Can "operation Medic Bag" Revive Payday 3
After a painstakingly drawn-out month, the infamous Starbury Strike team has finally made their plans for bringing Payday 3 back to the public. I'm not here to talk about all the corporate filibustering that must have taken place over the past few weeks, delaying this announcement to the point that many in the community started to doubt if this strike team was the real deal.
No, today we're here to celebrate what could be a second chance for payday 3. It's just about every community-requested feature being given the proper time of day, as stares have announced their intention to pivot it almost entirely, given the many miserable functionality and gameplay aspects that have maligned the game since launch.
Applying Operation Medic Bag is the team's first and only chance to win back the trust of the community and start moving those player numbers in the right direction, and I'm going to walk you through every upcoming change, giving you juicy details on everything from a soon-to-be implemented offline mode to a completely reimagined progression system with challenges going out the window.
Are we back? I was far too hasty to launch Lavish Payday 3 with praise prior to launch without knowing all the potential pitfalls, and I won't be jumping the gun this time. What I will say is that this complete overhaul is absolutely a necessity if the game is ever going to succeed to the extent we initially hoped, and these all seem like hugely positive steps in moving that needle in the right direction, but with a bit of a wishy-washy timeline and still a few decisions up in the air, we're going to need to put a little more blind faith in the guys at Star.
For the time being, let's start with the real juicy bit. Offline mode is coming to Payday 3. I didn't think I'd see the day when those words would cross my lips in a serious capacity, but here we are victorious. This is huge for so many reasons, not least because we can now play and enjoy the game solo without needing to worry about our connection to some server miles away.
However, it's not going to come to the game in the same capacity as Payday 2's offline mode. This is something that will start a bit of a trend with these upcoming changes to Payday 3 that might help to explain why people have been hesitant to make these additions. Up until now, most things have come with a compromise, and for offline, it's the sanctity of player progression and, to some degree, cheap protection.
That's why the implementation of the offline mode is going to come in stages. First, we'll gain the ability to circumvent the matchmaking process by hosting games locally on our own machines and avoiding having to connect to a potentially high-ping server. This will hopefully streamline the process of starting a solo heist and avoid any inexplicable lag when playing alone.
Unfortunately, you will still require an online connection to the Payday 3 back-end systems for progression and unlocking the function, meaning you'll be playing offline in theory, but we'll need to retain online connectivity for it to mean anything. That's only phase one of the offline mode roll out though as the plans to develop this further allowing you to play out fully offline play sessions that only need to briefly connect to the backend to upload progress that still ultimately stored server side, it's a bit of a compromise and still seems to be a tenuous measure to prevent wholesale cheating which I personally believe to be a losing battle but this is still a tremendous step in the right direction that I cannot wait to see functioning in game, at least by finally chipping away at the old it's on the table stance with gradual changes such as these we can begin to shape the game as we the community want it to end up the ying to the solo players Yang, though, is, of course, improved at matchmaking.
Anyone who wants payday 3 to work as a corop has been championing the existence of a server browser, alongside a multitude of additional quality of life features, which it sounds like we're finally getting. As it stands, finding a heist on Payday 3 is almost impossible, with 44 different potential cues depending on your heist stipulations.
In the immediate term, it looks as if the team is going to try and support the current system with a quick play function, allowing you to reliably matchmake with other online players without having to go through the current Heist selection guessing game. This looks to just be a Band-Aid solution, though, as later in the year the team is planning to bring back the crime net security server browser.
We know and love it, and my hope is that a proper browser can completely streamline The heist-finding process allowed us to play the game together for longer, building up a more active and online community once again. Also, this new crime net should absolutely include filters, meaning at long last, stealth and Loud Mains will finally be kept away from each other's throats, alongside this major new addition, which still baffles me as one of Payday 3's largest dev oversights.
We're told the game will receive a vote-kick function, an unready button at long last, and the ability to morph into a heist party at the end of any match. That last feature has always been key to the payday franchise: saving time on matchmaking, enabling you to keep heisting with the same group of players repeatedly, and building up a proper rapport with them quietly.
I actually think this lack of online functionality was as responsible for the playerbase dropoff as a lack of content was, so let me tell you. I am relieved that this is being addressed and that Crime Net is no longer a tooot Ras. If I just asked the community, though, I bet they'd say that one of the most complained-about features of the Payday 3 launch was progression.
Pure challenge progression was always a misguided mistake, in my opinion, but I didn't hate the hybrid approach following update 2. However, I think challenges in Payday 3 are just a poison chalice at this point, and trying to sell them to the wider community is a waste of energy. It seems Star Breze now agrees with me, as they're doing away with the system all together.
Level progress will now be dictated purely by the completions, as it was back in Payday 2, and as a result, infy payouts will now be rebalanced with per-bag scaling and new bonuses being added to properly reward us for our success within each specific heist, not just time spent in the big bathroom.
I am glad challenges aren't completely gone, though, as it seems that daily and weekly side jobs will be returning in the future, and the fragments of the framework that did work will be repurposed into a way to earn extra hardcore cosmetic rewards instead of being the entire basis of progressing in the game, taking another major box.
