Just about everyone knows that Payday 3 had a terrible launch, and developer Starbreeze admitted as much in a recent interview, despite making some promising promises.
Payday 3 was difficult to run from the start – matchmaking issues persisted, and it wasn’t as if its predecessor Payday 2 had a 10x increase in players on Steam just a month after launch. What the developers hope to get out of the sequel. Now, in a recent interview with PCGamesN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community lead Almir Listo talked about the game’s launch and the studio’s hopes for the game’s future. Listo explained that Payday 3 “encountered major technical issues, making the game more or less unplayable for a few weeks.
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“When you launch a game like we did – a disastrous launch where no one can play the game – there’s no place to hide… the game feels unfinished. It’s a bad experience for our players. Another problem is that “Payday 2” took 10 years to develop, and Starbreeze is aware of this. “It’s a challenge to get the right experience from ten years of production, and every game project is different from the other. I think a lot of little things are built in,” Listow explains.
Penniger chimed in: “A lot of the problems were caused by us not doing our due diligence. We were developing Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted… and it ended up being a product.” I think. We were somewhat confident that Payday 2 would be a success, but we ended up making a decision too quickly.
Of course, the future of gaming is still worth thinking about. Penniger said the team is working hard to listen to the community to understand why Payday 2 is so successful, noting that it’s “trying to do too many things at once. Our focus needs to be a stronger core fantasy.”
Listo said that Starbreeze is currently focusing on three points to attract players back. The first point is to make the game “better and better,” but the second point is also worth noting, “to regain the trust and respect of the community.” Last but not least, for Listow, it’s all about telling “a great story. PAYDAY’s storytelling has heart and soul, and that’s what I’m looking forward to in the coming months.”
Neither Listo nor Penniger have revealed specific details on how they’ll get to this point, but any player who was disappointed with Payday 3 will at least have something to look forward to.