PAYDAY 3 Is Finally Launching After Three Years, Apparently
PAYDAY 3’s third anniversary update is starting to look less like an anniversary update and more like Starbreeze quietly admitting that quite a lot of PAYDAY 3 needed doing again.
And I mean quite a lot.
We’re getting a rewritten campaign connecting 19 heists, weapon perks, the Locomotive 12G, a portable saw, improved enemy behaviour, shared weapon mods, OVERKILL weapon customisation, a shooting range that finally has a reason to exist, audio improvements and a pile of smaller changes. All previously paid heists are also becoming part of the base game, as will future heists. The Brute Force Crimebond arrives September 22.
The weird thing is, after three years of PAYDAY 3 announcements usually being followed by the community examining them for signs of structural damage, people seem genuinely excited about this one.
I can see why.
Planning to actually play PAYDAY 3 after its apparent three-year loading screen? Start with the heists themselves, before the Bulldozer discovers cardio.
Starbreeze basically threw the old story in the bin
Campaign Mode may be the most interesting part of the update.
Starbreeze’s writing team started looking at the existing story last December and came to a fairly brutal conclusion: it was a dead end.
So they put the heists on a whiteboard, started moving them around and built a new story out of what was already there.
The result connects 19 heists, excluding the Smash and Grab contracts, with roughly 34,000 words of new writing. It should better explain Shade, her connection to Houston and, quite importantly, why this woman suddenly became the gang’s handler.
Because PAYDAY 3 did technically have a story before.
Things happened. People appeared. Shade said things into your ear while you were trying to steal several million dollars. Somewhere in there was presumably a plot.
Now the heists should actually feel connected.
And I like the way Starbreeze is talking about what comes afterwards too. Future stories could be smaller campaigns instead of another contract simply appearing on the menu with the expectation that we all nod knowingly and understand why Dallas has decided to rob this particular building on this particular Tuesday.
There’s another big story beat coming in December.
For a game about career criminals, giving those criminals an actual career seems sensible.
Weapon perks could finally make guns properly different
The weapon perks are probably the part I’m most curious about mechanically.
Each weapon class gets roughly three to five perks, with some shared between classes. The important bit is that these aren’t all tiny stat adjustments requiring a spreadsheet and a man called Kenneth.
Some actually change what you can do.
Vampire, for example, lets SMGs restore a small percentage of health while dealing damage, which can contribute to adrenaline and overheal.
Pinpuller returns too. Grab a SWAT officer as a human shield, shove him away and pull the pin from his grenade while doing it.
Which is wonderful.
You have taken a police officer hostage. Normal hostage-taking procedure would suggest using him as leverage. Perhaps negotiate. Make demands. Request a helicopter.
PAYDAY looks at this delicate tactical situation and asks:
What if the hostage exploded?
Yes.
That’s more like it.
Iconic weapons are getting exclusive perks too, which might finally make them feel iconic for a reason beyond having arrived from the factory wearing nicer trousers. There is already some pushback about perks being tied to specific weapon categories, with players asking for universal perks instead.
I want to see the system in practice before deciding whether that restriction is clever or annoying.
Giving weapon classes their own identity makes sense. Preventing players from discovering completely stupid builds because the game has decided shotguns aren’t allowed to have the funny perk does not.
There is a line there somewhere.
We’ll find it by shooting people.
We’re getting a saw because apparently lockpicking was too civilised
The OVE9050 portable saw arrives with interchangeable blades and its own perks.
One blade is designed for environmental objects such as lockpickable doors and deposit boxes.
The other is for cops.
Naturally.
The saw comes with the Brute Force Crimebond on September 22.
I’m much more interested in this than another assault rifle with slightly different numbers because a portable saw changes how you interact with a heist. A locked door is no longer necessarily a lockpicking problem. It can become a power-tool problem.
And power-tool problems tend to be solved faster.
Louder, admittedly.
With considerably more screaming.
But faster.
Nineteen heists are about to become one actual campaign. See which PAYDAY 3 jobs we’d willingly rob again, and which deserve to be left at the crime scene.
