Payday 3 has largely been ignored by the dedicated Payday community of players. Developer Starbreeze Studios launched the game back in September 2023 to lackluster sales, and many Payday fans continued to play Payday 2 over the most recent entry in the series. Now, the studio has put out a dev blog detailing exactly what they see the problems are with Payday 3, and how they plan on approaching fixing them in future updates.

Payday 3 certainly was not the commercial hit publisher Embracer Group hoped it would be. The game hasn’t found an audience amongst the huge amount of fans of FPS games and has been dead in the water in terms of the Payday 3 player count on Steam, dipping to as low as 150 concurrent players.

As Payday 3 flops, fans of the series have continued to return to its predecessor, Payday 2. However, the devs at Starbreeze have not given up on the third entry in the franchise just yet.

Game director of Payday 3 Miodrag ‘Mio’ Kovačević published a blog post on Friday March 1 detailing future planned updates for the game. He centers the first part of the blog on adaptive armor and how the changed armor system will hopefully bring the armor system in general to a better place.

Mio also recognizes a handful of specific problems with Payday 3’s current armor “meta” including pointing to how permanent damage feels punishing and leads to some stressful micro-management; how the ways to restore armor are very limited; how heists, due to their length, are simply easiest to complete by bringing as much armor as possible and powering through the damage; and finally, how it doesn’t feel like there are enough a variety of playstyles for surviving a loud heist. Mio concludes his admission on the state of armor saying that each of these problems will be addressed with different updates to the game but has no plans to change the current available armor in the game as it stands.

If player count is any indication of how players feel about the new armor system, they aren’t all too happy: Payday 3’s current players as of writing are at a measly 489, while Payday 2’s are at over 20,000.



It might take much more than updating the game’s armor system to resuscitate Payday 3, but only time will tell.

If you’re itching for other multiplayer games, or perhaps the best crime games available on PC.

Posted: Mar 07, 2024 1:44 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/payday-3/players-leave-for-payday-2