Fixing Payday 3
Strangely although I liked it at first I actually think skills are too open in how you pick them up now if you take payday2 for example a high powerered armored skill like tank requires you to fully commit to an armored style of play, by forcing you to invest in a certain number of points in other skills before you can reach the play Styles Lynch pin compared to Payday 3 where tanky armored play styles are hugely favored, the investment in necessary skills is a lot lower meaning just about anyone can Splash armor into their build without having to sacrifice anything else, the other problem is with all skills basically costing the same investment to equip they will have to be reasonably well balanced around each other, not only is this a thankless task resulting in a clear meta which again isn't good for variety or replayability.
It's also led to very few fun-to-use or distinct skill options. Again, looking back at Payday 2, the tier tree enabled designers to create skills with power relative to their cost, meaning they didn't need to be restricted by their relative balance to one another, as is the case in Payday 3. Basically, the current system makes it too easy to grab what you need without making any compromises; homogenizing builds from a roleplaying perspective.
And role-playing purpose within a team. Fix 5 is centered around progression, which has admittedly been a lot better since launch but still feels like a perfect example of reinventing the wheel for no particular reason. The thing is, at this point, regardless of how reasonably balanced challenge leveling actually is, a huge subsection of the community is just so fed up with the entire concept.
I think there's very little way back for it in the course of public opinion. By now, any associations with the system are just toxic, as it's generally perceived as more developer oversight trying to control and limit your fun with the game. I'm inclined to implore stares to return to a more traditional Payday 2 Star leveling experience and shift challenges into the background, more like how the old trophy system works now.
While I don't personally have an issue with challenge leveling as a concept, where I do have problems is that in the challenges themselves, there's zero creativity or inventiveness in how they've been conceptualized. Or implemented instead of being a surrogate system for Pay 2's 1,300 Plus achievements, as I initially assumed, it would be these challenges amounting to uninspired box-ticking exercises.
To make matters worse, the IP economy doesn't reward proportionally for the difficulty of the challenge set. Take, for example, an achievement that would actually be considered on the level of payday 2s: completing turbid station with all loot pacifists on Overkill, which rewards a whopping one of 150 experiences.
That is 10 less than what you earn for simply completing the heist on very hard the first time with that in mind my week one discovered bathroom combat challenge Strat on touch the sky is still pretty much the best way to level any account to 100 quickly which is all you need to care about from a gameplay progression perspective, we were told challenge progression was added to reward all styles of play and prevent a name repetition but here we are four months later realizing that all it did was succeed in making an even more degenerate style of play the optimal way to go and I know this is another system that's causing friction online and making it even tougher to find a half recent public Lobby.
Payday 2 thrived from its ludicrous trophies and achievements To This Day guides and achievement reviews are some of the most popular articles on my and many others channels, this is because they were creative existed for bragging rights instead of being the cruxs of progression and didn't just boil down to beat X Heist 300 times losing the addition of new achievements due to crossplay and strange console limitations on the distribution of imaginary gamer points is one thing but at the very least challenges should try to cover for that by being just as engaging, instead of monotonous and timec consuming if challenge progression sticks around I'd like to see an entire overhaul of the challenge economy as well as the actual tasks being set replayability in Payday has to be organic it can't just come from the game telling you to play a heist over and over again up into the hundreds of reps.
So that's my five-step suggestion for how to turn payday 3's fortunes around and start bringing the community back to the game, obviously this list isn't exhaustive and I think needs to be supplemented by regular content updates and a number of quality of life fixes that still haven't been addressed.
The game desperately needs more tangible content in the form of heists weapons heisers and customization options in particular it needs more free content I'll be hugely disappointed of all free Heist of reused Classics from Payday 2 we were so used to a development cycle that included free additions for all such as the ever popular Shadow raid four paid DLC maps per year worked during the Revival era of Payday 2 predominantly, because the game was already as content filled as it was and because we were under the impression we were helping to fund an excellent payday 3, the fact that we're about to hit month 4 without a single free weapon Edition is damning, especially when the DLC weapons from syntax era consisted of the best content the game has seen as of yet, free content is more important than ever when Star Brees have decided to charge an arm and a leg for their DLC releases.
The value proposition for owning the Gold Edition is now solid, but only if the game servers are still up in 12 months, so it's key that all players feel like they're a part of the community, regardless of how expensive their addition is. Of course, the game's menus and overall UI need a lot of work, not just to display more information like valuable gun statistics.
It also needs a complete conceptual redesign to move away from this bland and generic Call of Duty style to something more befitting of a franchise. Cret was obviously a huge part of that in the past but there is just something about payday 2's menus that are more evocative of a hidden criminal Network, it gives the game more Soul I'd love to talk to someone who's played payday 3 without touching another piece of content within the series I can't imagine they'd even have a strong opinion about which heyer is their favorite because none of them bring the personality they once had outside of a few static cutcenes that me and the 10 other payday La enthusiasts are paying attention to it was such a wasted opportunity not having them interact in any way on Heist they're by far the most pivotal element surrounding engagement in the entire IP and yet they're insanely underutilized.
In Payday 3, that aside, we need better communication features for online lobbies, a vote kick function to fight back against Griefers, controller functionality needs to be fixed as it sounds like a nightmare to even play the game on console, and finally, we need to be able to unready up for a heist.
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