Payday 3: The Problem With Always Online Games
Intro meme
All right I'm ready. Let's do this. The mask—you're right, I'll be silly of you. I'm sorry i'm sorry let me fix that right away. All right now, I'm ready to rob a bank. Now here's the thing: I actually had a completely different article planned and recorded already, as you can probably tell by that intro meme.
That's very good, so we're still keeping it, and to be fair, I do want a rapid fire.
Positives
And kind of talks about a few of the positives that I have about the game; actually, they're quite a bit. The music is Banger from the very get-go to the intro while you're playing the game; it really makes you feel pumped up for the heist.
The gunplay is decent throughout, and the guns that you get in the game feel really nice. The feedback says that the voice acting is pretty decent and that you feel like each character is rather unique compared to some cases in Payday 2, so that's really well improved. Some systems are gone, but some systems are improved, and there's a little bit more functionality.
For example, you're able to get more use out of your hostages and be able to trade them in the negotiation part of the game so that you can delay the police from coming in and busting through the door as you're doing your heist or do different things in that regard or keep the hostages near you, stuff like that, to prevent certain assaults, so that is all very good.
The different arrays of equipment and things that you can customize are also pretty nice. Maybe compared to other games, it's more or less the same, but I think it's overall functional, and also the game is already on Game Pass, so even if you think that forty dollars is too steep for what's being offered, which can be the case for some people, you can actually have it there for a lot cheaper, so what's the problem?.
The problem
Well, the problem is something that actually extends further than payday 3, and it's a contentious topic that has been around for a while now, but it has to do with online-only games. Now, I'm not necessarily against games being online all the time. I think in some cases or in some genres, it's kind of a necessity, whether for security purposes or not.
Or proper servers and matchmaking things like that it makes sense like if you're making a looter shooter game where you're constantly playing with other people in a online, world and it's closer to an MMO then that makes sense for you to have that and there's plenty of games that have servers like Path of Exile that don't suffer from a ton of matchmaking issues aside from cues on new league stars or things like that so I have nothing necessarily, against the concept if it works towards, a better game but there are some games like fighting games for example where you have an online mode to fight people but you also want an offline mode so you can practice your combos so you can play against your friends in, local versus mode and then there's paid A3 a game that's pretty much player, versus environment.
And you can have lots with you that are kind of moronic, and they're not that great, so that would be a little bit of a negative there. They're a little bit better in some cases than Payday 2, but they're overall very stupid, but at least you have them there, right? But the thing is, the game is primarily you going in doing a heist; you can do it stealthy.
You can do it by brute force, and you're wanting to get out of there alive and with as much money as possible and not go to jail or be dead. Here's the thing: if you're playing with other people, yes, you have to have matchmaking, and again, it's good to have servers so that can be accommodated rather than it being peer-to-peer, but there are moments where you will want to.
Let's say I want to practice this run I want to test. Out the game first because I'm new to the game and maybe I want to try it with Bots, and I'm not saying me specifically, just like a new player coming into the franchise, maybe you want to try playing with one other friend and then Bots, and you don't want to fill the whole team.
I don't know whichever the case might be, but there's always a good thing to be said for having an offline option, or at least aLAN, a co-op option, so that you can play around and test out the game, or at least if the matchmaking is down or the servers are down, you have an option to still play the game.
Here's where the problem comes in because since this game is called Matchmaking and the servers have pretty much been down all the time, now I can be forgiving at first because all launches are difficult, and to be fair, this game is launching across multiple platforms, on Steam and Game Pass, so there's a lot of people trying to get in, but I'm pretty sure the developers knew this ahead of time, and while I can forgive that, you know, maybe at launch they're having some matchmaking issues, the hours kept on going by, and I was checking Twitter on their main account, and it's like we're still investigating the issues.
Six hours later, we're still investigating the issues. 12 hours later, we're still investigating the issues. Here we are. The second day and the servers are still having issues; it's not just myself. I really wish that they had enforced this kind of thing upon us. I know that there were two contentious topics with this game: Nouveau, which thankfully got removed before the launch as that was a terrible idea, and online only.
I feel like these two things are one in tandem because usually developers implement them in tandem because they feel like that's their golden ticket to preserve the game and play. Hackers. Or whatever, even though it doesn't really work that well, this is a problem because if people can't play your game, then they can't really experience it in its fullness, and this is a problem that permeates across the entire industry.
There's a lot of games that have this issue where they would benefit from an offline mode so that if something happens, you can still play the game, but here's the reality: if you spent money on this game and you didn't get it through Game Pass, then you're unable to play it and you wasted your money.
Early early access
I think that's a big issue, and I think that's something to consider, and most importantly, because this developer also chose to do a marketing run before, the game was out, which is normal, but what they did was invite if you were big content creators into a bank, and they had them do like a pretend game of being held hostage, and then they had some things to do and they got to play the game, but the thing is, they did this all pre-launched.
