What Could Have Been. Payday 3 Leaked 2020 Build
Intro
A leaked build of Payday 3 was posted online, and it's pretty good. I don't get why the team switched to Source Engine halfway through development and then back to Unreal, but I guess it's newer than diesel, so yeah, it has these guns and stuff, and everything is taken from Payday 2. Well, with that out of the way, a few weeks ago, a major discovery was made for Payday 3.
A playable build of Payday 3 from 2020 was leaked online and revealed the state of the game about 4 years ago, showing a game that resembled much more Payday 2, with a functioning server browser regenerating armor and a familiar control scheme, than the game that was released in 2023 with the same name, so let's get into it.
How to
First off, if you want to download this version of the game, here's a quick tutorial on how I did it. It's only 2 GB from there. Open it up with Renar and open the executable shooter game, and boom, payday 3 Circa. 2020, once in the game, believe it or not, there's a server browser where you can see games being hosted in real time, a feature that probably won't be in this game until the end of this year, but I digress.
Now let's deal with the game play, and it's pretty good.
Gameplay
The game play is lifted directly from Payday 2 with regenerating armor. I think I've made my position on the armor system of Payday 3 clear in my past articles, but I'll make this brief. I love this system so much more than the current system.
This plays like classic Payday and builds off the continuity from Payday the Heist and Payday 2 regenerating armor, allowing you to be aggressive and defensive depending on your given situation. I would happily see this in Payday 3 over the new armor system. With appropriate changes to armor bags so that they're not just snapped out of existence, maybe an armor overcharge like adrenaline that doesn't fade I don't know, but you also get six grenades this time around and three flashbangs.
You can't switch on the fly with them until you run out of frags. You get flashes, but the flashes work on dozers in this one, not to mention that it lets you mark and shoot by moving my finger off the left click by default. And one more thing about dozers in this: I love them.
The dozer in Payday 3 is, in my opinion, a bit too tanky, as is the auto drum. Shotgun by default is a bit much; seeing this good old green boy come up with a pump, there's just a feeling there, man. It's hard to explain. Gunplay is mostly the same as in current payday 3, however, rifles aren't perfectly accurate on the first shot, only pistols are, and there's a lot more active spread when not aiming down sights.
Model-wise, it's a car 4; however, the quad rail grip is wrapped in covers like the P of the heist car 4, and it comes by default with a red dot. The signature 40 also comes with the Obelisk suppressor by default, so not much new there other than it spits out rifle casings and nails, and most of the rest of the visuals are either very bare bones or taken from Payday to like the player models.
Drills
Drills , however, are very different in this build of the game; they work off a system of built-up heat and material they're drilling through and come up with the option to speed up drilling at the cost of more heat, with the only way to cool down the drill being to turn it off entirely. The adjustment mechanic is still there, as in regular payday 3, but this time it's to switch materials and not just prevent a breakdown.
I like and dislike this system. It feels great to have a more hands-on system that lets you feel like you're an active element in the drilling process. However, it can also feel like babysitting a machine that you will have to stop all progress on for the sake of making a little bar go down. If there's any takeaway from this build and it's drilling, getting rid of the pause mechanic was a good choice if it were up to me on how to make drilling more interactive.
I would bring in technician skills and make it so the drill can be left alone, like in the other games. However, in exchange for actively working on the drill, players can speed up the progress by switching its settings and making adjustments, like how we see the gang. Ed drills in live action may have some animations for cooling off the bit with water, like in heat, where you have to set the drill for optimal speed for different materials.
It's a thin line between a fun miname for faster drills and a pain in the ass babysitting simulator for a little reward. I'm not an expert after all the changes like this were left on the cutting room floor for a reason, but little more than just default payday drilling would be. It feels so seedy and malicious.
I love it. It feels very good to me. Something I can still say about the current music, but this, along with the new Heist track, just hit with a different energy and tempo that feels a lot more like OG Payday than what we got in three. I like the music in Three well enough, but this just has hyperactivity and franticness that really, really encompasses the feeling of a criminal shootout.
A theme that paydays 1 and 2 nailed but something that payday 3 missed for me personally, outside a few tracks like No Rest for the Wicked. All the others just lack a certain energy. I guess I don't know; I'm not a composer. I like the tracks from Payday 3, but this is my favorite one.
Maps
We'll talk about that later, so keep watching now on to the maps, There's There's not a lot to say about the maps; there's only three you can take anything away from. 80% of the maps in this build are just for testing features; there's a cool one that lets you test weapon sounds, which honestly.
I kind of prefer compared to how the sounds work in the game now, especially how you can hear the Sonic crack in some of the outdoor zones and just how bassy the sounds are regularly. The rest of the test maps haven't changed a lot compared to how they were in Payday 3. Now you can take a look at them in this article by General McBadass.
He did a great job showing them off, and if you want a good look, check it out. For the actual heists in this build, there are about three, but we'll start off with the jewelry store, which is a straight port from Payday 2. There are no interactable objects in it, the glass can't be broken, and the sibs don't care unless you shout at them.
The lighting for the whole thing is the unreal preset, and honestly, it has a kind of charm to it that I'm into, but then again, I'm a filthy Ark player in my spare time. An interesting note, though, is that when you go around the back of the store, you begin to notice that the map is a bit too big, and it was around this time that it clicked with me that Star Breze said that the Legacy Heist had to be made from the ground up.
