PAYDAY 3 Update 3.9 Is Live and the DLC Paywall Finally Got Robbed
Updated: Oct 2
PAYDAY 3 Update 3.9 is live, and the biggest change is almost stupidly simple: every previously released paid heist is now included with the base game. Starbreeze also says future heists will follow the same model.
Which immediately makes PAYDAY 3 a different proposition than it was yesterday.
Because if there is one part of a PAYDAY game you probably shouldn’t sell off in increasingly separate chunks, it’s the robberies. That’s the game. Nobody bought PAYDAY 3 because they have a deep emotional attachment to its weapon inventory screen.
And that’s only part of Update 3.9. Campaign Mode is finally here, there are Weapon Perks, a Shooting Range, shared weapon mods, customisation for OVERKILL weapons, enemy changes, new Contracts and another round of progression work.
Is PAYDAY 3 finally fixed?
We still aren't declaring PAYDAY 3 magically fixed because two hotfixes do not erase three years of history. But we know considerably more now than we did at launch: 3.9 had some very real problems, and Starbreeze has already pushed two rounds of repairs aimed directly at them.
But this is definitely big enough to come back and have a look.
If every heist is yours now, the next question is obvious: which ones are actually worth robbing first? See our PAYDAY 3 Heists Ranked before spending Friday night hauling bags through the digital equivalent of a municipal car park.
Update: 3.9 has now received two hotfixes
Since this article was published, Starbreeze has released Updates 3.9.1 and 3.9.2, fixing a sizeable collection of problems introduced with the Anniversary Update.
The October 1 3.9.2 hotfix tackles several things players were actually running into during heists. Legacy-controller users can lockpick again, Team AI will now attack Cloakers mauling downed players, and Cloakers should no longer immediately kick you back onto the floor after Team AI has revived you.
Cloaker melee-stun behaviour has also been restored, while Zappers and Grenadiers should no longer instantly respawn when killed through their weak points. Starbreeze has also reduced Cloaker and Techie spawn rates and restored Techies on Normal difficulty, where they had accidentally stopped appearing altogether.
There are several crash fixes too, including problems involving destroyed throwables, Zapper Proxy Mines and saving loadouts. Combined with 3.9.1, which already fixed Saw, Crimebond, Renown and several crash issues, the Anniversary Update is now in noticeably better shape than it was on September 22.
Apparently the traditional PAYDAY anniversary gift is a large update followed by Starbreeze sprinting behind it with a toolbox while bits fall off.
The heists being free matters more than another pile of patch notes
All previously released paid DLC heists are now included in PAYDAY 3, and Starbreeze intends to keep future heists inside the base game too.
Weapons, cosmetics and other extras can still be sold separately.
Fine.
Sell me trousers. Sell me a gun with enough chrome on it to redirect aircraft. Sell me a mask shaped like an angry toaster if somebody somewhere desperately wants that.
But the actual robberies should probably be available to people who bought the robbery game.
That always felt like the awkward part of PAYDAY 3’s DLC model. The more heists arrived, the stranger the base game became. You could own PAYDAY 3 while increasingly not owning PAYDAY 3.
It was a bit like buying Monopoly and discovering Mayfair is €7.99.
Update 3.9 finally gets rid of that problem.
It also makes the whole game much easier to understand for somebody arriving now. Buy PAYDAY 3, get the heists. There. Done. Nobody needs a flowchart.
And from our side, it makes all those PAYDAY 3 heist guides we’ve been building rather more useful when every player can actually enter the bloody buildings.
Campaign Mode could finally make PAYDAY 3 feel like one game
Campaign Mode is probably the feature I’m most curious about.
PAYDAY 3 has accumulated a lot of heists, but until now they’ve often felt like exactly that: a collection of heists.
Choose job. Rob place. Go home. Choose another job.
Repeat until you can identify security cameras from 40 metres away and start becoming suspicious of jewellery shops in real life.
Campaign Mode is supposed to give that catalogue more structure and provide a clearer path through the game.
That could be genuinely useful, especially for new players. PAYDAY games are brilliant at making you feel like a professional criminal once you understand them, but getting to that point sometimes feels like being dropped into an organised-crime apprenticeship where everyone assumes you attended orientation.
What I don’t know yet is how much Campaign Mode actually changes.
There’s an important difference between a proper campaign and putting the missions in an order.
One gives PAYDAY 3 the feeling of a criminal career.
The other is Spotify for bank robbery.
