CEO of Payday 3 Issues Apology for Turbulent 'Always Online' Launch

By many accounts, Payday 3 appears to be a disappointing half-step forward for the longrunning co-op bank robbery
series. Unlike its predecessor, it also requires players to always be online, a seemingly grave misjudgement given
Payday 3’s first-week launch woes. The problems with crashes, slow matchmaking, and disconnected servers were
so bad the CEO of creator Starbreeze Studios began apologizing for the state of the game almost immediately.

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“No matter what you choose, public, friends only, invite only, it will just matchmaker forever,” wrote one player
in a post that blew up on Reddit. “Release day is usually tough for studios. This...This is embarrassing.”

Players on PS5, meanwhile, began the week with an apparent wrong build of the game. Lead producer Andreas
Häll-Penninger blamed Sony for pushing out an incorrect patch. “PS5 players: For reasons out of our control you
are currently playing an older version of the game,” he tweeted. “Sony is working on rolling out the proper
patch.” The right version arrived a day later, but it was still a bad omen for fans on PS5 who paid £30 extra
for the Silver Edition to play the game before others.

Naturally, the outages have once again spurred calls for companies to move away from always-online requirements.
Payday 2’s offline mode lets players run through missions with AI-controlled characters. While the allure of the
series remains its real-time online multiplayer antics, being able to still enjoy the game without an internet
connection was a nice feature. An offline mod for the game is apparently already in the works.

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A three-act play on the Payday 3 Twitter account perfectly captured the mood of the launch. “HEISTERS! We’re
number one on Steam!” the account tweeted on September 21. “Heisters, we’re currently experiencing slow
matchmaking,” read its very next tweet. “We’re investigating and working on a solution.” While matchmaking was
unavailable for many throughout the afternoon and evening, the studio reported that things were improving by
early in the morning on September 22, only for outages to creep back in as the day went on.

The ongoing mess is another reminder of why so many people take a wait-and-see approach to new game launches,
especially on PC, especially when they have stringent online requirements. “Payday 3 feels like the kind of
game that is not meant for day-one purchase,” wrote one observer on Reddit. “But rather wait until they have a
bunch of content released.”

This is effectively what IGN wrote in the very first paragraph of its Payday 3 review. “The usual horrible
Payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it’s not exactly the giant leap
forward I was hoping for,” it reads. “Still, if Payday 2’s post-launch support is any indication, this is at
least a very promising start for what could become another decade of happily pistol whipping cashiers and fixing
drills.”