Large numbers of Payday 3 Steam players have abandoned the heist FPS, which now sits more than 100 places beneath predecessor Payday 2 on the most-played chart.
That's a bit harsh, if it was literally Payday 2 with a new engine and graphics upgrades I'm sure plenty of people would buy it happily, the main problem seems to be that it's not as good, which isn't a great sign for a sequel
It was never going to be able to live up the sheer breadth of content Payday 2 amassed over what, a decade?
Granted, it doesn't really excuse some other quality features missing like at the very least, a lobby browser or offline mode. An actual lobby is nice too. I was just playing Payday 2 for a bit, joined an ongoing mission with randoms, we did pretty well, and we just kept doing more heists together. You can't do that in Payday 3.
Not a ton of good loud heists also with how the progression system is. Its pointless to do the same things over and over again since you have to beat those stupid challenges and many of them favor being stealthy.
It's been a terrible launch and there are still major issues that need fixing. Too little content, bad progression system, bad matchmaking system, mostly boring skill tree for loud... But I'm still having a lot of fun with it despite all of that. I wanted more out of a finished game, but at least most of the heists that it shipped with are interesting and fun. 99 Boxes can go to hell.
I wish people would just stop preordering games. I think a lot of these launch problems would magically disappear if developers actually had to produce finished, high-quality games in order to get paid.
I love 99 boxes, but that’s only because of the sweet sweet XP glitch for weapons and skills, although it’s pretty easy to unlock all the skills without cheesing.
For those wondering, the exit zone/square thing marks the mission as completed as soon as you step into it, which is probably intended. What’s not intended is that on this heist every time you walk in and out of the square it counts as an additional completion. So if you want to level a gun just do a run of 99 boxes and hop in and out of the exit for a few minutes and then complete it (I usually trigger it 100-150 times to be sure). Gun done.
Honestly it’s the only thing that kept me playing for as long as I did, because trying to level the weapons is almost as bad as the infamy grind. Whoever pushed the progression systems through in this state should feel shame, although I doubt they’re capable of doing so.
honestly, i have played the game for about 60 hours and I am just about (halfway maybe?) through Act 2. I wouldn't worry so much about what act falls short in what way, when there is simply so much in the game as-is. Act 1 was available through Early Access, i would expect A1 to be more polished than A2 and 3 simply because A1 has had three years of player feedback versus the others which have had, what, 2 months of feedback?
Damn shame. At its core, it has the potential to be a really fun game! It just started off as an absolute shit show with far less QoL features than it's predecessor had. Payday 2 got several hundred updates over its decade of activity, so the game will get better over time. The new companies in charge, Starbreeze and Deep Silver, really shit the bed on their decision making, though. There's a lot of absolutely dumb shit involved with launch-day PD3.
Hell, there was supposed to be their 1st patch coming out today, that was pushed back from the 10th. It's been pushed back again without even a hint of a new deadline.
I can give them credit for basically redesigning everything on a whole new engine. But a lot of the new issues they have that PD2 didn't have are entirely from their top-level decisions. They wanted always-online crossplay, but haven't gotten anywhere near an infrastructure that provides the same capabilities that PD2 had. There's no built in voice chat. Matchmaking is limited to picking specific heists at specific difficulties. There's no real way in-game to get in touch with another player you just met.
For a game that's all about playing with people, or makes it a lot harder to get them together, especially compared to the previous game.
Not sure but you want 50% of players to stick around. Eve Online had to polish and revamp their new player experience multiple times because newbies kept quiting their first week.