There was a time when video game launches were all but guaranteed to be “refined experiences” at launch. Now, whether those experiences were good or not depended on the game itself and who was playing it. However, there were rarely any AAA or “big release” titles that had buggy launches that had to be fixed immediately or apologies being sent out because of what happened. If you made a buggy launch during the early days of gaming, your studio was over. Fast forward to now, and buggy launches are the norm, sadly, with titles like Payday 3 being the kind of AAA experience you would expect to be great, and then it turns out terrible.
The irony of this is not lost on gamers, as Starbreeze was famous for its previous entry in the heist franchise, creating DLC for it LONG after the game’s main launch and keeping a hungry fanbase happy. They didn’t even intend to do a third game until fan demand basically forced their hand, and then, they fumbled that entirely. The launch was, in the developers’ own words, “disastrous,” leading to apologies, tons of fixes, and the admission that they shouldn’t have launched when they did.
In an interview with PCGamesN, Starbreeze community head Almir Listo got very candid about how bad the game was:
“When you have a launch like we did – a disastrous launch, where nobody is able to play the game – there is no place to hide. But it’s important that we don’t use the technical issues as an excuse because we clearly missed the mark from an experience point of view as well. The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players.”
Almir, and others in the interview, did their best to admit all they did wrong, including stating that the team that helped make the previous entry weren’t all at Starbreeze, and that led to different views and ideas on what to make. That also led to them making something that “didn’t resonate” with people like the last game did. They even went so far as to admit they were overconfident in their skills based on their success via the decade-long cycle with the last entry.
While they are trying to fix things with Payday 3, you can’t help but shake your head at the fact that this is yet another developer who felt that they could “make whatever they wanted and people would buy it” and then were sent reeling when that didn’t happen. It’s a tale that’s getting retold a lot lately, and gamers are sick of it.
