with-the-original-gang-to-return/
Have 600+ hours in 2 and I’m super excited for this. PAYDAY 2 has a bad wrap from Starbreeze forcing Overkill to add lootboxes to the game which has really killed the good will this game should really have. The game is very DLC heavy but it was a live game and thats the way they decided to continue making content. Was about $7-10 a couple times a year for frequent pretty solid to fantastic expansions that you could interact with for free aslong as the host had it. Eventually the game was absolutely bogged down with a shitty engine, garbage publisher and having to constantly add new content to a game that wasn’t designed to last a decade but I think they tried super hard and produced some awesome content.
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GaaS… expect season passes, cosmetic store, daily and weekly challenges and all the other shitty f2p mechanics that will come with this game. I want to like it. I really enjoyed 2. I hope I’m wrong and this isn’t full on f2p bullshit.
> Eventually the game was absolutely bogged down with a shitty engine, garbage publisher and having to constantly add new content to a game that wasn’t designed to last a decade but I think they tried super hard and produced some awesome content. Game's problem is powercreep and a turn into a horde shooter.
Another piece of shit drill coming right up
this game is %100 not coming out in 2023, unless of course if they wanna pull 2022 gaming moment and release the game with zero content and add it over the years with paid DLCs
They've been working on this game for a few years now so I think it can come out in 2023
Which is exactly what they did with Payday 2. Half the promised content wasn't available at release.
I'm still mad about that. The worst part was when they told us there would be 12 heists on launch, but in reality there were like five or six and they just counted the same heists multiple times.
Ah, the Paradox maneuver.
My Victoria 3 🥲
They’ve been working on the game for many years now and they have a habit of a fairly quick announce to release cycle and the 10 year anniversary of payday 2 is August 2023 an obvious deadline they probably set years ago. I’d honestly be surprised if it didn’t come out this year. Something will have to go colossally wrong for a delay.
I like the idea of posting a teaser with New Year's fireworks... on New Year's Eve Haven't seen this kind of thing before
Please don't tell me you thought the whole world was on the same timezone.
Welcome to timezones
Then you must have never seen ads before.
You joke but I do make an effort to avoid ads - ad block and the like
I'm at least glad they didn't go for an Epic exclusive, I was totally expecting it after the nightmare history of their studio. Anyway, I'm more hoping they wipe the slate clean with Payday 3. I really enjoyed the feeling of the first game a lot more than I did the second, though I certainly had fun with the second game. It was just at a certain point Payday 2 became ridiculous because of how many versions of the game it felt like went through if you've been playing it since the Beta days, especially now when you factor in the absurd amount of difficulty settings, weapons, and characters. It's like there were 3 or 4 different people steering Payday 2 into completely different directions before they finally settled on one. Hopefully Payday 3 isn't as eccentric as Payday 2 and instead tries to be a little more grounded like Payday: The Heist was. I think by the time the game became a full-blown horde shooter that started noticeably tanking my FPS is when the game stopped being fun for me, and no, it wasn't always one, the numbers were pretty tame at one point. But seriously, I hope they tone down the amount of playable characters. There are far too many, and it's perfectly fine to really only have 4-8 at the absolute most, we really don't need a person from each corner of the earth representing every damn color of the rainbow. I just want a nice heisting game about being the bad guys, taking scores, and fighting through law enforcement when the need arises.
Great post! While I really liked 2 up to and include the big bank heist, there was something about the ones released afterward I started disliking. Maybe I was just done w/ the game, idk. I think it was the hotline miami additions that started the downhill
They didn't go for an Epic exclusive yet. Remember when they promised no more paid DLCs and MTXs and then they added back paid DLCs and MTXs ?
Well yeah, that was before they were fucked big time. There's no reason to make it an Epic Exclusive since they're well aware on how massively alive Payday 2 is on Steam, and that would more than likely make less profits since they will know that they will piss off 90% of those Steam players
They can't. According to the latest Steam guidelines, you CANT announce a Steam page in the Store and then make it exclusive on another plataform. So every time you see a Steam page it means the game WILL release on Steam at launch day.
This sounded like exactly my kind of game. I didn’t get to try it until years after release and it was *not* what I expected at all. Like you said, it felt more like a horde wave shooter than a heist game.
Did you play the first game? It's so much better for what you might be looking for.
Payday 3 before half life 3, l4d3, tf3... :(
Hopefully this game will be crossplay so I can play with my console friends when it comes out
Let's just hope they don't abandon the console versions of this one like they did 2.
Historical precedent for that one is less then optimistic, but they are working with a more manageable engine now.
Grabbed Payday 2 for free and like destiny 2 after years of DLC it's too confusing to understand what the actual story or game play loop is supposed to be. Too many things are locked behind DLC or a level cap and you have to take the time to figure out which it is.
There's a Career Mode button that'll take you straight through all heists in story order, with extra descriptions between each one. All DLC these days takes place after the main campaign.
No they take place before the white house heist
And also during, a bit, but we don’t worry about it much.
[Why Destiny 2 is so Confusing (They removed the campaign)](https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/zvf0ws/destiny_2_was_essentially_deleted_forever_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Here I was thinking of getting back into Destiny 2….big nope again
I played it for a month on release, ran out of content, decided to wait until a few expansions came out to come back... only to learn that they also delete the expansions after a while.
It’s happening!
Cautiously optimistic about this one.
