Starbreeze Studios has revealed plans to remove Payday 3’s always online requirement.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Starbreeze made this announcement at the end of an update where the studio discussed Payday 3’s many technical launch issues. Starbreeze made this statement:
“Payday 3 matchmaking infrastructure has not performed as tested and expected.
Matchmaking software encountered an unforeseen error, which made it unable to handle the massive influx of players. The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbreeze’s third-party matchmaking partner.
A new version of the matchmaking server software was gradually deployed across all regions leading to improved performance. However, a software update made by the partner during late Sunday again introduced instability to the matchmaking infrastructure. The partner continues to work to improve and stabilize Payday 3’s online systems.
The issue in question did not manifest during Technical Betas or Early Access due to the specificity of rapid user influx and load-balancing. Starbreeze is currently evaluating all options, both short- and long-term.
In the short-term, this means Starbreeze’ focus is to ensure the player experience. In the long-term, this means evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services and making Payday 3 less dependent on online services.”
Payday 3, following the precedent set by the original Payday and Payday 2, has a single player mode where the player can choose to add bots as their teammates for each heist. However, whether you play alone or with friends, Payday 3 requires that you have a constant online connection.
When Starbreeze announced this always online requirement, they did not provide a reason for why it was implemented in the game. Without an explanation, we can look at the reasons game studios do this in general. The usual reason is that these games were made to be online multiplayer experiences. Subsequently, if you play the game with bots, you aren’t really playing the game the way it was meant to.
In particular, this means the game could probably be considerably less fun than it could be. Bots can’t match the particular ways human players think, including potential out of the box thinking. Some games are explicitly designed by their developers to make that experience as good as possible for such an experience.
Another potential reason is that Starbreeze is deliberately tracking their players while they play, and as a result, using this opportunity to collect telemetry, or game data. I believe it is possible to build such data collection systems without always being online, but the way Starbreeze could be doing it could also be rewarding them with instant data, and instant feedback.
Whatever the reason, things have clearly rapidly changed for Starbreeze and Payday 3. A few days ago, the company was talking about adding an offline mode. Today that has escalated to removing the online requirement completely.
We don’t know if this means Payday 3 will be playable across a local area network now. But at the very least, Starbreeze should be doing this to gain back a lot of goodwill that they had lost.
