izigame.me

I don't want to get caught up in an anti-hype frenzy over Project Baxter or the "significantly lower level of investment" or 25% of Starbreeze's development workforce being allocated to go work on PUBG or etc. I'm going to try and take those elements out of this evaluation.
With that said, I don't think I can recommend this game, except on a very strong sale.


What's the problem with this game?

A fair question, a lot of people have trouble articulating it. I'll boil it down to a core point:

This game, fundamentally, isn't replayable.

The name of the game with 4p co-op games is replayability, keeping gameplay fun in the long term as virtual hangouts. PD3 just doesn't really have it.

A major part of this issue is how enemy AI works. A lot of police spawn AI is linked to objective progress in 3, so their behaviour gets predictable fast. Previously, when special enemies like Bulldozers spawned affected the feel of a heist a lot, but in Payday 3, you will start to learn Bulldozer timings after doing a heist a handful of times. (the techie is an exception to this, she's cool)
There are also AI issues that result in full lobbies on max difficulty often running out of cops to kill. Combine this with the new Negotiation mechanic, and it's very common for experienced players to knock out ~40% or more of a heist's objectives before the cops intervene. That sounds like a cool heist fantasy, until you do it, and realise how noninteractive and repetitive it is.
This is all in the name of the game being "less horde shooter, more tactical" but to be blunt I think that is smoke and mirrors. Eg. If you try running outside in Rock The Cradle mid-heist, you will see squadcars parked, the building surrounded, but probably zero cops, because Payday 3's cops are still about as reliant on spawning on top of you to generate difficulty as Payday 2's cops were. They aren't locking down areas, they aren't bouncing grenades around corners, they aren't doing any of the things we dreamed of them doing in a future Payday game, they are still zombies with guns, they're just procrastinating now in the name of realism.

Another element is how map RNG works. Payday 3 has almost no area defense RNG in its arsenal of maps. No Rest For The Wicked only varies the escape van slightly. Road Rage only has one minor variation in the route the truck takes and the bag securing. Dirty Ice only shuffles the escape helicopter around. Rock The Cradle only moves stealth stuff. Under The Surphaze only shuffles objectives that don't need defending. Gold & Sharke only shuffles the escape helicopter's roof location. Touch The Sky only randomises the filing room's location, and it doesn't need defending. Syntax Error changes very little. Boys In Blue shuffles the generator around, but all 3 locations can be proxy defended from the same parking lot you always defend anyway. Houston Breakout changes the Houston evac route, which is something, and the mandatory evidence type. Fear & Greed changes the side of the stock market the hacking room is, but that doesn't need to be defended.
The only real exceptions are 99 Boxes, which is an awful heist for other reasons, Diamond District which is actually good (Thanks, Ilija!) and Cook Off/First World Bank, which are remakes.
This is all a simplification, there are other RNG details, but I believe the broad strokes holds true. Payday 2 has a lot of objectives that make you engage with different parts of the map on different runs (eg. the different objectives in hoxout day 2) but Payday 3 has an extreme lack of this.
Most variation is instead caused as you're learning the map, which is a perfectly fine element, but once you have completed that learning process the variety fades. Diamond District is the only instance in 3 where there's enough complexity for that approach to work.
So, the map's not making each game feel different, and the enemies aren't making each game feel different, so it's down to the player to make each heist feel varied! Well...


Skills are so boring, that the game is more fun without them.

IMO, that explains the beta's positive feedback compared to the full game.
Payday 3 gives you 28 points, each point equals one full skill. All skills are grouped into "lines" where one skill gatekeeps ~4-6 other skills and that's it, there's no big investments, everything can be mixed and matched.
This means every Skill needs to be balanced around its low inherent cost, which has limited the design space for skills. This boiled over with the Ammo Funnel debacle, which I think explains the whole problem in an anecdote, so here's two skills from this game:
Ammo Funnel: As long as you have Edge, ammo you pick up goes straight into your weapon's magazine.
Replenish: As long as you have Edge, you instantly pick up ammo enemies you kill drop.
This is the game's most iconic skill combo, devs were proud of it and showing it off before launch. Later, they tried to remove it in a balance patch, giving Ammo Funnel a different effect and creating two new worse alternatives. There was a community uproar about it, they cancelled the change, it sucked for everyone.
And the root cause was, well, Ammo Funnel/Replenish would be great if I had to make significant build investment to use it, but I don't, and as a result everyone can make reloading irrelevant. The result is that devs felt that the game's one unique, awesome skill needed to be stamped out.

What's Edge, you ask? The game has Edge, Goon, and Rizz Grit and Rush (E/G/R) as 10-second universal buffs that a bunch of skills generate or interact with. It sounded neat, until we saw these:
Enforcer: If you kill 2 enemies within 4 seconds and within 5m of you, gain G.
Enforcer Aced: If you kill an enemy within 5m and have G, also gain E.
Combat Reload: If you reload, and your magazine has remaining ammo, you refresh E/G's remaining duration.
Escapist: If you are masked up and sprint for 3 seconds, gain R.
Well, there goes all the design space for E/G/R, because they are now easy 24/7 buffs. Most other E/G/R generators can't compete with how simple and universal these skills are, and it costs 4 skill points to set up, which is only 14% of your total resources for a build. So no matter what build you're making, you can make room for this. I think you're starting to see the issue, right?

To be clear, bad balancing isn't the problem, it's a lack of opportunity costs. I never find myself thinking "I wish I could do THAT, but there's no room in my build. Maybe I should start from scratch?" Everything is too modular and equivalently priced for that to happen.


I've got nearly 2,700 hours in Payday 2, and I could still go back for more. At just under 80, I'm already exhausted of Payday 3.


Ok, but is there a reason people think updates won't fix this?

Besides the hot topics the community's fuming about right now? Well:
1. As far as we know, Starbreeze aren't working on either major problem explained above yet. (Edit: Overskills were announced after this review was made, and while they'll likely be nice, they don't interact with the actual skills system. they are also "considering" a skills rework) They are preoccupied with a completely different problem, the Armor system. That patch has been delayed to Feb/Mar 2025- Sorry, SPRING 2025, they delayed it again, hooray. For a variety of reasons, their patch speed has been glacially slow.
2. Payday 2, during this equivalent time period a year after launch, was enjoying its golden age during the early Dentist era. It's not a favourable comparison.

I'm not saying this game can't recover. Lord knows Payday 2's journey was a bumpy one. But don't count on it.

If you just want a few hours of fun with friends, you can find it here. You will not find a PvE game capable of standing up to its competition.