Welcome to Operation Medic Bag
Hello Heisters!
Last month, we shared a short update letting you know that we were working on an updated comprehensive roadmap of what we’re doing for PAYDAY 3 over the course of 2024.
Summarizing all the feedback from our community, we have identified what we believe will be some of the most impactful changes to PAYDAY 3, listing them in this post.
Making PAYDAY 3 live up to community expectations is a major project for our studio, so we’re grateful to have you along for the ride.
Starting this project we collected a tremendous amount of feedback from various community sources. With all the feedback in one place, we started narrowing down what the major categories we needed to look at were and came up with the following:
- 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.
We do want to tackle the biggest topics brought up by the PAYDAY 3 community head on. As such we put together a list of what we have identified as the key areas of improvement along with short descriptions for each topic. More information on many of these will be brought up in blog posts going forward.
Solo-mode & Offline mode
It is clear to us that the community wants the ability to play PAYDAY 3 reliably and on your own terms. In order to meet that need, we will be doing two major changes to the current implementation.
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.(Added in Update 1.2.0)- 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.
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. (Added in Update 1.1.4)
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 (Boys in Blue, Houston Breakout & Fear and Greed) and we intend to add another free heist (Diamond District) for PAYDAY 3 in this same period.
We will also be rolling out skill lines, cosmetic items, rewards, a free LMG primary (added in Update 1.3.0) and much more throughout the year.
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. (These changes have now been implemented).
In-game Store
Once we are satisfied with the improvements we’re intending to make to PAYDAY 3, we’ll revisit this topic in 2025.
Unreal Engine 5
We have reallocated the resources dedicated to the Unreal Engine 5 update to instead work on the improvements to the PAYDAY 3 experience. Since the UE5 update wouldn’t directly fix the current problems, we’ll come back to this topic once we are able.
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(Added in Update 1.1.3)Loadout Renaming(Added in Update 1.2.0)- Recurring Smaller Content Drops (Ongoing)
Controller Improvements(Added in Update 1.1.1)- Vote Kick
Rotating Stealth Modifiers(Added in Update 1.1.1)- Play Again Feature
Merge Players into Party Post Match(Added in Update 1.1.3)Daily Activities with Rewards(Added in Update 1.3.0)Mask Vendor with Weekly Rotating Inventory(Added in Update 1.1.4)Communication Wheel Improvements v1(Added in Update 1.3.0)
For the latest news we will keep you updated on the PAYDAY 3 Development Blog where information about the mid and long-term changes will be posted as soon as we have development updates.
We would like to invite you to a Reddit AMA to answer questions about the content of this post.
We’re releasing the first of these PAYDAY 3 Developer Blogs next week. Throughout the year, we’ll dive into the topics mentioned today to keep you all informed on our progress. We’ll continue to push out regular game updates, add new content, balancing and more.
Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to all heisters who have shown their passion by leaving feedback, reviews and comments telling us what PAYDAY 3 can and should be.
