The Daily Populous Tuesday October 15th, 2024 morning edition
Authored by eurogamer.net and submitted by Remorse_123

Starbreeze - the developer behind the beleaguered Payday 3 - has likened its release to being a rock band when "the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left".

In an interview with PCGN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo discussed the shooter's disappointing debut, acknowledging its "disastrous launch" wasn't the only issue.

"The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players," Listo admitted.

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"It's hard to make videogames, and it's particularly difficult to follow up on the kind of success that Payday 2 was, not only at its launch, but also in the ten years succeeding that," the community head added.

"Andreas and myself were part of the Payday 2 development team at that time. Not everyone, ten years on, was still there. 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."

"A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn't do our due diligence well enough," Penniger added. "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."

"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."

On its release last year, Payday 3 struggled with matchmaking issues and unpopular online-only requirements, while its first major patch was hit with repeated delays, eventually arriving two months after the game's troubled launch. Since then Starbreeze has released two additional major bug fixing patches under the name Operation Medic Bag, and introduced an early offline mode. Amid all this, the studio revealed it's working on a Dungeons and Dragons game.

Listo cites the launch issues as particularly problematic, but said it was "important that we don't use the technical issues as an excuse because we'd clearly missed the mark from an experience point of view as well. The game just felt unfinished".

Admitting that if the team had just carried on as if there was nothing wrong, the game "would be dead at this point", Listo also took time to acknowledge the importance of feedback from the Payday community.

"If we just put our heads in the sand and continued on, the game would be dead at this point. But even the angriest Payday fans still come from a good place. They want the game to succeed, and their anger is only a reflection of that.

"They're not hating on the game just to be haters - they're telling us what they want the game to have, in order for it to improve."

I awarded Payday 3 three out of five stars last year, calling it a "shallow shooter that doesn't offer anywhere near enough bang for your ill-gotten buck."

notodial on October 14th, 2024 at 18:55 UTC »

I tried to play for three days straight with my partner. I really tried to give it an honest shot. I was SUPER excited. It was such an incredible failure and so impossible to play that it practically ruined the entire series for me. 3 straight days of trying to connect and we were never able to play a single round. Seriously the worst game launch I've ever tried to be a part of.

It's more like if you were a rock band, but in order to see them perform you have to cross a moat with an alligator pit to get to the venue, and then when you finally get there the doors are boarded up and everyone has already left.

Deathtrooper50 on October 14th, 2024 at 17:10 UTC »

Management made the band write their songs on stage and no one stuck around to watch. Then management set the stage on fire.

KingVape on October 14th, 2024 at 15:56 UTC »

More like the band realizes they don’t know how to play their instruments. The stage didn’t break, the band just didn’t perform.