Payday 3's "loud Modifiers" Are Terrible
Intro
And apparently it won't just be the only thing that has a breakdown, because I'm probably going to have one as well. If you've seen the title and thumbnail, you'll know I'm not the best pleased with this blog, and I've talked about it in my Discord with a couple of partners. I've just tried to get an overall feeling to make sure I'm not crazy, and I'm reading through this and feeling like everything here is bad.
But I'm going to be honest with you; pretty much everything here is bad. I'm just going to put it out front, so what I'm going to do is read through and summarize this post because it is very wordy. There's a lot of interview stuff here with Mo, the game director, and I don't know about you, but for my content and also for the sake of how I deliver this.
I'm getting really tired of just reading out interview questions. So what I'm going to do is just summarize the key points as we're going along and focus on the stuff that matters most. So let's do.
Introducing loud modifiers
This blog post is all about loud modifiers and how they're going to help combat difficulty. Now, right off the bat.
I did predict a couple of weeks ago, and as much as I hate to be the one who says I Told You. I had a bad feeling that loud modifiers were not going to amend the problems with the game's difficulty, and everything about this blog post proves that, unfortunately. I was absolutely bang on the money.
In this interview, Moo talks first about modifiers, with the gameplay being the first thing they want to do to try and combat the game being too easy. That's fair; saying it's not the only thing is a very good first step; there are other things you do. However, are there any comments about nerfing, adrenaline, or fortitude?
anything that would actually make the game a little bit more like it was pre-update 5 and adding new features that don't just break the game; no, they're adding loud modifiers on very hard Overkill and hoping that'll do enough for now, and they said they're going to wait for a while afterwards before they actually try and touch any of the statistics on those skills because they want to see how people respond to the modifiers.
The problem is that these modifiers don't add difficulty to the game; they add nuisances. That's what these do there's a couple in here I will give credit to that are good for example one of the loud modifiers and as I've said bear in mind these will only pop up on very hard and Overkill, is budy system I really like this one because it increases the amount of specials that can spawn and increases the special cap that's a good way to make the game harder I like that however you've got other ones like regular SWAT units being replaced with heavy SWAT or reflector shield which is just them bringing back the Marshall Shields from Payday 2 which unless I'm confused people didn't like it was a flashbang on a shield that was one of those unnecessary, combinations and it was something Payday 2 got a lot of criticism for towards the end where instead of adding any new interesting enemies they just went let's smush things together and hope people like them and so they're adding Shields that have a flashbang and it's like well either look away I'll kill the shield. That's just a nuisance.
Loud modifiers full analysis
Let's just break these down one by one and actually go through them, and to begin with, this is the most important thing I want to focus on. There are six loud modifiers coming in a future update, not the next one getting in the next week or so, but here's what we've got: first off, hard bargain players can't leave custody without hostage trades.
Getting a player out of custody costs one hostage plus one additional hostage for each time they've been in custody or have killed a civilian. That could become problematic quickly and I don't know how much I like that because the timer works better in Payday 2 anyway this is a concept is not terrible I don't hate this they do say they may change numbers and I think they should do that because trading hostages to get players out does make sense of high difficulties it's how payday2, worked and it is a sign that they are you know going back to Payday 2 feet just to make the game better this one I don't have a big problem with I just think the one additional hostage for each time they've been in custody could be a problem, because hostages have too many uses at that point, either they used to get extra time before the assault starts or they used to trade resources which are desperately needed in a game where you need to rely on them to keep playing because payday 3 is obsessed with forcing you to finish Heist as soon as possible, which just isn't Fun compared to Payday 2's logic so then adding in an extra thing where you have to save up so many civilians to trade people.
Is not a good thing, so one to trade a player, fine, add a timer on top of don't add extra hostages terrible idea body system as I've said I like that one no problems with it armor pacing 10% of damage LW enforcement deals to armor is also apply to health. I mean, it just puts even more stress on you.
As I said. I don't feel as though some of these mechanics are the best way to make the game harder as opposed to making it more of a nuisance because, as I've said, they're forcing you to complete Heist as fast as possible, adding fortitude and adrenaline. Basically, we've made the game too easy.
How are we going to combat that instead of actually combating fortitude and adrenaline? Which moo does say at one point in this blog that they are going to allow taser and cloaker damage to remove adrenaline faster, either double or triple the race? That's good things like that help combat the thing that's made the game too easy, but leaving the changes that you've made really powerful and then hoping that another thing that's completely separate will then address it is not a fix; it's a band-aid.
You don't die because your caps only take 100 health damage because that was the maximum health, and the game never anticipated for you to have more health than that; they didn't even think that through. So while they have good intentions, in trying to make the game better, I don't think they're going about it in the right way.