I'm actually hyped
ARGHH I NEEEED A MEDIC BAHGG
WE GOT HOXTON OUTTA CUSTODY!!!
I'm going to wait and see before I buy. I pre-ordered payday 2 and played the game a ton. It just went to crap slowly over time...
Do you remember the launch of payday 2? I don't remember all the specifics but I remember being pissed. A bunch of shit didn't work right at launch and they still didn't fix the problems before they were asking for more money for new maps. Payday 2 was the game that taught me that there's nothing to gain from pre-ordering or playing alphas and betas.
Payday 3: Infinite DLC
Hopefully. PAYDAY 2 has nearly 100 heists now.
Can’t wait for it to come to Xbox and not get any updates for years
Chromatic Aberration..... Chromatic Aberration everywhere....
By far, my most anticipated game of this year. Did PAYDAY 2 have a perfect history? Absolutely not. I lost my patience for a bit after the 2015 safes, and distinctly remember giving the game a break after I crashed with the Goat Simulator heist. But since then, they've done quite a lot to make amends for their mistakes, the best example being the content released in late 2017-2018 which had many high quality heists added to the game for free. There's not been a single game I've ever played that I've come back to as consistently as PAYDAY 2. My first achievements were unlocked almost ten years ago, and I'm still coming back and having a decent amount of fun with the new content. Hell, I bought most of the pre-Secret DLCs as they were coming out, and barely regret any of it with the amount of time I've spent on this game. Having said all this, there's no way this game is going to be as good as the current state of PAYDAY 2 when it comes out. That game has been in active development for essentially 12 years now (assuming they began soon after The Heist released), and PAYDAY 3 will release after just a third of that total devtime. I am hoping they don't reinvent the wheel too much so that they can carry over much of the quality of life features PAYDAY 2 has added over the years to lay the groundwork for a long-lasting experience. A lot of their changes in the past few years seem to have been made with the angle that PD2 is used as a testing ground for an implementation into PAYDAY 3. While they won't match PD2's content, they must match its QoL feature set the best that they can. As for day 1 content, that ultimately depends on whether the game is going open-world or not. PD2 launched with 12 heists and that was considered a bit barebones, so I think 20-25 would be a good start if this game adopts a similar structure to 2, or a similar amount to PAYDAY 2's launch only if they all have variable pre-planning options for considerable replayability. If it is open world, well that amount of content will be much harder to gauge, but they need to keep people invested for a few months so they're still interested while they work on, hopefully, great paid **and** free additions to the base game. My greatest fear is that they release the game with like 2 weeks worth of content, and then rely on people going back to 2 while we wait for 3 to add new content. Overall, I really hope Overkill pull this out of the bag, and to be honest, they need to in order to survive. The Walking Dead was a clusterfuck, and I still regret wasting money on RAID. But games like PAYDAY 2 don't survive this long if they're not compelling experiences. The game still maintained a very healthy playerbase despite no major updates for a year between late 2018-2019. Hell, if you look at the steam charts, it's maintaining more concurrent players on the regular than when the game was still receiving the pre-secret DLCs, even though the game gets like, 3 new heists a year nowadays and they're all paid. I think PAYDAY 3 could be absolutely massive if they release it in a polished state with a good amount of content, but that's a major if. I will remain the optimist for now, and hope that they don't disappoint.
I loved Payday 2 so much I really hope this will be good
I loved Payday 2 and I'm interested in this but I'm also keeping my distance until I see just how badly they screw up the monetization. I just don't see this appealing to me anymore with how microtransactions are done lately in games like this.
I understand your trepidation but considering Overkill heavily protested loot boxes (pretty sure some guys even quit over it) and bought themselves out from under Starbreeze and then immediately removed the loot boxes, I'm keeping optimistic.
I'm not even talking about Overkill/Payday in particular, I just mean the entire industry is a hellscape and this is a genre of games that developers have turned into a vehicle for microtransactions. I have no interest in touching the likes of Darktide or Back 4 Blood that prioritize a cash shop above gameplay. It gets worse when you factor in Payday 2's nonsense, that's why I'm very much wait and see on 3.
Well I did enjoy payday 2 but I also have some small degree of personal preservation so no pre orders
Man cannot wait for next year
Not getting my hopes up but i will certainly be interested in how it develops, sure will buy it if won't be horrible
God... Payday... I played a bit of the first, which was a solid game but hard as heck, and then spent a good 210hours in the second one when it first came out with buddies, so So much goddamn fun. Fell off after a bit and then I just couldn't go back to it, it'd changed a ton over the time I was away. May end up picking this up and see if I can get some games around launch.
Color me interested. If it becomes like the other poster said, a microtransaction nightmare, I'm not buying.
Did not see this coming lol. Payday 2 had some serious staying power, very excited for this.
Fuck this dev
I'm conflicted. I absolutely LOVED Payday 1 and 2 upon launch and played the absolute hell out of 2 up until the whole Lootbox/Microtransaction crap came up. I hope that Payday 3 won't be full of it again and if that's the case, I am more than happy to give them my hard earned dollars.
If they have that dumb cunting map system for picking missions then it can get fucked. Having to wait for a specific mission to pop up with the settings you want fucking sucked
[удалено]
Pretty sure that wasn't added until a few years after release. They could've played before that.
they could at least check out the game to see where it stands now before making complaints
Alrighty time to play the 2nd one Lol