Let's Talk About Payday 3's Launch
Okay, so today I want to talk about Payday 3. The game launched fully a week ago and with Early Access nearly two weeks ago now, and it's no secret that it's been a difficult time to be a Payday fan. Hence, in this article, we're just going to be discussing Payday 3 in general, completely unscripted, and I'm just going to be bringing up a few things that I've noticed throughout my first 2 weeks of playing the game, and not just playing the game but also being a part of the community.
The first thing that I really want to discuss is some of the disingenuous negativity surrounding Ring's launch. I understand that the launch didn't go as smoothly as Starberry wanted, and of course I was affected by the server downtime just as much as everybody else was. I too have struggled with the leveling system and the UI in general, and so many things around the game that aren't really up to scratch just yet, but one of the things that I've noticed happening so often in all corners of the internet, whether that be Twitter.
YouTube and elsewhere. I'm sure it's going on Twitch and threads; if people still use that, I don't know, but people tend to just be shouting at Star Brees and the developers specifically, which is never okay. Never go after developers. If you have an issue with a game, you can tweet, comment, or call out the company as a whole.
Going after individual developers on their personal social media profiles is despicable, and anybody who does it should be ashamed of themselves. But I digress. I've seen comment after comment, article after article. I'm not putting screenshots up because I don't want to call anybody else specifically.
This article is not aimed at anyone in particular; it's more just speaking about the things that I've seen. But there are people out there spreading misinformation. If you will about the game, I've seen a couple of articles saying that Payday 3 doesn't really change anything from Payday 2; it's just a graphical overhaul.
You can agree with people, you can disagree with people, and you can find yourself in the middle. What I'm basically asking is that you don't follow either the first opinion you hear or the loud, shouty person who is saying that the game that's had a troubled launch is bad, and speaking of that troubled launch, let's actually talk about that itself.
Obviously, it's no secret that the payday 3 servers were struggling to begin with, but now they seem to be a lot more stable as Starb has undertaken some well-needed maintenance. Did this have to be how the game launched? There was an open beta that wasn't exactly an open beta. And I know there were a lot of people, myself included, who felt like maybe that should have been an open beta to really test the servers, but thankfully that seems like a misstep that has been and is currently being rectified, and so I don't expect the server instability to play the game for that much longer, and obviously the server instability drew the always online model into question.
There are a lot of people currently requesting an offline mode, myself included. Obviously, I would love to see that, but I don't know how possible that is—pulling back the curtain a bit. I'm under the impression there may be an issue with shareholders. When it comes to the implementation of an offline mode.
I won't bother getting into why that is the case right now, as it's going to take some time to explain, and it's not necessarily the point of this article. As for the game itself, the gameplay loop is brilliant. I am absolutely in love with the game, and I can't put it down. Really, I think they've built upon the foundation that Payday Toth set.
I think there are things missing, which we will get to in a minute, but I really think they've got something here, especially with the new approach to stealth and loud gameplay, the fact that you can start a heist and stealth, and if it goes wrong and you end up going loud, you don't often find yourselves restarting, unless of course you're going for a solely stealth run sort of transition.
Between stealth and loudness, which is one of the things the developers set out to achieve, they've struck gold with it. I often find myself starting a heist in stealth, getting past certain objectives, and then going loud and allowing myself to enjoy that transition instead of it feeling like a penalty.
Of course, there are still issues in the heist design, but thankfully we're seeing fewer drills, or rather, they have quite clearly been replaced with this new hacking mini game where you have to go and stand in certain areas, and I'll be completely honest. I'd rather be a drill than that. I understand that maneuvering around the map adds challenges, and that's probably what the developers were trying to achieve with that, but I quite enjoy it.
Knowing that once I've set up a drill, especially in stealth. I would be a massive advocate for more drill stuff and less hacking stuff in the future, but the hacking stuff works perfectly in loud. I find, and potentially, there's a way of merging the two, so in stealth you end up drilling more and in loud you end up hacking more.
I don't know; I'm not a game developer, but that's what I would want to see personally. I think another element of Payday 3 that absolutely shines is the new skill system. Instead of having a perk deck and your skills like in Payday 2, in Payday 3, you just have the skill lines, and playing with certain skills unlocked researches and unlocks more skills.
I would argue that the rate at which you earn skill points doesn't necessarily complement the rate at which you unlock new skills. And personally i would have advocated for players having the full 21 skill points by level 50 instead of level 100, especially given the way that the leveling system works, which we will get on to in a moment, but there are no skills or perks in Payday 3 that feel essential; unlike Payday 2, there's no Inspire, there's no Stoic, there's nothing like that, and I think that allows a lot more customization.
The absence of essential skills allows for builds to be completely tailored to individual play styles rather than sort of metas if you will, which is something I am a big fan of. Something that I'm not that big of a fan of is the current ammo economy in the game. I often find myself running completely out of ammunition and either waiting for a teammate to throw down an ammo box or being forced to bring them along myself.
I guess I would argue that the closest thing to essential skills that we have are the ones that allow you to get more ammo faster, whether that's from enemy drops or ammo cases. If you asked me to describe how I feel about the payday 3 ammo economy in a sentence, I'd say that they failed to draw the line between in a player to be conservative and inconveniencing.
