VIDEO GAME PAYDAY 3 UPGRADE
VIDEO GAME PAYDAY 3 FULL

People care about Payday 2 in a way that they’ll probably never care about Stray, or the aforementioned Loop Hero, or Tunic, with the greatest respect to those brilliant titles. It’s a great example of traditional games coverage’s blind spot. 17th by recent player count (opens in new tab), as I’m writing this: 49,000 players in the last day. It was there when Dota and CSGO looked impossible to topple, it was there when PUBG and Apex Legends toppled them, and it’s still there now. It’s been hiding in a sort of plain digital sight, always up there in Steam’s most played games in a given 24-hour period. Stealth jobĪnd this has all happened without Payday 2 getting much fanfare along the way. For a game about psychologically exhausting shootouts that might last hours, and in which you could well walk away with absolutely zero reward, it’s surprisingly friendly. More importantly, Overkill has totally reworked every system within its heists, from AI detection behavior – now vision cone based, rather than triggered by whether you’re running, jumping etc – to the way drills and saws work, and how you level your characters. The safehouse has changed, expanded and filled itself with incredibly esoteric easter eggs that you need a YouTube iceberg video to decipher. Hoxton became Houston, John Wick is just another one of the gang, no biggie, and he might find himself fighting alongside Jacket from Hotline Miami.

VIDEO GAME PAYDAY 3 FULL

It’s nearly impossible to grasp the full extent of the game’s lore now, so busy has Overkill been since release – fleshing out its original roster of characters, adding to it, and then drawing confusing timelines of their exploits. Had that premise not proved so irresistible that we looked past the heist sim’s considerable annoyances, it could all have been so different. So much revenue, in fact, that Overkill was able to buy back publisher 505 Games’ share of the Payday IP in 2016 and maintain total ownership of the franchise. The studio needed to secure funding from fellow Swedish company Starbreeze in order to begin production of Payday 2 in 2012, although insiders have since described the situation as more like Overkill’s investors taking on Starbreeze’s assets – the net result being that both studios could put out their next release (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in the latter’s case) and start generating revenue again.įor a game about psychologically exhausting shootouts that might last hours, and in which you could well walk away with absolutely zero reward, it’s surprisingly friendly When you look at Overkill’s financial situation at the time, this turnaround of fortunes is all the more impressive.

It’s a game you can give as much or as little focus as you like, and still walk off smiling. It’s not Clicker Heroes now by any stretch, but its hardest difficulty mode is probably pitched around the middle of the original game’s levels, and it’s much easier to pull off stealthy heists.

VIDEO GAME PAYDAY 3 UPGRADE

Not only have the intervening nine years filled Payday 2’s content vault with stuff to do, weapons, every mask design ever imagined by humankind and revised upgrade trees – they’ve seen the game successfully pull off that repositioning. And to reposition it as a more forgiving experience, closer to the hangout space vibe that co-op gamers demanded than the hardcore stealth-infused class shooter its predecessor offered, and which informed Payday 2’s original form. In 2013 we just called it “playing the same 10 heists over and over without much incentive”.īut despite these conceptual cable ties around its wrists, Payday 2 did well enough commercially for the Swedish studio to keep supporting it. Or at least it would have done, if we’d known what Early Access felt like back then. In the absence of seasonal events, crossover content from John Wick and the like, or any structured narrative to put the heists in a sequence, it all felt. In 2013 we just called it “playing the same 10 heists over and over without much incentive” It would have felt a bit Early Access, if we’d known what Early Access felt like back then.

Video game payday 3