One of the most-anticipated new shooters of 2023, Payday 3 had a seriously troubled launch. The heist sequel faced criticism due to performance problems, missing features, unwelcome tweaks and overhauls, and the always-online functionality that impacted matchmaking. Starbreeze has since initiated an expansive campaign to try to save Payday 3 – veteran developers from the first two games have been arranged into a ‘strike team,’ and a series of resuscitative updates called ‘Medic Bag’ are underway. Seven months since launch, one of Payday 3’s biggest problems is now being fixed. Could this be the start of a comeback?
Issues, problems, a lot of bad sentiment – Payday 3 is nevertheless an FPS game with potential. Between Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76, and No Man’s Sky, we’ve seen plenty of big, emboldening redemption stories in gaming, and there remains the possibility that Starbreeze’s shooter sequel could find a way back. Matchmaking, certainly, would be a good place to start. Until now, if you wanted to quickly get into a game of Payday 3, well, you couldn’t – you had to manually choose a heist and wait for an available spot. Now, however, that’s all going to change.
Starbreeze confirms that the next Payday 3 update will deliver the first version of quickplay. It’s basic – you’ll be able to select a difficulty level, but nothing else. A more expanded version of the feature is set to follow, however, which will allow you to set a variety of parameters to find the perfect quickplay game.
“This version is a nice easy-to-use system that does the job,” Starbreeze says. “The thing we want from the feature is to get people into the kind of game they want to play with the press of a button. In Payday 2, you accomplished that in two ways: either sit around Crime.Net until something strikes your fancy, or use the quickplay menu with filters that were added to the game later on.
“We know we want to create an updated quickplay, a v2, by building on the groundwork that we have for this update. What that will look like is still being discussed, and we’re open to suggestions. Currently, we’re at the crossroads of either creating a standalone quickplay v2 with filters, or somehow baking it into the Crime.Net-style server browser coming later in the year.”
Starbreeze invites players to leave feedback regarding what kind of quickplay system they would like, which you can do right here. Alongside quickplay, another vital Payday 3 feature will arrive in the next big update: player merging. As it stands, we’re still waiting for a full server browser feature and can’t choose between stealth or ‘loud’ heists.
With player merging, however, when you finish a heist, you will remain in a team and in a lobby with that group of players. If you like them, you can stick around. If not, you can leave and find another crew. It’s a basic feature and we’re still missing the more robust matchmaking options that you would expect from a co-op game, but Payday 3 is seemingly moving in the right direction. We’ll have to see what else Starbreeze can pull out of the Medic Bag in the coming months.
In the meantime, try some of the other best crime games, or maybe the best multiplayer games available right now on PC.
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