Payday 3: Cook Off Is Back
Cook off the classic endless Heist from Payday 2 is back within payday 3 granting us our first holdout themed Heist which actually suits the sequels mechanics really well but not everything is as it once was the host itself has been built from the ground up to be visually mechanically and structurally unique offering new opportunities to maximize your reward as well as new challenges to keep you on your toes, unfortunately this has come at the cost of the heist endless nature as it now has a fixed bag limit although don't worry too much as payday 3's attrition based combat was never suited for hosting endlessly and its 19 bag cap is more than timec consuming and difficult enough especially considering how assault waves ramp up to turn the screws on most Crews.
This article is going to walk you through all of COF's major mechanics, heist differences for Payday 2 veterans, and some effective strategies to stop you from burning the house down. Let's get cooking. Upon immediately loading into the heist, there are a few noticeable changes from its Payday 2 counterpart.
You're not on any sort of timer, so you can start exploring the outskirts of the heist freely, which has been slightly expanded, giving it a more open feel despite its dark and moody atmosphere. Stepping into the lab, though things are a lot less scripted than they once were, you'll arrive with the Cs already dead but five police responders within the building and a couple of gangsters already arrested.
Even if you try to finesse these guys in stealth, there's simply too many radios to answer, meaning this is once again a force-loud-only heist, which is just the way I'd want it to be. After dealing with the cops, their prisoners will become your hostages, which will be crucial to stopping grenadiers from gassing out the entire lab.
The scene you walk into is mostly familiar, with a similar layout to what we're used to. You have the ground floor as a potential location for the objective equipment, with its kitchen counter and slightly wider bathroom heading upstairs. This room has been slightly changed, with the balcony removed, the side room opened up, and a new entrance directly to the upper floor installed via some scaffolding.
Of course, depending on RNG, this can also be the cooking spot, but with the added entrances, it's no longer the optimal one for camping out. Where the primary differences can be found is down in the basement. This used to be a closed-off room with just a few ingredients placed inside, but now it's a potential objective location of its own and has been expanded with new horizontal windows for cops to slide through and a connecting garage area that loops around to the north side of the building.
This is my preferred cooking spot, as it's almost certainly the most well-covered and defensible, especially when you make use of the wooden planks to board up the windows. Just like the old days, you can find a few of these scattered around the heist, although their value is slightly higher. I find the cops in Payday 3 are much better at target acquisition and will aim to flank through as many entrances as possible if you don't cover them up.
Moving on to the section of the review you're most interested in, though, how does cooking work now? Well, very similarly, with a few small tweaks and general improvements. Placed around the heist are a few sets of chemicals: hydrogen chloride, costic soda, and muriatic acid. The old water formula, when combined in a very specific but apparently variable order, creates the purest meth.
There are a couple of new upstairs spawns for these ingredients, and the garage houses a few, but for the most part, your Payday 2 knowledge will carry over when it comes to locating them. Actually using them will also be quite familiar, as Shay takes on Bane's previous role, apparently reading directly from his notes, which has led to some funny lines of dialogue to instruct you on which compound to add to the reaction.
From my play testing, if she ever reads the wrong ingredient, she'll correct it so quickly that you wouldn't have even had time to add it, and she won't ever make an outright mistake, as those Payday Two vets amongst us might remember Bane doing at launch. If you do miss here, though, and add the wrong ingredient, you will be slightly underwhelmed.
Fashion blows up the cooking equipment, disorienting your view for a few seconds and making it impossible to proceed with the objective. If you do this after already cooking at least three bags, you receive a relatively generous point of no return window during which you must secure them and escape, but if you don't already have enough loot, this sparks an almost immediate heist failure.
State, this is pretty familiar for Payday 2 plays, but there are some sizable differences when it comes to the process itself. First of all, Shade seems to be much faster with her instructions than before. Bane used to give them quite a consistent pace, but she reels them off evenly, and you'll be able to start the next batch as soon as you secure the previous one.
The most impactful change on the cooking process though is in how it can actually be halted by sabotage squads going after the power supply, if the power on the house is pulled and the lights go out now you're no longer able to just cook meth in the dark and will have to head out to the power switch before you can progress the current batch, this is probably a necessary change from a difficulty perspective as it would be quite simple to just Camp inside the house without ever leaving, but forcing you to prend or switch the power back on creates a lot more room for Jeopardy and brings payday 3 snipers into contention who will aim to move around the outskirts of the heist instead of acting his Sentry spawns to get a decent angle on the heisting party The loot you produce through the cooking process also has some added complexity.
After a batch is complete, you can choose to leave it to heat up further and change states. Think of it as a monster hunt. With the right timing, you can get some well-cooked meth when it changes to these bright blue crystals or burt meth when it goes red. Your loot bags will be marked to indicate this, and their relative financial value to the crew will vary across all three loot types.
Very little has changed on this heist; otherwise, after cooking three bags, a switch will arrive to secure the loot and your potential escape. Once loot has been secured, he will only be able to hang around for so long before looping back around, so if you're going for a massive hall, it's probably best to hold off on securing any until you're ready to leave.
