Payday 3 Dev Explains Reason For Bad Launch

UPDATE

Do you hope that Starbreeze can fix this game like they hope? Or do you feel it’s doomed? Let us know below!

ORIGINAL STORY

Since 2023 is almost over, it’s easy to look back and see the many “highs and lows” that have happened over the course of the gaming year. Trust us, there have been plenty. On the bright side, plenty of indie and AAA titles have astounded fans and given them hope for what might happen in 2024 and beyond. However, on the flip side, NUMEROUS AAA titles were so buggy at launch or weren’t optimized that players were furious they weren’t delayed. Payday 3 was one such title, as it had such a broken launch it’s STILL recovering from it.

Recall that this entry was the follow-up to the beloved title that lasted for a decade on its own without issue. Oh, and it had plenty of DLC over that period, so that helped, too. But when Payday 3 launched, nothing seemed to work! The matchmaking was skewed, the gameplay wasn’t as fun as promised, and more. After weeks of getting raked over the coals, Starbreeze Studios finally released a video detailing all that went wrong.

It was Lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger who spoke the most during the video. He revealed that a key bug that the team missed led to many of the game’s woes:

“A lot of you want to know why this happened and what we’ve done to make sure we don’t end up in this situation again,” Häll-Penninger said. “To make a long, complicated, and technical story short, we found a critical error in our backend update pipeline just after the game went live.”

That bug was so great that trying to fix it with an immediate update might have set gamers back further:

“As a result of this, there was a significant risk that any update we made could affect the player saves and progression. We had to ensure that the test environment functioned as intended before we could proceed with publishing the update. We have no reason to want to delay updates for this long.”

He further noted that this was frustrating for all involved and that Starbreeze is working hard to ensure that issues like this don’t pop up again. The team also revealed the game’s first batch of free content, including some heists from the previous title returning.

The problem is that the third entry has already turned off many players and are already going back to the previous one!

If things don’t turn around, this could be really bad for Starbreeze.