Payday The Heist holds a very special place in the hearts of PC gamers as one of those very rare 'Valve' style games that seemed to hold a 'forever audience' of a type, simply for how infinitely approachable it's design and concept was as a game wherein players pulled bank robbery after bank robbery. Of course, that game wasn't a Valve product, which is what made it such an anomaly for the time it was released when it joined the cult Steam game status of title like Left 4 Dead! And come Payday 2, the developers started to realise and capitalise on this in a way that Valve never got around to doing with any of their games because they slinked out of the development space long before DLC became wide spread as a concept. Payday 2 is currently buried under a mountain of DLC so large that new players, should any truly still come at the year of 2023, are buried under a mountain of DLC (a lot of which is free, it should be said) that totals somewhere north of $200 in total. What is this, a public transport simulator franchise? (I jest, those would be thousands more expensive in DLC.)
Payday has a long history of support and development to such an extent that it could reasonable be called a sort of 'proto live service' before that term had been properly crystallised and defined as it has in the modern day. Regular season updates, new content such as weapons, heists and masks to keep player coming back time and time again- Payday 2 knew what it needed to do in order to keep fans engaged within it's ecosystem for literal years of upkeep. Under the developer Overkill, the game flourished into something of a cultural icon. And then Overkill would go on to assassinate every bit of Goodwill the industry had afforded them by making their 'Walking Dead' game- which was so bad it was pulled from storefronts before their player numbers could hit the thousands. I guess sometimes you've got it and sometimes you don't, eh?
When moving onto Payday 3, Starbreeze took to developing the game in house even amid mumblings following the disaster of Walking Dead- likely figuring that simply creating a sequel to a much beloved game would be a far simpler, and more sure, prospect for the team. Unfortunately what they failed to take into account was the fact that with a game already under their belt, a fandom of players would be curious as to what Payday could possibly have waiting up it's sleeve- emboldened by the expectations built up by a game with multiple years of support already. City Skylines 2 ran into this issue with their less-than-stellar launched product and Payday 3 ran into this with the force of an out-of-control cyclist barrelling into a brick wall. Which is to say- the outcome was far from pretty.
Payday 3 launched with perhaps the most horrific server problems ever experience in a modern game launch, rendering the game unplayable for a large portion of the 63,000 players trying the game out at launch. As a fully online game, unlike Payday 2 which boasted ample offline support, Payday 3 sat as inert software for weeks on most people's harddrives as the team scrambled to fix their servers to funnel players in. That crucial launch window, where the most amount of feedback is delivered, was duly squandered in the flurry, meaning the moment had already past by the time the game was playable and Payday 3 only really managed to retain the hardcore Payday fans from 2 who were already deadset on making this their next go-to game/ rather than picking up the wave of new supporters that a fresh release was designed to do. If only that were the extent of their issues!
Upon spending even a little more indepth time with Payday 3, all became familiar with the truth under the skin- that the new game was not the successor they had waited for. And to be clear, no one sensible expected the new Payday game to have nearly the amount of content that the first game did at launch, but you would hope that the lessons hard learnt in the development of years would carry on to the be the foundational basis of the new game, no? Payday 2 eventually started to gain these ambitious multifaceted levels wherein multiple playstyles were welcomed and treated to alternative routes and paths to complete objectives. Payday 3 reverted to the bare basic heists lacking all those ambitious innovations. With a slew of balancing, progression and basic combat issues to boot.
Support has been similarly lacking, with the half a year since launch being marred by desperate attempts to patch the game up to a decent standard which are still very much ongoing. The only addition up until now has been a pack of recycled maps from the old game and a single new map, with unfinished animations and packaged with a small selection of guns that some suspect are literally just cut content from the base game brought back in- for the way they round up the arsenal to some rough approximation of Payday 2's base. Things have gotten so rough that the only roadmap the team have been able to announce to 'Operation Medic Bag' seeks to merely make the game a worthy successor in it's base state by adding such hot button tools like the ability to 'unready' when in a lobby, and a new adaptive armour seemingly designed to try and emulate the Payday 2 armour system which they scrapped in favour of a much more boring and less complex Fortnite-style version.
All and all it seems clear that somehow Payday 3 was release early. Really early. As in- the team seems to have no idea how to bring this game forward in any significant way such to the point that even if 'operation medic bag' succeeds, what we'll be looking at is a game that looks better than, but is functionally nearly identical to Payday 2. One might even go so far as to ask why this sequel was ever needed in the first place, and just like with the discourse surrounding Overwatch 2- the answer would seem to be monetisation. Payday 3 has been built with the option to squeeze in extra monetisation whenever they think it will best pop, as they rather telling divulged in the FAQ's of the game where they laud the fact that game has no 'Battle pass' whilst simultaneously coyly implying they're totally open to throwing one in if they feel like it. Could Payday 2 have supported such a system? Probably not!
It's always telling when anything other than artistic intent invades key decision within the development space, and the bold-faced bluntness of it can sometimes really dampen the image of the product. There was a slight underground charm to the Payday franchise before it's bastardisation that we've whole-heartedly lost in the rush to seek that homogenised vision for the future of all online gaming. I won't pretend that Payday 2 was the height of player-first design choices- the $200 of DLC makes me balk; but the game under all that nonesense offered something no other game really did. And it still does, because Payday 3 doesn't deserve to be called it's equal, let alone it's successor. But at least both games surpass 'Crime Boss: Rockay City'- for what scant praise that is.
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