It’s been a rough few months for Payday 3 gamers, as Starbreeze Studios failed to release substantial content and updates to the point that on Steam, the game even dropped below 100 players a mere four months after launch. Well, the studio aims to fix that with what they call Payday 3: Operation Medic Bag.
What Is Payday 3 Operation Medic Bag About?
This is essentially a roadmap of what the studio aims to do for the game in the course of 2024.
Major Categories the Studio Is Looking Into:
- Optimization & Reliability
- This covers the game performance in all ways. This includes reliability of both performance and consistency of finding games, UI improvements and technical issues such as crashes.
- Teamwork & Co-op
- With this, we collected all things that make playing with others easier. Including communications tools such as VoIP & text chat, how your party is made up and how you communicate.
- Replayability & Progression
- This refers to features that will make playing again easier and more enjoyable. Sticking with your group, the infamy system and more.
- Fantasy & Heisting
- This one will reinforce the heisting fantasy, this involves a Crime.Net style map as well as more features to make you feel like a true heister.
Will Payday 3 Get an Offline Mode?
Short answer is yes, but it will be rolled out in two phases, and there is firm release date for it yet.
Firstly, we will be developing a stand-alone solo mode you can get into without going through the matchmaking flow. This will be a local game, on your own machine, thereby circumventing the need to connect to a server.
We see this being rolled out in two phases:
- Phase One will still require an online connection to our backend systems for progression, unlocks, etc.
- Phase Two will look to improve on the solo mode implementation and allow you to play the game without requiring a constant internet connection. You will need to connect intermittently to our backend to upload your progression, but will otherwise be able to play offline. We’ll need to come back with details on exactly how this will pan out.
As playing co-op will always be dependent on connecting to another machine somewhere, we are seeking to implement the solution that provides the best balance between reliability, latency and overall experience. Our technical leadership have been evaluating options for the past months and will be able to share more details on the solution in the near future.
Other issues the dev team discussed include matchmaking, the price of DLC, a UI revamp and more.
STABILITY, MATCHMAKING & SERVER BROWSER
On the topic of cooperative play. Our matchmaking isn’t doing a good job of bringing people together. We have a number of social and cooperative features planned for the year as well as rebuilding our matchmaking functionality into a much more robust system.
Until those features are implemented, the current matchmaking will be supported by a quickplay functionality, ensuring you can reliably play with other players. Later in the year, we’re looking to bring back a Crime.Net style server browser.
CHALLENGE BASED PROGRESSION
Based on your feedback, as part of our Replayability & Progression initiative, our current challenge-based progression didn’t achieve the goals we intended, so we’ve decided to do away with the current system.
The challenges will be removed and we’ll switch infamy progression to be tied to heist completion. As part of this, we will revisit all the current heist payout values, add scaling per bag secured for Infamy Points and also a new bonus that rewards loud playstyles. The existing challenge framework will be repurposed to give cosmetic rewards for hardcore accomplishments instead.
UI REVAMP
We’ll be working on creating a more intuitive UI that better explains what’s happening around the player as well including a simplified friends menu as well as a menu UI that better communicates the heisting theme. We’ll be rolling out improvements and eventually a revamp of most of the current UI during 2024.
NEW CONTENT
In addition, we intend to deliver on and expand our promises for new content. There are 3 DLCs still planned for 2024 and we intend to add another free heist for PAYDAY 3 in this same period.
DLC PRICING
We’ve received feedback regarding the DLC pricing not meeting player expectations. As a result, we are currently reviewing the pricing on upcoming DLCs.
INITIAL FOCUS
Many things mentioned need preparation or other features in place to be implementable. There are a number of items that we can start working on immediately. As such, we have a list of goals that we would like to finish by summer 2024. We won’t go into great detail on any of these topics, but will list them here:
- Quickplay v1
- Loadout Renaming
- Recurring Smaller Content Drops
- Controller Improvements
- Vote Kick
- Rotating Stealth Modifiers
- Play Again Feature
- Merge Players into Party Post Match
- Daily Activities with Rewards
- Mask Vendor with Weekly Rotating Inventory
- Communication Wheel Improvements v1
According to Starbreeze, once they are satisfied with the improvements, they are intending to talk more about the in-game store sometime in 2025. As for Unreal Engine 5 development, they are reallocating the resources dedicated to the UE5 update to instead work on improvements to Payday 3. They will revisit this topic once they are able.
This sounds like a solid first step by Starbreeze, but let’s hope the player base sticks around long enough for them to implement all these improvements.
Source: Payday