Payday 3 devs say its disastrous launch issues have been fixed as the co-op heist shooter passes 3m players
“This was not the start we wanted, but at the same time, our business model is a marathon and not a sprint”
Payday 3 makers Starbreeze have promised that the matchmaking woes of its launch are at an end following multiple rounds of maintenance to the co-op shooter’s servers.
The heist-’em-up sequel generated the wrong kind of Heat - more burning bag of dog poo than Michael Mann masterpiece - when it launched on September 21st, with long queues needed to get into a game. That included even when going it alone in single-player or playing privately with friends, thanks to the game’s initial insistence on an always-online connection.
Starbreeze took the game offline a few days after launch - and again a couple of days after that - to dial back its reliance on a constant connection, while also looking to address some of the long queue times and matchmaking problems that had helped it to swiftly earn a ‘Mostly Negative’ review average on Steam, with little over a third of almost 30,000 reviews being positive.
After those two rounds of maintenance, Starbreeze promises that simply getting into a game should actually work like it’s supposed to, with “stable” matchmaking and “good performance” since the most recent fix on September 29th.
“First and foremost, I would like to thank our players for the patience they have shown us,” said Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren in a statement that apparently uses a different dictionary definition of “patience” from the one I’m familiar with, given the thousands of angry reviews.
“I don't really need to repeat that this was not the start we wanted, but at the same time, our business model is a marathon and not a sprint and we will tirelessly continue to build Payday 3 bigger and better to deliver the greatest possible value for our players.”
With Payday 3 now working like it ideally should’ve from the start, Starbreeze say that the next spate of updates will look to add more than 200 quality of life improvements early this month, before subsequent updates add “new content and new functionality” later in October and into November.
The game’s first bit of DLC, Syntax Error, will then follow before the end of 2023. The hacking-focused expansion kicks off the game’s first-year season pass for ‘The Bad Apple’, continuing with Boys In Blue next spring, The Land Of The Free during the summer and Fear And Green in autumn 2024.
Outside of the dedicated DLC drops will be seasonal events, new characters and enemies, additional weapons and skill lines, extra cosmetics, and a planned Unreal Engine 5 update.
Despite its wobbly launch, Payday 3 managed to rack up an impressive three million unique players in the little over a week since it launched to the end of September, Starbreeze claims, with a combined peak concurrent player count of 124,254 in the last five days.
Alice found that the game's technical problems weren't the only issue with its matchmaking, as its skill-gating of players detracted from an otherwise enjoyable shooty-stealy experience.