Payday 3 Team Breaks Down How Heists Are Different This Time

When it comes to the Payday franchise, it’s a series of games that makes you feel like actual high-profile thieves and robbers, and that means that you need to take care with each heist if you want to make it out alive and with your pay intact. With the second title, the team at Starbreeze Studios rewrote the book on how games of this nature can be cared for over time via their long line of content updates and DLC. But that was a long time ago, and Payday 3 is coming to show the world that the game has changed in more ways than one.

The Starbreeze team has been releasing special dev diary videos to highlight the different elements of the game. In episode 5, they focus on the heists themselves and how they are different from past games and thus will force players to adapt to new situations.

One of the key things they note is that the game will have eight heists to start. But the difference here is that each one will have “its own identity” and has to be planned differently than the others.

Teamwork will be vital here, which plays into some of the new stealth mechanics in the game, such as being able to position your team precisely where you need them to be to get the task done.

Another key difference between the second and third games is what happens if your stealth plan fails. In the last game, it made you feel bad because you “failed” at your task of getting “in and out.” But here, you’ll simply be asked to adapt to what happened and push ahead.

As you go through the different heist locations, you’ll notice that the civilians have gotten an upgrade in their AI. Before, civilians acted the same, but that wouldn’t be fully realistic. So now, there are plain old civilians, and then there are the employees of the place you’re trying to rob. Each one has a different mentality and will do things differently depending on how you get them to react.

Just as important is that the security of certain high-value targets has been upgraded. So a key part of every heist is figuring out how to adapt to these new obstacles and get out with the pay.

If all goes as planned, Payday 3 could easily be the franchise’s biggest and most diverse entry. You can check out the full dev diary below.