The Locomotive is back
The Locomotive 12G is returning as a secondary shotgun with only three shells.
Good.
That gives the secondary slot something genuinely different to do instead of becoming the cupboard where we keep pistols until somebody remembers they exist.
Three shells also means the thing has to justify itself every time you pull the trigger. If those three shots hit hard enough, that could be a lovely little emergency button for when a hallway suddenly contains far more police officers than a hallway reasonably should.
The Locomotive is one of those PAYDAY 2 weapons people actually remember.
Bringing it back was the easy bit.
Giving it a different role was the clever bit.
The Bulldozer can run
Right.
This is the important one.
The Bulldozer can run now.
Starbreeze is changing enemy behaviour so police should push from clearer directions rather than attacking from everywhere at once. Specials are also being pushed harder into their actual roles. Tasers lose their pistols. Grenadiers should throw grenades more often.
Fine.
Whatever.
THE BULLDOZER CAN RUN.
This man is wearing what appears to be an industrial refrigerator reinforced with military ceramics. His helmet has its own weather system. Previously, one of the more reliable ways of dealing with him was to notice him coming and relocate yourself at the astonishing tactical speed of a normal human walk.
That era is over.
The YouTube comments noticed immediately.
One player is delighted that the Bulldozer is “actually scary now.” Another realised that hiding in a dead-end corner may become a considerably shorter-term investment once several hundred kilos of armour starts sprinting toward it.
I’m fascinated by this.
Not because running is revolutionary technology. We’ve had running for some time.
Because it changes one of the simplest calculations in PAYDAY. Distance from a Bulldozer used to be comforting.
Now distance is just the amount of time remaining before the Bulldozer arrives.
The shooting range might finally be useful
The shooting range is getting the things I would have assumed were included in a shooting range.
You can change target distance, inspect damage, critical hits and spread, swap loadouts and test OVERKILL weapons you don’t own.
That last one is particularly useful.
Let me try the enormous expensive murder-device before asking me to build around it.
The range should basically become PAYDAY’s laboratory. Walk in with a theory about an SMG, abuse a cardboard target for five minutes and discover whether you have created a magnificent build or misunderstood mathematics again.
Shared weapon mods should make experimentation easier too, while OVERKILL weapons are getting more customisation and cosmetics can be repositioned.
There are smaller improvements buried in the update as well, including reduced default controller deadzones and improved weapon audio. Incoming police gunfire aimed directly at you should sound louder and heavier than gunfire happening elsewhere.
Which should make identifying the person currently shooting you somewhat easier than the existing method of waiting to see which direction your corpse falls.
If PAYDAY 3 has somehow talked you into becoming a career criminal again, we’ve already done the paperwork. Builds, heists, stealth routes and other terrible financial decisions live here.
And somehow the comments are... happy?
This might be the strangest part.
The comments underneath the video are overwhelmingly excited.
One calls this “payday 3 re-release or 2.0.”
Another says:
“I can’t believe payday 3 is about to release.”
That is vicious.
It is also quite difficult to argue with.
Another player says they’re simply happy the game survived long enough to reach this point, while someone else thanks the developers for continuing to improve it update after update.
That doesn’t mean everybody has suddenly forgotten the last three years.
People still want offline mode. More maps. Better Xbox performance. More weapon customisation. A safehouse. Multi-day heists. Returning characters. One commenter simply says there still isn’t enough here to make them want to play.
But I think the complaints are actually the interesting bit.
People are asking for more PAYDAY 3.
That’s different.
There was a point where every PAYDAY 3 conversation seemed to eventually become a discussion about whether the game itself could survive. Now people are arguing about which heisters should return, what weapon attachments they want and whether there should be a safehouse.
They’re planning renovations instead of discussing whether to demolish the building.
PAYDAY 3 still has things to prove. An impressive developer video doesn’t magically make the update good, and half of this stuff still needs to survive contact with several thousand PAYDAY players doing things Starbreeze absolutely did not expect.
But September 22 suddenly feels important.
Three years after PAYDAY 3 released, we may finally be getting PAYDAY 3.
And this time the Bulldozer is running after us.
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