Payday 3

Payday 3 is a first-person shooter game developed by Starbreeze Studios and published by Deep Silver. The game is a sequel to Payday 2, and is the third installment in the Payday series. It was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 21 September 2023. It received mixed reviews from critics.
Setting
Payday 3 takes place after the ending of Payday 2 where the Payday Gang went separate ways and left their lives of crime, but being double-crossed and losing all of their money causes the Payday Gang to return to the life of crime. The original crew of characters originating from Payday: The Heist ("Dallas", "Chains", "Wolf", and "Hoxton") and 2 other heisters, one returning from Payday 2 ("Joy"), and one new ("Pearl"), will appear as additional characters. The game will take place mainly in New York. From teaser images, one of the missions will take place at the "Gold & Sharke Incorporated" bank. Payday 3 will take place in the 2020s, intended to add more depth to the Payday Gang's crimes with game-changing differences like more advanced surveillance or the rise of cryptocurrency.
Development
Developer Starbreeze Studios announced in May 2016 that Payday 3 was in development at Overkill Software, after Starbreeze acquired the rights to the intellectual property from 505 Games for around . In March 2021, Plaion committed to pay to assist in the game's development and marketing, including more than 18 months of post-launch support using the games as a service model. Payday 3 was developed using Unreal Engine 4, but will be upgraded to use Unreal Engine 5 post launch. On January 1, 2023, a teaser trailer titled A New Criminal Dawn was released, revealing its logo. Console versions also will be the same version as the game on PC platforms, unlike its predecessor. Overkill states that this is due to the game being created using the Unreal Engine. In June, Overkill announced that the game would release on September 18, 2023, for pre-orders of the Silver and Gold editions, while the standard edition would release on September 21.
Reception
Payday 3 received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.
Vikki Blake, writing for Eurogamer, called it "a shallow shooter that doesn't offer anywhere near enough bang for your ill-gotten buck." Travis Northup, writing for IGN, wrote that "Payday 3 cooperative heists are off to a strong start, even if the vault is a bit bare at the moment." Giovanni Colantonio, in a review for Digital Trends, said that "Payday 3 doesn't shake up its predecessor's formula much, but a strong batch of initial heists sets the live service shooter up for success."
Upon launch, the game's servers failed due to the massive influx of players, making the game almost unplayable, since the game is online-only. These outages have lasted for days. Starbreeze announced that the game had attracted more than 1.3 million players at launch. It became the fifth and the sixth best-selling video game in the US and the UK respectively in September 2023. One month after launch, the player base on Steam plummuted, with Payday 2 having 10 times more concurrent players than Payday 3.
References
External links
Bank robbery in fiction
Cooperative video games
First-person shooter multiplayer online games
First-person shooters
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Multiplayer online games
Organized crime video games
Plaion
PlayStation 5 games
Stealth video games
Unreal Engine games
2023 video games
Video game sequels
Video games developed in Sweden
Video games set in New York City
Windows games
Xbox Series X and Series S games