Payday 3's Progression Isn't Great - But It Could Be
I got to about level 67 because I thought I wasn't going to get this unlocked for ages, so I got that so I could start leveling up that gun because I wanted to give it a shot, and I've only just now hit about levels 78 and 79. Because I started using other guns. I like using particular weapons and leveling them up.
I don't want to feel like I have to cycle through every single gun just to level up my character, and right now that's where I'm at, and I don't particularly appreciate that because some guns are better than others, and I want to be able to focus on enjoying the ones that I like more rather than going.
I've leveled that gun up now, so I guess I better try out this SMG I don't care for, but it's not just down to encouraging different play styles; it's also repetition. Now one of Payday's biggest things right now that it needs to nail down on the ground for Payday 3 that it managed fairly well for Payday 2 is its replayability.
You need to be able to play a heist an indefinite number of times and not get bored of it. You know what? Let's give this bank heist another world and try something different. That's a very important part of payday, but for me, logging into a game and seeing that one of the hardest challenges in the game one of the things you need to do long term is getting the heist completed, times both in stealth and in Loud, meaning you need to complete Heist 300 times on all difficulty, so if you do it on normal and then up to Overkill, it's even more completions than that.
That's too much. I mean, I'm sounding like I'm quitting BoJack Horseman, but genuinely, that's too much. Man, that is honestly forcing me to do Heist far more than I even did on Payday 2. I think for Shadow Raid on Xbox. I think I had about 100 to 150 completions in the end, and that was because a lot of them were ECM rushes because I had a friend who constantly wanted to get money and wasn't bothered to do it any other way.
I know he wasn't playing Payday in the best way, but that's my point. I wasn't doing heists that many times; that's pushing you to do it far more than I want to, and especially in a game where there's only eight heists, you're going to feel that repetition a lot more. If there were say 20 or 30 heists in the game and you were forced to lay them that much, you'd be able to vary up which heist you play a lot more and a lot more easily without going.
I've played this heist 20 times. Let's bounce to a different place. Let's go back. Let's go back and back and back. There's not enough, as I feel right now. To really enjoy that repetition, at least for me personally. I think as the game gets further on its life cycle, and it's something that will apply to a lot of things that people don't like as much about this game right now, as you get more stuff added into the game, it will get better.
I do genuinely think that, but at base with this being in your face like that 150, I just think it's too much of a grind, so challenges that go that in depth I don't think are the best in the game. Now I did check this with Starb. You don't need to complete every single challenge in the game to get to level 150.
And that was a gross oversight when this game came out, because for me personally, if I go, I wonder if I've got any more challenges with this gun. I have to scroll through about 40 weapon page challenges, I think, or something like that, or a lot of pages. Basically, there are some that have 40 pages.
I lose track, honestly. It's part of the problem. I don't really know how many pages there are, and I'm just scrolling through them all, having to fish through for the one challenge you want to find. Achievements had a tracking system and a filter system, and before anyone throws the this was nay, launch thing at me again, like Alir tried to unstream with the greatest respect to him, don't do that because, as I've said previously, some things not being in Payday 2 at launch does not mean they shouldn't have been in Payday 3 at launch, and a sorting system for something that you need to progress should have been in there at base, so if the next update that adds actual quality of life features doesn't do that.
I'm going to be annoyed, but aside from that, there's also the issue that some of my challenges just haven't been completed. I have done the objectives, and it says I've done one out of one or 10 out of 10, but there's no tick next to it, and there's no infy point unlock for me. They're still sitting there gathering dust, and that's obviously a bug that the game had at launch, but as we play into, as I've said already, the fact that there haven't been any updates since launch, they're still sitting there. Gathering dust: obviously, this will hopefully get fixed when the first patch comes out, but it plays into my general distaste for the fact that there hasn't been an update, which doesn't really help your system if some of the challenges don't even unlock, and you aren't Swift to fix that, but all of this pales in comparison.
The biggest problem
The big negative is the thing that annoys me the most about the progression system, and I think the problem that a lot of people have about this system and that problem is that it's the only way to level up, and it never should have been the idea that the only way you can level up is by completing challenges and not by, you know, beating heists or completing With Friends.
The whole point of payday is so mind-boggling. Sillyly, I just don't really know how no one really saw past that. I get it; he wants to push the progression and get you to try different things, but not even a base amount of XP for betting your heist. Just to me, it seems like a bit of an oversight, at least personally.
I don't know why that wasn't done. If Call of Duty, for example, had done that and you didn't get XP for killing enemies, playing objectives, or completing matches, there'd be an uproar. And it is again a very similar first-person shooter game; it doesn't matter if one is PVP or one's PVE; they're very similar frameworks in the way that they are first-person. Shooters at they're very core, progression is very important, and introducing a challenge system is great and it adds a lot more depth to your game, but if it's the only way to level up it then ends up becoming more of a problem than it's worth, so I think it's important to acknowledge that because it was a big issue I had with this system and it's one that still goes on, so hopefully one of the big fixes we get going forward and this is what leads us into the fixes section is getting XP for things that aren't just challenges; it can be for completing heists; it can be scaling for how much loot you get; how many heists you play with, basically.
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