Payday 3 had a pretty rough first year of existence, if we’re being honest. Slowly, and with great difficulty, the developer Starbreeze managed to make it to the first anniversary on a positive note. Now, studio heads look back and discuss the state of the game on day one.
In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Payday 3‘s community lead Almir Listo and lead producer Andreas Penninger explained what happened early on. “Our energy was like ‘we’re a rock band, and we’re coming onto the stage, and we’ve got a new album.’ And the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left,” said Penninger. “When you have a launch like we did – a disastrous launch, where nobody is able to play the game – there is no place to hide. But it’s important that we don’t use the technical issues as an excuse because we clearly missed the mark from an experience point of view as well. The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players,” Listo continued, setting the tone for the rest of the interview.
Payday 3 is on the road to redemption, but it’s not quite there yet
The really interesting bit to highlight ahead of everything else about Listo and Penninger, specifically, is that they were recently promoted to the position of effective game directors for Payday 3. This helps contextualize their interview with PCGN further still, and underlines the importance of them looking back at what’s gone down in the past year.
“It’s hard to make videogames, and it’s particularly difficult to follow up on the kind of success that Payday 2 was,” said Listo. “To draw the exact right learning from a ten-year production is challenging, but also every game project is different from another one. I think a lot of small things built up.”
As for Penninger, he had a similar, albeit slightly different point of view: “A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn’t do our due diligence well enough,” he said. “We built Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted, in parallel. It ended up being a product that people didn’t resonate with. I think we were a bit confident from the success of Payday 2 that we ended up making decisions too quickly.”
According to Listo and Penninger, Starbreeze is no longer dead-set on pushing forward certain unpopular changes that came about during the switch from Payday 2 over to Payday 3. Armor functionality, specifically, is a popular topic with the community, and Starbreeze didn’t want to budge on the matter until somewhat recently. Now, that is behind us, and Listo claims a different take on Payday 3 is already underway.
“Something we’ve learned is to try and understand the community, understand what made Payday 2 successful, and then to try and translate that into a more modern context,” said Penninger. Listo continued with a shortlist of objectives for Payday 3‘s second year of content: “One is to improve the experience and make the game better and better. Two, it’s regaining the trust and respect of the community. And three, it’s to tell a great story.”
