Payday 3 Has Failed Again
I think this is a really good change; it still keeps the armor penetration effect in the game while giving ammo bags more use. Frankly i hope that the armor penetration remains just as overpowered as it currently is, as now that it's limited to 30-second intervals, it won't make it heist. Unless you and your team specialize in making sure you have the maximum charges for each of your ammo bags and can therefore keep the effect up for much longer, at that point you would have tailored your build to revolve around the effect and no doubt have spent a bunch of skill points doing so, and I think at that point you've earned that power; it's no longer a couple-point investment that trivializes the entire game but instead Arguably a whole new build, The next two segments of the blog post I want to talk about, despite being separated by half of the post, actually go hand in hand, and interestingly, they appear in the opposite order to how we'll be looking at them today.
New difficulty?
The first is simply a mention that a difficulty higher than Overkill is coming after year 1. I really don't like that we're seeing this, not because I don't want more difficulties. I don't really have an issue with that; it's just that Starb said before launch that they didn't want to add another difficulty, so this just reads as them saying.
Yeah, we've messed up and added some things we didn't really have planned, and now we need to add another difficulty. It's something that they weren't planning on doing and will need to allocate resources for in the future, which would be fine if we had confidence in the rest of their pipeline and their ability to deliver content at an acceptable rate, but right now it just doesn't look good. The second segment is about what their plans are to adjust difficulty in the future, where they refer to the new difficulty despite not having mentioned it at this point in the blog, as well as talk about the potential plans to increase the damage special enemies do specifically, to Adrenaline, and rolling out the techie to all other heists, with vague references to upcoming systems, but no actual further information has been given about them, so there's nothing to really talk about.
Weapon balance
And then they go on to talk about weapons, mentioning that they're looking to add long-term rewards to weapons. This is likely the prestige system we've heard about, but then they also say this, and I'm going to read this for reasons that will become apparent shortly, after we are in the early discussions of updating the weapons to emphasize their subfamilies, more like having battle rifles under the assault rifle umbrella, and we plan to have these subfamilies have a more direct impact on your builds.
Now that leaves me with one question, and that's, what on Earth does that actually mean? Seriously, I understand the words that I'm saying, but I can't, for the life of me, tell you what this actually means for the game.
Loud modifiers
But anyway, now we get to the main topic of the blog post: loud modifiers.
I don't often ask for subscribers in the middle of a article, but if you've made it this far into one of my longer articles, it may be something you're interested in. But anyway, I digress. Moo outlines his philosophy behind these modifiers, saying the loud modifiers are there to counter player strategies, giving the pretty good example of the lead guard causing players who may normally just take out as many guards as possible when stealthing to rethink their approach. With that philosophy in mind, let's take a look at the upcoming loud modifiers.
The 6 loud modifiers explained
Hard bargain: players can't leave custody without hostage trades. Getting a player out of custody costs one hostage plus one additional hostage for every time they've been in custody or have killed a civilian. When we're not off to a good start, are we, while I don't hate this modifier?
I think it will make the game much more micromanagement-intensive, which is something that we've wanted to move away from with armor since the very early days of payday 3. Mio himself says that this was initially intended to be the default way custody worked in Payday 3 before it was removed for being too difficult and I can see why I actually quite like that it gives us another use to hostages adding an extra point of consideration before trading them but that's about where the good ends for this modifier, it's got me asking questions like does trading one hostage count towards releasing all players or do we need to get them back one at a time then if there are two Bots and a player in custody will it prioritize the player, and if one player kills a handful of hostages does that increase the amount needed to be traded for any player to be released or just the player with the high body count.
And going back to that first question, if one player has killed seven hostages, for example, we need to trade a total of eight hostages to get them back, and a player who goes into custody after that player only needs one hostage to be traded if there's no prioritization. And if hostages aren't shared, does that mean that the player who hasn't killed any hostages still needs nine to be traded for them, even without answers to all these questions?
This modifier doesn't look good to me purely based on what it does to the economy of hostages as a resource, but now for an actual good modifier, the body system can spawn up to two instances of each special, and the special cap is raised by one. It's as plain and simple as that, and I quite like that as a modifier.
I don't, however, like armor piercing as a modifier, where 10% of the damage law enforcement deals to armor is also applied to health. This seems horrible, and frankly, if this were a modifier on a heist, I'd choose not to play it. It fundamentally changes the way armor works, for the worse. This could be a cool modifier for the armor type itself.
No, thank you. I'd much rather play with Alpha Strike, where regular SWAT units are replaced with heavy SWAT, another relatively simple but effective modifier. I don't necessarily agree with Moo that heavy SWAT is a noticeable difficulty spike during a heist, but I still like the modifier quite a bit.
I'm also interested in playing with the reflector shields modifier, where shields come equipped with a light that can LED players. I understand that this is similar to the martial shields from Payday 2, but as they were introduced in the Lost in Translation Heist, they never actually made it to the console version, so while I've heard that they were annoying.
I can't speak from experience, so I'm excited to see how they work in Payday 3. For the last and definitely my least favorite modifier, we have debilitating specials where players disabled by zappers and cloakers damaged by gas or hit by shields and doz melee attacks will use any stack of edge grit and rush.
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