PAYDAY 3 Creative Lead 'Stepping Away', PAYDAY 2 Remains Much More Popular

If I were to buy a heist game at this moment in time..It’d be that Crime Boss game. If I were to buy a heist game. Which I probably wouldn’t.

After the previous Payday debacles, I honestly have no intention of touching any of this series.

"Where did PAYDAY 3 go wrong?"

For my two cents, aside from the launch issues, it has less to do with anything that 3 did and just everything to do with their business strategy for 2.

When you spend ten years pumping updates and DLC into a game (to call PD2 bloated nowadays would be an understatement) you can't easily pull committed players away - least of all to a new entry that's starting over again at square one.

For my part, I first played PD2 in beta and enjoyed the first few years much more than the chimaeric behemoth that it grew into, and as such prefer PD3 for the fact that it goes back to basics and mostly improves on the core gameplay... but even I can't help but feel that it's too slim on missions, weapons, etc compared to 2 a year in.

(And as such only bought it in the most recent sale, which put it comparable to early 2 in price.)

I'm sorry but these developers deserve no success from this. They had EVERYTHING to learn from Pay Day 2 and they learned nothing from it.

I think it's time to release PAYDAY 4

Payday 3 is good and much improved from Payday 2, which whole fun, is so janky and 3 is a great improvement to it. It’s gotten some really good DLC too. The fan base after a rocky launch almost wants it to fail out of misplaced spite I feel like.

Isn't Starbreeze notoriously bad at supporting console versions of their titles? The IDEA of playing a heist-focused game intrigues me, but they're basically the only real big developer catering to that fantasy and from everything I hear, they're pretty terrible developers.

Not really all that surprised at any of this after the debacle that was the Payday 3 release.

@crossbit I'm always surprised that Starbreeze didn't try and take the R6 Siege (or in some ways, Fortnite) approach and try and continue to expand on the existing title by re-baking the core gameplay, while retaining all of 2's content and features.

I'm not a player of 2, but I've kept my eye on it. it seems 3 tried to overhaul core systems and introduce new ones. I feel it would have been in Starbreeze AND the consumers' interests to simply redo the core engine, update the gameplay systems, but make the game into more of a platform for the content. Not a distinct release.

Hell, they could have made it F2P with all the DLC and add-ons they've pumped into from what I understand. If they made it "the place to go to play this sort of experience" and let 2's player base retain everything they've dedicated time to, they likely would have been better off. Even if that would have been difficult. Then again, developing an all new title and having to support both is ALSO risky and difficult. Seems they just didn't make the right call.

@MFTWrecks The PS5 version has been getting updates and plays great. I was just playing the new heists with a friend who's on PC recently.

@MFTWrecks On that train of thought, an approach similar to the recent Hitman trilogy might have been the way to go about it; the old stays in a static state, while a copy of it is adapted into the new. IO set a decent precedent with that, updating the levels to fit new/adjusted mechanics where possible, while adding new features to the fresh batch. Hell, they even handled the rocky situation of being dropped by Warner pretty well in the "you have to unlock it all again, but it's still here for you" approach to Hitman 1's content in 2 under Square.

Granted, Starbreeze have a lot more to repack and/or reset so that approach likely wouldn't have been as feasible, but even just borrowing from that and adapting the "highlights" of 2 to slot into 3's systems might have led to it all playing out better for them. It says a lot that their immediate response on free content was effectively that on a very small scale - redoing 2 missions from Payday 2 more or less shot for shot.

@Jaz007 Good to hear. I always heard that 2 failed to get the sort of support it deserved on consoles.

@crossbit Yeah, that also would have been a great way to do it.

Think, even if they only supported a portion of 2's content at launch to push people to newer stuff, they could have simply dedicated time to bring free DLC to 3 in the form of 2's old missions (updated for 3's mechanics) over time, and then all-new content could have been packaged however they thought it made most sense (either as free expansions or paid DLC). But over time, 3 would have been brought up to the same content level as 2 AND it would have introduced all new stuff.

And they could have done so while only having to support one "platform" over time (assuming they eventually stopped supporting 2 altogether to push people to 3's "platform" approach). But either way, it would have more appropriately incentivized players to adopt 3 as a whole.

And had they gone F2P, they could have made the platform (generally) F2P, maybe with a rotating set of heists available to play at any given time (the way MOBAs often have a rotating cast of free characters). Then if new 3 players wanted to unlock permanent access to certain heists from 2, they could pay outright. Meanwhile, 2's players would unlock all 2's content for free at release once it was in 3. But maybe everyone pays for all-new 3 heists? Or something? I dunno. It just could have been handled better, for sure.