Payday 3: A Rough Start
I'm a big fan of Payday 2. I've had some really great experiences and times with that game, so, of course. Bumbo Head. I pre-ordered the edition of it that would give me three days of Early Access, which means I actually got a chance to play the game since. Currently, as of recording, the game is completely unplayable, which led to, of course, very negative reviews.
This is just a general first impressions kind of article. I'm going to start off with stuff I actually like about the game, and then I'll go into stuff I'm pretty negative or mixed about, but if you like this article, make sure you check out my other articles. I talk about games, and I talk about movies sometimes.
I talked about 100 guests that one time. yeah, let's get into it. One thing: right off the bat, the game looks great. The environment is beautiful. The lighting is great. The guns look good. I do think the way players and NPCs look, they look slightly better than Payday 2. Overall, it's definitely an upgrade, especially since Payday 2 looked old, maybe a year after launch.
That game is crusty. I mean, I love it to death, but Payday 2 is crusty as hell. The actual missions in this game look fantastic. A lot of the missions are set in New York, and just the overall feel of the city and the heists is really great. One of my favorite openings would be the jewelry store heist, which is just a random corner on a street, but it just looks so good.
You got the you got the foggy New York skyline. From all the smoke and piss, probably I also gotta say level design is pretty good this time around. There's multiple ways to do these levels for maximum loot, or whether you're doing a loud or stealth I believe all the maps are stealthable except for one, and the updates to the enemy mechanics are also really good.
Cloakers can run on walls. Shields can charge you; there's also new enemies like the naders, which actually throw gas grenades at you, unlike the last game where gas grenades just showed up randomly; and the way that cops work at the start of the highest negotiations is really, really good in Payday 2.
When you fail The Heist, you will probably just restart if you're trying to stealthfully or if you just instantly go guns blazing. It doesn't matter on Payday 3. Tying down the hostages is actually really good, and making sure that cops Do Not Free Them is really important because when the alarms go off and the police response starts, you can actually trade hostages to delay their attack, which gives you more time to do the objectives like opening a vault or unlocking locked doors, etc., so you get into this kind of gameplay where, of course, the highest number of people have different roles, so you could have one guy who's in charge of tying down people and trading them, and later on, trading hostages actually rewards you with first aid kits.
On this one mission in the nightclub, we took down so many hostages that we had like an infinite supply of first aid kits, and it turned out to be really helpful. There's a lot of great new mechanics, not only in loud but in stealth as well, and PayDay 3 has improved. There's a lot more to keep track of and do, and you have so many more options.
Now that the casing is ready, you put your mask on and you're walking around, and you know your case in the joint in case and a joint, so now you can actually do a lot more objectives if you're sneaky. Tool slot You can run the pocket cameras with motion sensors. The motion sensor is really good because you can throw it on someone, and then they'll mark people all over the map for you, which gives you, essentially, wall hacks on the guards overall.
I think the new gameplay additions feel really good. I can't wait to see how they're used in heists in the future. The music, while it's under a different producer, is fantastic as always; it's hyped as [__] and it still has that progression system where there's highs and lows during assault waves and stuff like that, but they also added this kind of music progression to the stealth heists, so once you get into a vault or once you do something like a big objective, it actually picks up a little bit, and the music is like.
It's like. Yeah, it's like. Yeah. I'm doing something cool right now, but yeah, the music, of course, is fantastic now. We probably should talk about the heist and the amount of content in the game. Apparently, at launch, the game only had eight heists, currently with a planned DLC. Structure, for the next year, which I believe will be at the very minimum four more ice and, maybe, the highest or free heists.
Heading into this game, I knew the amount of content would be a huge pain point for players to, you know, swallow because Payday 2 was around for like 10 [__] years. There's a whole boatload of heists you could play through and master, and all that you know, replayability is huge in this series, so, like, really learning how to speed run and go through a heist and all the different variations of it is important, but there are only eight of them, and when I mentioned variations.
I mean like stuff spawning in different areas or different guard papping or key card spawns and stuff like that. There's a variation, but at the same time, you're only playing eight heists. Now, I fully expect this game to be supported for, as long as you know, it has good bones it has it has good bones well what.
What are good bones? I think the gameplay is solid, and the performance has been pretty good for me. I've only maybe dipped frames on a couple of heists or maybe a couple situations. I like the gameplay and the heist in the game so far, but I just want more. That's the main problem. I want more.
I know that in this modern era of article gaming, the demand for more content has only gone up over the years. It feels like the general audience probably expected a lot more than what we launched with, which is going to be difficult to deal with at the start, and we haven't even gone into the rest of the negatives of this game, which are that they're a bit rough.
They're a bit rough before we even go to the current launch or where the servers have been down for the last 48 hours at the Early Access launch, apparently. Sony uploaded the wrong build, so PS5 players couldn't even play Early Access for like a whole day or two, which that's, ass that's. It's pretty bad, and now people can't even get into the game in general at all because of server issues, which is very unfortunate, but at the same time.
I feel like they could have had better metrics for this stuff because they did a close beta test and an open beta test specifically for testing server strength, and surely with those numbers and pre-order numbers, whatever the [__] it could be, it could be better. This all could have been solved if they had an offline mode, which this game does not have in Payday 2.
