Step out of retirement back into the life of crime in the shoes of the Payday Gang, the envy of their peers and the nightmare of law-enforcement wherever they go. Several years after the crew’s reign of terror over Washington DC has ended, they assemble once again to deal with the threat that roused them out of early retirement.

Payday 3 takes players to the city of unlimited possibilities - New York City.

The Payday Gang, consisting of Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains return from retirement, and find themselves in the Big Apple after an unknown threat appears, shattering the illusion of peacefully living on the “right” side of the law. As they say, “Leopards can’t change their spots”, and thanks to years of experience and a mysterious new player in the criminal underworld, they quickly get their hands on the first lucrative heists and leave their explosive calling card with the city's security and police forces.

Players will discover new ways to pull off the perfect heist thanks to new skills, gadgets and weapons while the Payday 3 storyline will continuously expand with new content and challenges.

The Payday 3 team today revealed “Operation Medic Bag” – a focused effort to respond to community expectations and improving Payday 3. The initiative covers sought-after features such as solo-mode and offline play as well as new content, enhanced features and community initiatives. 

A team consisting of veteran developers from the design, community, communication and production teams has reviewed and revisited all aspects of PAYDAY 3, identifying the most impactful changes and reprioritized the development pipeline.

The major categories of Operation Medic Bag:

• 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 heister in true.

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.
• 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.

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.

We will also be rolling out skill lines, cosmetic items, rewards, a free LMG primary 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.

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
• Loadout Renaming
• Recurring Smaller Content Drops
• Controller Improvements
• Vote Kick
• Rotating Stealth Modifiers
• Unready Button
• Play Again Feature
• Merge Players into Party Post Match
• Daily Activities with Rewards
• Mask Vendor with Weekly Rotating Inventory
• Communication Wheel Improvements v1

 

Key Features:

• The Tightest Crew - The legendary Payday Crew, feared by the law and underworld alike, is back. New York City has a lot of opportunities for a heister with a plan. 
• Give in to your greed - Give outlet to your greed and let loose in Payday 3. Claim any valuables you might come across in order to build a private arsenal of weapons, cosmetics and accolades. 
• The Art of Heisting - In Payday 3 the choice is in the hands of the players. Choose your equipment, your skills and your approach. Each heist will play differently depending on the choices you make. 
• Thrive in Co-op - play heists with elegance, as in Ocean's Eleven, or go toe-to-toe with the security services, as in HEAT. Each playthrough is unique and full of action and tension!

Payday 3 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam / Epic Games Store) at $39.99.