We need to play it before deciding which one Starbreeze built.
No crew? Excellent. Fewer people to blame. See the Best PAYDAY 3 Heists for Solo Players and find the jobs least likely to turn one-man organised crime into unpaid crowd control.
Weapon Perks might actually be the bigger deal
Then there are Weapon Perks.
These could quietly end up being one of the most important additions in the entire update, because PAYDAY needs systems that give you reasons to keep messing with builds after you already know where the vault is.
Once you’ve robbed somewhere enough times, the mystery is gone. You know the doors. You know the cameras. You know which guard is about to wander into exactly the wrong corridor and ruin everybody’s afternoon.
That’s when builds start doing more of the work.
Weapon Perks, shared weapon mods and customisable OVERKILL weapons potentially give players much more room to build around individual guns rather than treating half the armoury as slightly different metal tubes for converting police officers into paperwork.
Early reactions to Weapon Perks look enthusiastic.
But I’m not touching the word meta yet.
The update has been out for five minutes. Somewhere right now, a PAYDAY player with a spreadsheet and a worrying amount of free time is beginning the sacred process of discovering that one completely innocent perk combination turns a shotgun into an industrial accident.
Give them time.
They’ll find it.
The Shooting Range is boring, and I mean that as praise
PAYDAY 3 also finally has a Shooting Range.
That sentence has roughly the excitement of “the council has repaired the pavement”, but I genuinely like this addition.
If you’re adding more weapon customisation, perks and mods, you need somewhere players can test them without starting an armed robbery every time they change a scope.
Imagine having to storm a bank because you wanted to check recoil.
“Everybody on the floor!”
“Sir, what do you want?”
“I’ve moved the vertical grip three centimetres forward.”
The Shooting Range is just sensible infrastructure.
Games that have been around for years eventually need this sort of thing. The glamorous additions get the trailers. The boring ones are what stop playing the game from feeling like trying to assemble IKEA furniture inside a burning van.
If PAYDAY has awakened the deeply respectable urge to rob more fictional buildings, head into our Best Heist Games. There are only so many banks one franchise can provide before diversification becomes sensible criminal management.
So, should you come back to PAYDAY 3?
If you already own PAYDAY 3 and haven’t touched it in a while, Update 3.9 is absolutely worth another look.
That’s as far as I’m willing to go today.
The game's recent Steam sentiment had already improved substantially compared with its lifetime score before this update arrived, so 3.9 isn’t being dropped onto exactly the same smoking crater we had at launch.
PAYDAY 3 has spent much of 2026 changing. Peer-to-peer hosting. Skills 2.0. Contracts. Heist work. Progression changes. The Unreal Engine 5 migration.
The Anniversary Update has already received two hotfixes. Update 3.9.1 dealt with Crimebond, Renown, Saw and crash problems. Update 3.9.2 goes further into actual heist behaviour, fixing broken legacy-controller lockpicking, several Cloaker problems, special-enemy respawning and some of the spawn-rate insanity.
That matters because these aren't all menu typos and a hat being three pixels too far left. Team AI refusing to help while a Cloaker beats you into laminate flooring is the sort of bug that changes your opinion of the evening.
The question is whether all these improvements have finally turned PAYDAY 3 into the game people wanted three years ago, or whether we now have several excellent replacement organs lying around while the patient is still asking where its trousers went.
Campaign Mode still needs more time.
Weapon Perks are already being pulled apart by the community.
But we now know more about the enemy changes and technical state than we did on launch day. Some of 3.9's rough edges were not theoretical. Cloakers behaved incorrectly, special enemies could instantly respawn after weak-point kills, legacy controller users lost the ability to lockpick, Techies disappeared from Normal and several crashes survived the update.
Two hotfixes later, Starbreeze has now dealt with those specific problems.
That does not mean the Anniversary Update emerged immaculate from a Swedish mountain while angels played trumpets. It means the first week exposed problems, and Starbreeze actually started fixing them.
Given enough gamers, somebody will still discover that crouching backwards near a microwave deletes Austria.
The entire heist catalogue being folded into the base game still changes the value proposition more than anything else in 3.9. Add Campaign Mode, Weapon Perks and the rest of the Anniversary Update, then factor in two rapid hotfixes cleaning up some of its nastier problems, and PAYDAY 3 is in a considerably stronger position than it was before September 22.
I'm still not ready to declare the three-year reconstruction project complete.
But at least we're now arguing about the plumbing rather than whether the house should be condemned.
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