Is Payday 3 worth the wait? A deep dive into the game’s new features and improvements.

By: Hypron|| September 24, 2023

In the criminal underworld, ten years is a long time. Factions rise and fall, power swings, the rules of the game shift, and perhaps some old faces resurface from retirement for one final ride. Payday 3 undoubtedly falls into the latter category, with the series’ original gang of thieves returning to their old ways for Starbreeze Studios’ latest. But what about the rest? It’s pretty much business as usual.

Given that Payday 2 is still played by tens of thousands of people, many fans will undoubtedly regard this as a positive. However, if you were a fan of Starbreeze’s multiplayer misappropriation sim over the last decade, you might want to hold off on handing over your money to the men in masks just yet.

What we have here is a nicely constructed yet resolutely old-school co-op shooter. And, while Starbreeze has left plenty of potential for growth, Payday 3 currently draws a little too liberally from its predecessor to make an immensely convincing case for its own existence. Nonetheless, when judged only on its own merits (i.e. as a bigger and better-looking vehicle for more Payday), this sequel clearly recognizes the task at hand and completes it successfully.

The first noticeable change in Payday 3 is a change in landscape. Instead of the streets and back alleys of Washington, teams of four thieves (either totally directed by the player or supported by AI) now raid New York City’s banks, stores, galleries, and other high-value targets. Overall, it’s a fairly rote location switch, trading one Mid-Atlantic city for another, but it does allow Starbreeze to capitalize on the Big Apple’s cultural touchstones for some of Payday 3’s more unique set pieces, all while presenting a heightened sense of scale via carefully choreographed shots of New York City’s skyline and its various landmarks.

However, there are now only eight missions available at launch, and while they’re undoubtedly designed to be replayed while Starbreeze works on future additions to the roster, that initial selection feels a little scant for the asking price of Payday 3. Nonetheless, there are some wonderful high points here, such as a storage yard robbery in which your bounty of chemically sensitive components begins degrading in value as soon as you take them from their cooling storage, forcing players into a quick exfil operation. Starbreeze’s fusion of handcrafted and procedural design, in which maps are frequently altered via variables such as private security modifiers that ramp up and reorient security measures, also continues to work well at elevating replay value, preventing any heist from feeling entirely predictable.

Another great change is that Starbreeze has switched from its proprietary Diesel game engine to Unreal 4, and the difference is noticeable everywhere you look. The harsh, flat qualities of Payday 2 no longer date characters, environments, and even weaponry, with a greater level of detail matched with a fluidity of play highlighting the game’s enhanced shooting and traversal features. The fidelity isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but PayDay 3’s better production value makes the heisting experience more pleasurable and intuitive overall.

Underneath the new cosmetic shine, Starbreeze has refined the rhythms and flow-state of heisting in each mission, including numerous new phases” that enhance and complicate the path of a successful (or unsuccessful) robbery. The search phase now sees on-site security tentatively tracking your crew down after initial detection, resulting in a risky game of cat and mouse that can be resolved by removing the evidence of your break-in, softening the tonal whiplash that could often come from Payday 2’s sudden escalation of covert sabotage into open warfare, for example.

Meanwhile, negotiation includes a clever concept in which you can release hostages to the police outside in order to buy more time for them to secure the riches and arrange their escape. These features have significantly sped up the pace of each mission, allowing for a more authentic and tactile build to the nearly inevitable crescendo of bullets and blood while also providing you with more alternatives and strategic variables to consider along the way.

And when the activity escalates into a full-frontal attack between your gang and NYC’s rapid response teams, the guys in blue don’t mess around. Enemy AI is vastly improved over Payday 2; instead of simply walking into your line of fire, special forces will now advance as tactical squads, try to flank your exit routes, and respond to the context of each situation more authentically, such as working more cautiously around civilians.

Many of these headaches can, of course, be avoided if you adopt a cloak-and-dagger policy from the start, and while performing the perfect stealth run remains a challenge (especially when working with random players), Payday 3 introduces a slew of new options for carefully extracting the goods without alerting a single soul, such as vertical pathways for infiltrating a building and tools like portable cameras that can be stuck onto enemy guards. Starbreeze, on the other hand, has accommodated those who prefer to go in loud and proud, with the addition of powerful Overkill weaponry like Grenade Launchers, great for churning through heavy enemy forces in a pinch.

These enhancements, together with the enhanced character and loadout customization elements that the franchise has always offered in spades, make a lot of the effort in widening and strengthening Payday 3’s capabilities for tactically oriented heist choreography.

Payday 3: The Gangster Dynasty

Despite the refined design and added content, nothing Payday 3 achieves is revolutionary when compared to earlier incarnations. You’ll still be going through the classic cycle of plan and execution, designed to be repeated indefinitely to the point of mastery at the highest difficulty levels, possibly for the next decade. In this way, Starbreeze appears to be very appealing to franchise loyalists for this sequel, which, while a wise move for a series that owes 10 years of success to a large consignment of returning would-be criminals, makes Payday 3 a harder sell for those outside of that pre-established player base.

Finally, the best and worst thing to say about Payday 3 is that, despite all of the under-the-hood changes implemented by Starbreeze, it’s very much the same in terms of broad strokes. Although established fans will be in a far better position to appreciate the total of all those minute revisions, others may take Starbreeze’s “If it ain’t broke” approach as a lack of ambition on the part of the company.

Having said that, the developer has a whole portfolio of evidence to back up its declared commitment to extend and enhance Payday 3 beyond what’s already here, with a busy schedule already outlined for the first year of release. If you choose to engage in that adventure now or later, it all comes down to your current appetite for the gameplay cycle that first put Payday on the map almost 12 years ago.

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