Payday 3's New Update Is Too Much, Too Late
Intro
At this point, I'm just so exhausted when it comes to Payday 3. As the title suggests. Update 4 itself isn't a bad update as it comes with a ton of bug fixes, some balance changes in skills and equipment, and some very highly requested features since launch like controller Dead Zone options, image scaling.
Nvidia DLSS options, and an unready button. It's revolutionary, I know.
The wait for update 4
The main issue I have with this update is that, despite some really positive changes, it still does not warrant or deserve any further attention or time from new and returning players, which is painful to say. However, what's even more painful is the amount of time we've had to wait for this update.
The last significant update payday 3 received was back on December 12th. 2023, with the syntax error Heist which granted those who either owned gold or silver editions or those who were ripped off by purchasing it separately access to a heist new weapons and cosmetics as well as some other changes like the introduction of the techie and since then besides some SE stack price changes we've had, nothing, instead during that time we've had a statement from starbur addressing the community regarding the condition and state of the game promising to bring it up to fans expectations, alongside this we have also received the studio plans going forward with operation medic bag which highlights the teams focus on payday 3 throughout 2024, and now finally today, approximately 78 days later, we have an update that's simply not good enough and quite frankly put it's piss poor this is Amplified, even further with the fact that there is no additional content packaged into this patch as an offering to the players to try out something new alongside these new fixes the only thing that's on offer Here is an exclusive charm for completing the Kiss the Chef challenge.
The amount of time between updates needs to change as the player base is starved for content. Thankfully, from last week's Reddit AMA hosted by Alir and Moo, they confirmed that updates will be coming more frequently. I really hope this is the case because, as things stand at the moment, it simply isn't good enough.
With that off my chest, let's finally talk about this update. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, update 4 brings a ton of bug fixes, balance changes, quality of life improvements, and performance fixes right to Payday 3's doorstep. I will leave the patch notes in the description of this article if you wish to get nitty-gritty and deep into specifics, especially when it comes to the balancing of certain skills and equipment.
I will touch on a few things regarding balance changes, but those, in my opinion, are not going to be a huge focus for a lot of people with this patch. However, what I'm going to do is simply go over and highlight what I think are the most sufficient and important features in this update from testing and playing it quite a bit recently behind the scenes.
As always, this article is time-stamped, so please feel free to skip to whatever portion of the article interests you the most.
Known issue (hardcrash)
First things first, straight off the bat, known issues on PC having the instant replay setting enabled in GeForce Experience or Shadow Play can, in rare cases, cause your system to hard lock if you alt-tab during game startup or while switching between full screen and window in the game's article settings.
Turning instant replay off in the Nvidia settings prevents this issue.
Performance increases
Starting things off with Shader compiling on Startup alongside image scaling and super sampling options and official DX12 integration, we finally have more options when it comes to the game's performance. Shader compiling will already give you a huge boost to performance all around the board as it is, and you can all take off your dx12 launch options as it is officially integrated now.
However, the icing on top of the cake is the addition of Nvidia DLSS and image scaling options in general. I've personally been asking about this since day one, and it's finally here, and after playing through every Heist again. I can confidently say that the game runs a lot smoother than it did thanks to these changes.
Hopefully this FPS comparison on Noas for the Wicked can give you guys a solid indication of the boost in performance that myself and others might experience in game pairing that with dx12. Support also means that those who have the Liberty mask will be pleased to know that you will no longer cause a crash should someone with it equipped join your lobby.
With all the listed factors, combined shader textures and overall performance have significantly improved over the previous versions of the game. And just a side note: if, for whatever reason, your game ran fine on dx11, you can just type dx11 into your launch options, and that will launch the game in dx11.
Visual tweaks
So I've talked a lot about improvements in performance, so now let's see how that impacts the visual side of things. For the most part, I didn't notice anything specifically different in terms of visual changes; however, the heist that has clearly been given the most love is the syntax error, and rightly so.
Besides, a lot of bug fixes, which are once again listed in the patch notes below the lighting IND visuals, have been addressed here, and thankfully, they may be very small fixes, but they add up to so much in the long run. First things first, the time of day of the heist has been altered slightly to adjust to the lighting changes.
I'm about to demonstrate, for example, the keypad on the door to enter the basement. Instead of you struggling to see which numbers you need to enter due to the awful lighting and sung glare, the pat is much clearer now, making it easier for you to punch in the numbers you need to before heading down into the basement in the basement the overall The lighting in this area is incredibly superior to what it was before, and at last we can no longer see this weird brownie fog. Smokey Ceiling, when we move our camera around the footage, doesn't really do it justice, but with the help of Nvidia image scaling, it really helps to enhance the visual quality of the game as a whole without detriment to Performance and those on slightly outdated hardware will be able to adjust this to their liking, which will result in better performance around the board.
Balance changes
There have been some adjustments and changes to certain skills in the game; some of these are very minor changes, but there are some here that are welcome additions, for example. The Negotiator skill just got a huge buff, dropping two extra resources from a trade instead of just one extra resource.
