Payday 3: Six Months Later
That's five months after the last heist. That's, Insane payday 2 post-Vival was 4 months between Heist as well, but they spaced out weapon drops and cosmetic content drops from month to month, so it didn't feel as long. On Thursday, March 14th, devstream. Elizabeth had to confirm that silver edition owners would still get the content even though it didn't release in the first six months.
So many things have gone wrong that people paid for an addition to the game structured around the first 6 months, and the content doesn't even arrive in that time frame anymore. That, of course, says nothing about the price model for boys and blue, which they said they are discussing changing but have not committed to actually modifying yet.
Even when updates are managing to get released, I have to question the priorities of the development staff or management. We already talked about Alir and Elizabeth getting exclusive masks when it might have made more sense to throw the community a free mask. In a recent blog post, Starb discussed that they are working on a play-again feature that will match a party back into the heist they just played on the same difficulty.
I don't know if that's a huge amount of resources that will go into making such a feature, but I also can't imagine many people using this button to grind the same heist repeatedly, aside from repeatedly showcasing new heists on rare update days. This just shows how skewed the current progression system and reward system are that it was deemed a worthy investment of time to create a designated button for farming the same thing repeatedly.
Speaking lastly about priorities, we need to talk about the infamous unready button, which is already released. On the March 7th stream, Elizabeth said it didn't take too long to get functioning and put in the game. Elizabeth is a good friend of mine, so I don't want to go after her like this, but there are only three ways to keep this statement in mind.
One of the unready buttons arrived in the last week of February, 5 months after launch. Her saying it didn't take long means that Starbur does not consider 5 months a long time. Two, it actually wasn't in development for long, which would mean the unready button, a universally requested quality of life item from launch, wasn't worked on until after the announcement of the operation medic bag; three, it was worked on earlier but they held it back until they released a larger patch; not impossible since they've discussed wanting to shift towards faster, smaller updates; if this is the case, it's just another example of questionable decision-making: having an improvement to the game ready to go but not deployed, no matter how you slice it.
Her saying the unready button didn't take long to do was just starb shooting themselves in the foot. I'm just tired and exasperated at this point, man. We're a third of the way through Payday 3's lifespan, and it feels like Starb is only really just beginning to comprehend the issues with the game and the decision-making prioritization.
And most importantly, their actions are still very slow to roll out. We're seeing them discussing issues and solutions that should have been dominating the conversation a few weeks after the disaster of the launch. They've said they expected to take all of 2024 to implement Operation Medical Bag, which only leaves 3 months of support for the actually finished version of Payday 3.
I would honestly be stunned if Payday 3's life gets extended beyond that 18-month window because I can't imagine either Starbur or Pion jumping at the chance to invest more in a game with 300 players a day. For all those reasons, it is genuinely getting harder for me every day to remain optimistic about the future of payday 3, and so I must once again recommend against purchasing payday 3.
Until next time, don't forget to spread the happiness as hard as that may be after a article like this and stay
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