July 19, 2024: Payday and What is a Heist?

Payday is a weird series.

The Payday series of video games is developed by Overkill Software and published by Starbreeze Interactive. There are three games in the series, Payday 1(2011), Payday 2(2013), and Payday 3(2023). Payday 1 was a fun heisting game that had one post-launch paid DLC, the Wolfpack. Payday 2 was a game that became an endless live-service game, one of the first actually. It continued to receive paid DLC every year for 10 years, resulting in over 80 pieces of paid DLC, split up between cosmetics, heist missions, and weapons.

During this time, Overkill and Starbreeze have attempted other projects, to try to branch away from Payday 2. "Overkill's The Walking Dead"(That's the full name, yes) horribly flopped. Raid: WW2, a World War 2 themed Payday clone, horribly flopped. Payday 2 on mobile spent years in development hell, until releasing as Payday: Crime War, in 2023. StarVR, Starbreeze's attempt to break into the virtual reality field, hasn't gained much traction.

And so, Overkill kept returning to Payday 2, long past its expiration date. It ran on a janky engine, the Diesel Engine, originally designed for racing games. The game actually ended, with the White House Heist releasing for free in 2018. The game lay dormant until Overkill slunk back in 2020 with more sets of heists released over the next few years.

And now, Payday 3 is here, trying to replicate the magic of both Payday 1 and Payday 2. The more grounded and streamlined heisting fantasy of Payday 1, combined with the live service, buildcrafting, and endless replayability of Payday 2. A perfect job, that could not go wrong.

Payday 3 horribly flopped on launch. Right now, Friday, July 19th, 2024, Payday 3 peaked at about 1000 players on Steam today. It's predecessor, Payday 2, peaked at about 23500 players today. 23x more players are playing the previous game, rather than the new game with an actual future.

I should say that I have followed and played Payday 2 on and off. I have done almost all the heists on around Mayhem difficulty, I have over 200 hours, I have reached Infamy 2, I believe. So those are my credentials. I am not some sort of mega heisting god, able to solo Death Sentence One Down with no crew AI, but I have walked around the block, I'd say. I have not picked up Payday 3, but have followed news on it from videos and articles. I have also not played Payday 1 either.

Payday 3 is odd because it is a PVE live service game trying to get off the ground in 2023. Having a small, humble game like that with DLC to gradually grow it was more viable in 2013, but nowadays? I think players, especially the live service kind, expect much more content.

Payday 2 launched with 12 heists, which had some variation in terms of size and complexity, but usually had pretty humble locations. Smashing up a mall, robbing a bank, holding up a nightclub. The high end had you doing some complicated clue grabbing to grab the correct fusion reactor. But anyways, 12 heists. After 10 years, there were 87 heists. The same gigantic amount applies to a lot in the game. The Infamy prestige system originally had 25 cycles, it was later changed to go up to 500 cycles. There are 29 assault rifles available, 9 light machine guns. There are rocket launchers, grenade launchers, bows, crossbows, miniguns, buzzsaws, and flamethrowers. 18 different types of throwable grenades. Payday 2, after 10 years, is a bloated sandbox that jankily allows you to do whatever you want.

Payday 2 also has loads of feature bloat. 7 difficulty modes, with optional modifiers like "One Down" and "No Crew AI". Side modes like Mutators(Funky modifiers that disable progress), Holdout(Wave defense in a small arena), and Crime Spree(Keep doing random Heists that escalate in difficulty without failing). A cosmetic set has a character choice, suit, mask, gloves, weapon skin, and weapon charm.

This is naturally going to be the biggest of issues. If you have an experience with so much content to chew through, between different builds, different difficulties, different heists, and different gamemodes, then a lightweight reset of a game is going to be a fairly hard pill to swallow. Payday 3 has 12 heists, compared to Payday 2's 87. Payday 3 has 25 guns, while Payday 2 has... hundreds. Payday 3 has a streamlined 4 difficulties, compared to Payday 2's 7. Gameplay wise, there's just a lot less variety to work with.

