Payday 3: Much Ado About Nothing
I find it relatively difficult to cover a lot of the news around payday 3 at the moment because it feels like I'm either beating a dead horse or trying to will a decent update into existence. The dev blogs, for example, feel as if they exist as much as tick employee metric boxes as they do to actually inform the community about the progress of operation medic bag.
The company has become so ineffective in recent months that we never seem to get an honest appraisal of the timeline for updates with the blog, which simply discusses what's being worked on this week and how far along the production cycle key features are. I think it would do a lot more for the community instead of these sanitized, overly wordy presentations.
They don't do a whole lot for me, and I can't really stand to come through them week by week, especially when they're not directly related to some gameplay change. I can actually Wade in on it, but with today's Dev Update Number 4, we have learned that the next patch will be released within the next week or so.
Landing between the end of April and the start of May, that's something I can sink my teeth into, and we've also learned what exactly is going to be in it, so I might as well preempt its launch and share my initial thoughts. Update Six looks to finally start tackling some of the larger operations medic bag promises, which is a nice step in the right direction, although ultimately.
I think it's a hard sell for most players who'll be desperate to see some evidence of new content before loading the game up again. I think my concern is that every update seems to be having an increasingly limited ripple effect on the payday 3 player count; it's as if franchise fatigue has really set in now and people are increasingly less interested in loading up the game to see their entire builds reset, no new Heist to try out, and little more than features that are industry standard in their game at last.
I remain skeptical as to the future of Payday 3, to be honest, but I will always tackle the content in these updates earnestly and to the best of my ability. Anyway, this development update is predominantly focused around quick play; now you can simply select a difficulty, and the game will automatically matchmake with players seeking the same level of challenge assumably on a random heist.
Remember, though this is version one of Quick Play, it's effectively filterless, meaning you can just as easily load into a random stealth lobby when you want to go loud and vice versa. Also, we don't know how it's going to handle cross-region matchmaking. Based on how Payday 3's base game matchmaking has worked in the past, it's completely possible that it still won't automatically find you lobbies with West Coast players if you're on the east coast of the US and could help you if you fall into the dreaded Asia region.
I hear that place is a ghost town; it's a Band-Aid solution at best and Pals in comparison to the addition of an actual server browser, but I still can't deny it's a dam site better than picking a random heist and a random difficulty and effectively praying to get into a populated lobby. Has Star Brees ever thought that would work?
I will simply never know. However, I do think it's my duty at this stage in the article to point you in the direction of hw12, dev's payday 3 server browser mod. It's experimental and still has issues, but somehow a member of the modding community has found and implemented a functional solution to the matchmaking problem before the actual development team has Of course, it's easy to be perplexed as to how a professional games development team has failed to implement this before a single dedicated Moda, but I prefer to focus on just how impressive an accomplishment this is.
It's been 4 months worth of work, as I understand it, so the Creator deserves all the plaudits that they rightly receive. Back on to the update alongside quick play postgame Partying up is now a possibility in this four-player cooperative game with a strong focus on team play and building up relationships.
7 months is far too long to go without addressing this feature, but we're here now, and as of update six, you'll be able to stay on in the group you last heisted with and hit the full 11 Heist Gauntlet if you see fit. My favorite part of this one is that in the dev blog they highlighted this key change using the same sad single-player Payday 3 front lobby golden shark gameplay that I feel we've seen dozens of times before.
When I'm working on a Payday 3 article, I at least make sure to play a heist from start to finish, not just record the first 2 minutes of it and call it a day. It's fairly telling when the internal crew doesn't seem to be willing to play much of their own game at the moment. The mission intro feature is also coming in the next update.
There's something else that's been modded into the game as early as week one but is now a fully implemented feature for all to enjoy.
Finally in terms of actual gameplay affecting content coming in the update we have the shot grenade which we saw previously showcased in a Friday Dev blog as I said at the time these look neat but utterly redundant when the flashbangs are so strong and the game is so bloody easy the throwable itself functions in a slightly unique way and that it sits where it lands and emits multiple pulses of electricity stunning any cop within the radius for a short window that is reset with every repeated sh, the area of effect can also be expanded as all humans conduct the shock grenades and will pass on the stun to other nearby cops acting as a sort of chain lightening effect the stun won't be as universally powerful as that produced by flashbangs, but it will offer more persistent area denial similar to the molotov in Payday 2 on top of that despite dealing zero damage to most cops it oneshots tasers by overloading their battery packs as well as Shields who conduct the electricity better than most.
This is exceptionally cool, if a little random and situational, although I do think it's a smart move to have a throwable weapon that acts as a built-in counter to shields, as they naturally counter most other throwables in the game, so if shields are a real problem for your build, maybe I can see the shot grenade getting a little bit of use and finding a niche.
If nothing else, it'll be fun for a challenge run. You seem to be able to carry three of these as standard, meaning you can bring up to five into your inventory with the right build. It's worth noting that they don't instantly kill shields or tasers upon conduction, so you can still waste ammo into them by accident.
