Recent reviews by Zorray, Skulldoggery

One of the best detective games I've played. The dialog & jokes, the story, the art, all of it is amazing!

I want to love this game, it has great potential. However, I'm not playing potential, heck I'm not even playing payday 3, because it's an always online game with no servers currently online so I can't even play solo.

There are some really good features here, however they are all mired by some very, very awful decisions.

I'll start with the good, it won't take long.

The graphics are good and performance is smooth. The maps feel more alive with ambient noise, cars driving around, and many npcs walking and talking.
Stealth has gotten a massive overhaul. If your not in a secure area guards just escort you out instead of going guns blazing, remote camera hacking, running, lockpicking, and using items in stealth, it's really fun.
I can use hostages as a human shield. I CAN MOVE MULTIPLE HOSTAGES (sometimes, it's very glitchy)

When it comes to combat (and combat skills) the devs seem to have wanted to stray away from payday 2s flesh lawnmower gameplay style and attempt to go for a much more difficult cover, tactical, work together gameplay. This in and of itself is not bad. While I preferred payday 2s mini-gun and run shooty style I still find enjoyment in the combat of payday 3. However in doing this, they made the enemies bullet sponges, even the normal armored cops take awhile to shoot down. (They also made the bulldozers near ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ invincible, super scary and I love it)

Now THE BAD:

The game is always online, you can't locally host your own game you have to connect to their servers to even play solo. You have to wait to find a match to play solo. YOU CAN LAG IN SOLO. There is no pausing in solo.
Since it's always online, lets throw out a complete hypothetical, like say the servers died and no one at starbreeze is going to lift a finger to fix them for 8+ hours. If such a case were to happen, especially on launch day, a week after doing a server stress test, which would totally never happen, but if it did, you couldn't play the game, at all, even solo. Luckily such an event would never occur.
The leveling system has a 2 fold problem.
1. XP is not earned from completing heists, it is earned by completing challenges. Some of these challenges are things like "Complete this heist X times on this difficulty" and "Complete heist doing this special thing" while others involve getting kills. So in a co-op game you will be competing with your fellow teammates for kills. You also have to do this to level up your guns so you can then be graced with the ability to get the attachment you want.

1.A. Also, I may be wrong about this, however, there are locked challenges that you can't get progress in. There appears to be no way to view HOW to unlock those challenges, however it does seem that many of the "beat heist at higher difficulty" are locked while their normal difficulty counterpart are unlocked. So if I go into a heist at a higher difficulty I won't get XP? If this is not the case and I do then what is the point of the Locked status, the UI is awful at explaining this.

2. They attempted to combine Skills and Perk decks from payday 2 and the result is lackluster. Instead of skill trees which you invest skill points into like payday 2 you have rows of skills, you have to pick the first one to use the rest in the row, however you can put a point into any skill in that row, you don't have to invest in the previous to use the next. However you have to obtain the first skill by "Researching" it. In my experience that means you play 1 game and that skill gets unlocked, However in order to unlock the rest of the skills you have to have a skill point in that starting skill. This means that if you don't really care for that first skill or some of the skills before the one you want, you still have to waste a skill point and unlock each skill in a linear fashion before you can use the skill you want. All in all this is just unnecessary grinding to unlock features you should already have access to because the limiting factor is your amount skill points (of which the number of points is greatly reduced from payday 2).

Side note: Only the starting skill can be aced, every other skill has no upgrade.
Side Side note: While some of the skills are very interesting, like the camera and pager hacking, most are very dull, require one of the new "resources" that you sometimes have, sometimes don't, or are very weak feeling versions of payday 2 perks

In-game the UI is fine, however in the main menu the UI is awful. Payday 2's UI was in no way perfect, however it had useful things like: AN OFFLINE SINGLEPLAYER BUTTON, a section of primary weapons and a SEPARATE section for secondary weapons, weapon stat numbers, A lobby browser. Oh ya, in another gigabrain level decision, payday 3 does not have a server browser. Instead you "matchmake" because for some reason this is necessary for a 4 play co-op game.
While the ability to press a button and get put into a match on map / difficulty you want is not bad in and of itself. When it's the only way it's down right the 2nd worst design decision the devs have made, and that's saying something. I can't view a list and see what maps and difficulties people are playing on. So I could try finding a match on a map on very hard and not find any games because everyone is playing on Hard or Overkill, and I might be down to play any difficulty, but with matchmaking I can only select one. Also there is no settings for "Loud Only" or "Stealth Only" which is a very important IMO.
Another problem with matchmaking is that the menu to select heists is just a long horizontal line of mission boxes WITH VIDEOS, SOMETIMES MULTIPLE, IN-BETWEEN EACH MAP. So to get to heist 1 from heist selection I actually have to go to the right once, and to get to heist 2 i have to hit right 3 more times. This makes me worried for future content when more maps are added. Also if you stop finding a match you get booted back to the main menu, then you have to go back to map selection and do it all over again.

It's honestly baffling how many QoL features that are in payday 2 are completely missing in 3.

Bonus Bad Thing (tm): Due to the always online, no hosted games model. Many mods become impossible. While some mods may be made, like replaced models, textures, and HUDs. Others like game rebalancing, new equipment, custom maps, custom / changed features can't / won't work.


In summary, go play payday 2.

Rock and Stone, lads!

It was fun, then I raced other people, then I hated it.

A great game that is always getting updates








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