Another issue is that almost impossible knife's edge that Payday 3 has to navigate in terms of gameplay and fantasy. Payday 1 tried to be a more grounded heisting game. Payday 2 ended up being a goofy horde shooter where you'd regularly get hundreds of kills in a mission, to the point that there were jokes about how the cops were getting cloned. Payday 3 had to try to marry these two disparate ideas for the ultimate heisting game. Payday 2 had loads of build customization, with weapon mods, skill trees, and perk decks. A lot of these resulted in silly setups, like getting instantly revived by a medpack if you were close to it. Or tanking loads of bullets by drinking. Or wiping out a whole hallway of enemies with a single sniper bullet. Or getting infinite ammo on your rocket launcher for a few seconds. Or walking into bullets just to trigger a percentage chance to dodge them. This gave an insane power fantasy, but took away the idea that you were... a regular bank robber. Instead you were demigods fighting against hordes of demonic cops, trying to pass a bunch of bags of gold while tanking dozens of bullets from super swat operators on the highest difficulty.

Payday 3 tried to bring engagements back down to normalcy, while still having buildcrafting and customization like Payday 2, while not letting the buildcrafting spec too hard into the insanity of powercreep that Payday 2 did, and also streamlining buildcrafting so that average players could think for themselves. This simply didn't end up happening. From what I've heard, many skills feel anemic, and the hyperfixation on the three keywords of Grit, Edge, and Rush, results in you being pigeonholed into the few best options.

In addition, Payday 3 tried to revamp the armor system. In Payday 2, you had a layer of armor(the amount of which depended on how much body armor you equipped), and a healthbar underneath it. Your armor could recharge, but your healthbar wouldn't naturally. So the idea is, run outside, get shot, and hide until your armor comes back. If you keep fighting while your armor is down, you'll be taking chunks of your permanent healthbar.

The issue is that this is not very immersive. Why is your nice suit able to tank a shotgun blast, then recharge like Wolverine if you just give it a quick sec? And so Payday 3 decided to make armor, just like health, a resource that wouldn't regenerate on it's own. You'd have to consume resources to replenish it.

We come to a classic issue in gaming. Limited healing vs regenerating health. Let's use some classic examples, Doom(1993) and Halo: Combat Evolved. The original Doom game featured loads of enemies with melee and projectile based attacks. If you didn't engage too many enemies at once, used the proper weapons, and rationed your ammo, you could reliably finish levels without taking any damage. As a result, if you took damage, you had to pick up a health pack. If you ate up all the health packs in the level, you'd have to wait until the next level, meaning you might be running around at 1 HP for a while, or reload a previous save.

Halo: Combat Evolved, has you fight smaller groups of enemies than Doom, but their projectiles are a lot faster than Doom, and your character is a lot slower. The result is that you probably cannot realistically dodge all of their attacks, especially since your weapons are generally best at mid to close range. But, the game gave you a regenerating shield. Just like Payday 2, if you take a few hits, and back off, you could regenerate all that damage taken back.

Call of Duty would adopt this concept for similar reasons. It wasn't fun to scrounge around for health packs in a bombastic action game. Enemies had firearms, so you absolutely couldn't reliably dodge all of those bullets while returning fire. The end result is Call of Duty having your screen turn bloody red if you eat some lead, and you hide for a while until it goes away.

But the Payday series is also amongst many other horde shooters. Left 4 Dead 2, Helldivers 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Killing Floor 2, Darktide, Call of Duty Zombies, and so on. A key design choice that unites these games is that a majority of enemies are waves of melee only chumps. Bugs, zombies, Zeds, chainsaw robots. If you keep driving them back before they touch you, you don't take a scratch. Ranged enemies are usually squishy, very large, or are bosses. As a result, most of these games have limited health that takes limited resources to recover(With COD Zombies being the exception, instead making you incredibly fragile).

So Payday 3 has many other games to look at, and decide what direction it wanted to go in. And it decided to fully join its horde shooter brethren. Players have indicated that these constantly taking unavoidable damage resulting in permanent damage is exhausting, and the biggest factor for why only a few skill setups are realistically viable.

So what would Payday 3 have to do to become a successful live service game? We have many dead giants lying nearby, like Suicide Squad, Anthem, Avengers, Skull and Bones, Hyper Scape, Evolve, Foamstars, Lawbreakers. For successful ones that got off the ground, specifically talking about PVE, I suppose we have MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, or ARPGs like Diablo 4. Destiny 2 is oddly the closest comparison I can think of, with first person shooting, buildcrafting, and a constant stream of new missions to do.

