Fixing Payday 3
Well, after creating a article that consisted of breaking payday 3, I think it's only right. I put one together, trying to fix it, although with where the game's currently at, this will be a tougher challenge. I watched Mio and Elizabeth run a sort of pre-patch notes stream last week, running over a bunch of upcoming gameplay changes in future updates.
This article is going to run you through the first five steps I would take to turn Payday 3's fortunes around, set it on the right trajectory, and finally stop languishing with only the hundreds of players on Steam. We know the player base isn't what it could be but even with a player base and tens of thousands this system would still cause matchmaking problems compared to Payday 2 where so long as there are three other players online you can feasibly find a fully filled out Lobby, this is a joke anytime you try and find a desired Heist it's a complete shot in the dark as active Lobby don't show up and once you do finally come across the other three players who happen to click the same Button as you sure as hell better to enjoy that 10-minute Heist as the lobby automatically disbands as soon as it ends, socially it's a nightmare I can't imagine making a friend online in this game but also just in terms of user experience it's fiddly unintuitive and horrendously frustrating.
The even greatest SC is that they literally have the perfect blueprint for how to do matchmaking, the right way with crime net of course it being a peer-to-peer system over dedicated servers does complicate the process slightly but I don't see a reason why at the very least we're not able to actively view what other players are playing online to give us a better chance of joining a filled Lobby payday 3 does have its other issues don't get me wrong but in hindsight this was the most agous decision made for the game that's massively holding it back regardless of what you think of the overall gameplay, it's hurting replayability, as the time between Heist is much longer players are loging off faster as a result of that and at the end of the day unless you're expressly playing with a group of friends no one actually feels like they're a part of a team it genuinely infuriates me just how much they dropped the ball when it came to matchmaking and servers, in Payday 3 speaking of servers I'm sure someone at starb gets a shiver up their spine anytime they're mentioned, after how pivotal their disruption was to Payday 3's overall lack of momentum at launch.
Their downtime on that all-important release week was a nightmare, especially after a reasonably successful Early Access window, but we haven't seen any more serious downtime since that troubled launch. I still think the lack of an offline mode is a problem. To put it simply, payday is a game that plays well with a single player, even if that wasn't how it was intentionally designed.
In fact, for some people, it was the only way they could play the game often due to spotty internet connections, so why alienate these portions of the community just so you can enact some highly ineffectual form of DRM? The reputation and playerbase drop-off cannot be worth it with recent difficulty changes in AI buffs.
Solo is a lot more tenable, so I see no gameplay reason for solo offline not being an option. Single players can actually be more enjoyable in Payday 3, in my opinion, as it reduces their ability to speedrun objectives and effectively bypass any difficulty, drawing out more of what makes the gameplay good and satisfying.
Why not just play invite only then I hear you ask? Well, first, it doesn't actually work for some reason, as I often have people join my friend list uninvited. But more importantly, even invite-only lobbies require you to connect to and join a server, meaning if you have a poor connection or just happen to be located a fair way away from the servers, you'll have a degraded experience.
Whether it's a little bit of visible lag or a full-on drop connection causing you to lose all height progress, it's still a nightmare, and one that could easily be avoided if you just gave us the ability to play offline. I think at this point it's been fairly well proven that the pros of doing so heavily outweigh the cons.
I am personally and beyond fed up with the high ping indicator popping up in the top right-hand corner of any recording when I'm working away from my standard setup; it's the main reason why I haven't made a Payday 3 article in over a month. Third up on my list of things to fix, we're finally going to get away from the technical side of the game and actually touch on where I think the game's gameplay is at its weakest, that being its cross-house randomization and, as a result, replayability.
For a live service game this is crucial and as I mentioned earlier I do think fixing online functionality could do wonders for that replayability if just because the experience you have in a full Lobby is always different from Heist to Hast but after playing a lot of Payday 2 L I have come to the conclusion that it does randomization better than any game on the market and PayDay 3 desperately needs to learn from it sometimes that's via specific RNG events like fixed enemy spawns or random objective placements, others it's just due to the true randomness of the game's enemy spawn system running into multiple dozes and inopportune moment never feels fair but payday 3 has gone too far in the opposite direction.
It's too fair to the point of being abusable; scaling host difficulty just doesn't work for me. Even with the upcoming Overkill changes, I still think reasonably efficient squads will have finished any heist before actually being challenged. The game is too easy, and once you finish all 11 Heist once or twice, you will have experienced virtually all there is to experience; in other words, the game is predictable and overly reliant on just having solid gunplay and stealth mechanics.
It's too easy to abuse, which means we hardly get to see Payday's iconic special units, resulting in the game having a very shallow learning curve. The fourth fix I'd recommend takes us out of the heist and into the menus, as I believe Payday 3 needs to see some serious improvements to its RPG mechanics and skill builds in particular.
While I'm actually a fan of the great Edge Rush system and think the skill lines work well in isolation, as does the skill-building system itself, that's what's really letting it down. In my opinion, at the moment, builds are too flat and simple; every half-competent build should run about 15 skill points worth of standardized meta skills, leaving only around seven points for flare and variety.
