Payday 3's Armored Identity Crisis
I'm John from Rusty Chains, and today our chat is about the armor system of Payday 3. Armor is one of the most talked-about aspects of the game's design; opinions of it range from controversial to pretty negative. Even the members of Rusty Chains, who conceptually enjoy the game's more difficult attrition-based nature, dislike the armor system.
After a lot of discussion about it, we are of the opinion that the armor system is the most fundamentally damaging aspect of Payday 3. The game's core design is incredibly flawed, yes, but many of these problems can be traced back to or are exacerbated by the armor system, for those unaware. The armor system in Payday 3 usually works as follows: Armor is a finite resource, unlike Payday the Heist or Payday 2, where it recharges over time.
Payday 3's armor bar is divided into two to four pieces, depending on which armor you have equipped. Armor takes what is called trauma damage, which is where a part of the damage you take will never regenerate. This is becoming a common system in co-op games. It is most prominent in the back for blood or the fat shark.
Warhammer, Games to restore lost armor, you need to use an armor bag to replace a missing piece of armor or an armor repair kit to repair trauma damage to a partially missing piece. When your armor is completely broken, it can't regenerate. This means you'll be taking constant health damage until you find an armor bag.
Given that you have very little health, it gets chipped away pretty quickly, and then you die. This was completely intentional, as the developers have described Payday 3 as death by 1,000 cuts. With the goal of punishing players who don't create a perfect heist by getting in as quickly as possible, the problem with this philosophy is that it isn't necessarily as fun.
Heyday 2 allowed players to stay in Heist for theoretically infinite amounts of time, and players enjoyed remaining in Heist for 20 or 30 minutes. In Payday 3, this isn't really an option. Heists are designed to punish players for remaining longer than 15 or 20 minutes. This results in having to speedrun heists without your resources.
And it is a bold strategy to punish people for trying to play your game for extended periods of time, especially when the previous entry in the series was an arcade shooter where you could kind of brain off and spend some time going around in a heist. My friend Peacemaker, who is another payday moderator, has begun calling the armor an allowed fun meter, and your enjoyment of the game is decided by how much of the meter you have left.
Personally, I agree with him on this and have started calling it that as well. This isn't simply because it makes fighting and holding on to your resources harder. Like I said at the start of the article, the armor system issues that permeated throughout the entire game played a big part in Payday 3's early failures.
In past articles, I've said Payday 3 is extraordinarily hostile to the player. While this isn't true for every aspect of the game, like player stats being hidden. I do believe that the majority of Payday 3's anti-player design can be traced back to this traumatizing heavy armor system, allowing me to provide some examples.
The much maligned Wi-Fi circles, the little capture points you need to stand in on roughly half the heist in the game These are manageable but a bit boring and stealthy; however, they are just a pain. You're almost certainly going to take some degree of damage while you're locked in place. This damage, in turn, creates armor trauma and reduces your allowed fun meter, bringing you out of the fight faster.
If you want to put a resource tax on your attrition shooter, fine, but for it to be fair, it needs to come from playing poorly or taking unnecessary risks. Forcing people to give up some of their singular most important resource to progress toward the mandatory objective is just not fun. I'd also like to look at something not necessarily in the game but of critical importance to any game.
Experience we at Rusty Chains feel strongly about thematic cohesion. The way elements come together to make a complete experience is key.
For example, the default font and minimalist logo lack personality. It would have made more sense to use the cracked and damaged logo from earlier games, given that the story is about the gang having survived attempts on their lives and being dragged back to crime. The immersive presentation of this game is hurt by the loss of the in-universe crime menu as well.
Now, I promise there's a reason I'm talking about this in the article about the armor system, and that reason is that the armor has caused a major thematic issue with Payday 3 for the hostages. In previous games, hostages were used to barter for player respawns. In Payday 3, hostages have more uses than ever.
You can use them to buy time before the cops rush, trade them for resources, decrease respawn time, or even use them as shields. However, they are no longer required for Heyer respawns, the way they were in previous games; instead, respawns are simply a timer and not a trade; you've got a resource-based, attrition shooter.
Where a system was key to player economy in previous games, it no longer does that. This is thematically at odds with the main design pillars of this game, and like many things in Payday 3, it is consistent with the things that were unique and interesting about the previous games. Do you see the cognitive disconnection here?
I have this in this specific article because I believe the change to timer-based responses to be a byproduct of the armor system. The allowed fund meter keeps you locked down in place for longer periods of time during assaults. It may be unreliable to get to your hostages before the assault break ends if you are trapped further away.
The final charge system also comes into play, which ends your ability to trade hostages for resources, so you can suffer roughly 900 of the Thousand Cuts. It all comes back to the armor meter forcing the design here, but what about the challenge system? When progression in this game was designed from the ground up around challenge systems, having an armor system that makes it punishing to spend more time in the heist just makes it harder to earn that progression.
That's how you end up locked in the bathroom and touching the sky for an hour grinding kills and hiding in a tub, and I mean that with no disrespect to the people who use that strategy. Holi, because the game itself necessitated it. Its other balanced difficulties include the skill system. We have so few skill points that it was required to increase the cap from 21 to 28.