So sure, let's compare Payday 2 and Payday 3 against Destiny 2, the unkillable giant that's constantly on the brink of death.

Destiny 2, in a regular year, releases an expansion and 4 seasons. There are two raids and two dungeons released across the year, alongside the expansion's campaign, post campaign, and weekly seasonal stories. You have season passes to unlock, and at least a dozen new weapons to grind every 4-6 months. New weapons will drop in a variety of sources, like PVP, Nightfall Strikes, Raids, Dungeons, Seasonal Playlists, Exotic Missions, and Exotic Quests. Alongside that, new content arrives in the form of new PVP maps(occasionally, at least), reworks for old Exotics to make them more up to date and viable, new abilities and Supers, and new game features, such as Fireteam Finder, Guardian Rank, Commendation Score, Cross-Play, Transmog, Titles, and a Free-to-Play edition.

And even with all this dropping over a year, it can feel like the game constantly has content droughts. If this is the case for Destiny, backed by Bungie, backed by Sony, how on earth can Payday 3 try to satiate their playerbase's appetite for content?

Gameplay wise, there are also a lot of factors to try to compare. For example, rewards for activities. In Destiny 2, every different activity has a different loot pool. If you finish a PVP match, you'll get a weapon from the PVP loot pool. If you do a raid, you'll get weapons from that raid's loot pool. So if you want to earn a new gun, you'll have to do the activities that specifically drop it.

Payday 3 does not have that luxury. Payday heists, reward wise, are based on a few things. The amount of XP you can earn, the amount of money you can earn, and the time it takes to finish a run. That's basically it. Payday 2 had this issue as well, where if you wanted to efficiently grind, only a few heists were really worth your effort, which were supposed to be grinded over and over and over again, ad nauseam. You would memorize the heist and barely fight anyone as you speedran the easy mission over and over again, to try to level up fast.

Payday 3 actually had a surprisingly innovative idea, that I wish they stuck with. A challenge system, where if you wanted to make progress, you'd have to complete achievements. Theoretically, this is a great way to incentivize players to do everything. If the only way to unlock that next skill point is to do some sort of hard challenge for a heist, then you'll actually do it. If you want to max out, you must be a master of every aspect of every heist, and have completed every gimmicky challenge for all of them. Payday 2 had many of these optional achievements, like speedrunning a heist by meticulously routing out a plan, or finding a very rare item in a safe, or escaping without killing any snipers, or stealing every single incorrect fusion engine before stealing the correct one.

I think this idea is great. The issue is replayability. Eventually, you'll be done with a heist, and have next to no incentive to ever return. In Destiny 2, that's ok, because another set of content will always drop within a few months to keep you busy. But in Payday, that's different. If you drop a new heist, the game's content only increases by about 10%. It's meant to be added to the rotation, not the only thing you do until the next heist drops. The heist missions are not deep, long, difficult, or random enough to do that. You could spend several dozens of hours in Destiny 2 doing several runs of a single raid, unlocking every weapon and armor piece, getting the rare exotic weapon, completing all the requirements to get the title, doing it flawlessly for a Shader, and maybe even doing some meta challenges like speedrunning or lowmanning. A Payday 3 heist pales in comparison. I don't think heists should try to compete with a Destiny 2 raid, either. Bungie has a lot of resources to put into these pieces of content, and Overkill... doesn't.

Payday 3 has quite a long way to go. If they want to gain an audience, and not flicker out, they need to massively increase the amount of content in the game. Loads more heists, of greater variety and scale. Loads more guns to pick and choose between. I actually think if you have these two done, you wouldn't need to do much else. Cosmetics, heisters, and skill trees are nice and all, but I'd argue you should try to make those more quality over quantity. A smaller number of more balanced, grounded skill trees to prevent immersion breaking insanity, while avoiding pigeonholing. A small number of heisters with more voice lines added over time, with more tight integration to the plot and missions. An attempt to make cosmetics more realistic and immersive, instead of the pickles, flaming skulls, giant beanies, and anime faces we saw in Payday 2.

Also fix the servers. That should probably come quick, too.