Operation Medic Bag: Update #22 – Consumables

Hello, heisters! This is Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević, game director on PAYDAY 3, and today I’d like to talk to you about our upcoming consumable system.

The consumable system is fairly straightforward and slots naturally into existing gameplay; you start off the heist with an empty “consumable” slot that you can fill with First Aid Kits (FAK) or Armor Repair Kits (ARK). All heists have some amount of FAKs or ARKs you can find, and you can also get them from hostage trading, so it will be easy to stock up before and in-between assault waves.

You’ll now have the option to pick up any FAKs or ARKs you find, instead of just using them right away, letting you save them for more precarious situations. Once picked up, you can either use the consumable directly from your inventory, or deploy it for other players to use.

There are some limitations, though. You can’t mix and match consumables, so once you pick up a FAK, you can only pick up additional FAKs until your slot is empty again. You can also carry only up to 3 consumables, but once the system launches, one of the existing skills will be updated to let you increase this capacity by 2.

We are also looking into allowing different consumable capacities for different armor types (the heavier the armor, the more pockets…), but we sadly can’t guarantee that this will be in by the time the system launches. We’ll try to get it to you as soon as we can, though.

With this update, we hope that you’ll have fewer situations where you expose yourself to grab an armor repair kit, only to have your armor break in the process. It will also make scavenging maps more valuable, as well as having hostage trading feel more rewarding. You can expect this to come in the same update as our next DLC heist.

While we think of this as primarily a quality-of-life feature, it will definitely make players a bit more durable, and normal armor builds more practical. Right now, we’re not making changes to the difficulties to compensate for this, but we’ll be taking a closer look at the higher difficulties in our Year 2 of updates.