The Fall Of Payday 3 6 Minutes

3, so let's get the obvious stuff out of the way, as many people will know there were some pretty serious issues with servers at launch. Matchmaking was all but unavailable for the first 2 days, then it came back, and then it was gone again. This led to terrible reviews on Steam, almost exclusively complaining about the matchmaking servers, leaving the game with a mostly negative review score that still hasn't recovered, which is a shame because the game itself is pretty good.

The good

The graphics are a nice upgrade compared to Payday 2, not as much as I thought there would be, but the lighting and the shadows are much better.

The textures and reflections are good, and the character models are much better overall. It's nice; it's a good improvement; it feels modern but also isn't too taxing on lower-end systems. The sound design overall is slightly improved. I, Line they got one of us, but it was fine on Payday 2. To begin with the important stuff, though, there's a marked improvement in the interactions and the general gameplay mechanics.

Lockpicking and safe cracking now require some attention to complete successfully. This is much better than in Payday 2, when you would just stand still and hold F, and these new interactions have been implemented well to make heists more interesting. Stealth in Payday 2 was pretty rudimentary, but in Payday 3, it's had a massive improvement.

They've been implemented well in each of the heists. They can be a lot of fun, and given an entirely new way to complete a level, you can use them to get in and get set up before you go loud. as a lover of stealth games. I think this is a great improvement. The gunplay is solid, and the movement feels great now.

It's all very smooth. The AI has improved; they work together; they hide behind shields; and the levels have been designed well overall. Overall, the game feels good to play. It's just such a shame that the servers were so messed up in the beginning.

The not so good

This is where it starts to drift a little bit. The skills have been streamlined from Payday 2; they've been condensed down from two separate systems into one. There are pros and cons to this, making your build much simpler now and probably easier to come back to than the system from Payday 2.

The skills themselves could probably do with a tweak, but that'll probably come over time, although the system in Payday 2 was more complicated. Leveling up in Payday 3 requires you to gain infamy points, which are only rewarded when you complete a challenge. This is a mistake, in my opinion, though you will complete challenges just by playing the game.

When you read what these challenges actually are, you can see that they might be for things that you're not actually doing, and while this might encourage players to try new things and play the game in different ways, it also kind of punishes players who want to play in a very specific way. Another problem with only being able to level up by completing challenges is that sometimes completing a heist can reward no points.

This can be very anticlimactic when you just fight a huge battle or stealth through an entire mission and receive nothing going towards your level. I find myself constantly checking the challenge page to see if I need to change weapons or do a different heist rather than just getting on with it and enjoying the heists that I like or using the weapons that I want to use.

Even a small amount of IP gain would solve this. This brings us to the weapons. The weapon types are linked to your level, and the weapon types are fine, but the modifications are a bit off. Most people I've spoken to find it difficult to work out if a mod is going to actually improve the gun or make it worse.

The way that you actually unlock mods is better than in Payday 2, which is unlocking more the more that you use the weapon, but overall, I think there's a missed opportunity. Unlocking and customizing a weapon the way you want and making it more powerful the more you use it was another one of those reasons to play that you had in Payday 2, and the customization for the weapons is.

The paints that you unlock for the guns make them look like toys; the other unlockable cosmetics are pretty lacking as well; and the options are pretty limited and again tied to IP. A lot of the suit options are pry PR poor. Some of the masks are okay, but they seem to get worse the more you unlock, and I'm sure there will be more unlocks in the future.

But this is another missed opportunity, another reason to play. This brings us to the cash. Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel I have a lot of cash and nothing to spend it on. This is the main reward for completing a heist. If you don't have something valuable and worthwhile to spend your money on, then why are you earning it?

You can dump your money into the other currency. SE Stacks, but there's not too much to spend that on either. These, I think, are the main reasons that people kept playing Payday too. It's great to have fun heists to play, but you also need a reason to keep playing them over and over again, which was working through your skill tree, unlocking the weapons and the mods for those weapons that you wanted, and making your character look badass. Because these are the weaker areas of the game, I've noticed fewer and fewer people playing.

Final thoughts

Overall, The Heist themselves are actually playing the game, which is a lot of fun, and I'm still enjoying it. Many of my friends also joined me, and we all had a lot of fun together despite the server issue.

I think it's a great sequel to Payday 2, and although there's a limited number of heists and customization options, I know they have much more planned for the future. It's just a shame that we had such issues at launch and that people are already starting to get bored. Many of my friends have dropped off one by one, and I'm not sure if they'll come back if they just add another heist or two.

The progression of the game just hasn't been enticing enough to keep people playing, and I myself haven't wanted to come back and play it as much as I did when I started playing Payday 2. Despite Payday 3 being better in game play mechanics and level design, the game is lacking in reason, which is why I'm hoping I can convince my friends to come back, and I hope more players continue to play and encourage the developers to make more and more content and to give us more of a reason to be holding all this cash.