Recent reviews by Zed

I am a seasoned Payday 2 player with 500+ hours, and purchased multiple DLC's.

Goes without saying I purchased payday 3 without checking reviews. As a big fan of PD2 and the fun I had on it, I wanted to support the studio. I purchased PD3 on release but only recently got time to sit down and actually play the game. I am currently at the bank job heist. I stopped playing PD2 in 2016/2017 back when they introduced the overkill difficulty.

I invite people to comment and give their opinion. Please try not to put other people down on their opinions, don't need keyboard warriors here xD.

( I am not programmer or game developer, so I do not know what is possible or not within the studio team,)


As someone who played MW2 and MW3 and a regular player of CSGO2, the studio could have looked at executing PD3 better.

I assume PD3 is using a better game engine and with this brings better use of resources, better graphics and more functionality.

It would be have been good to have the same menu as MW3 and port PD2 into PD3 as a separate option.

Example: Load up into PD3, and you have 2 selections, Play PD3 storyline (will come to this next) and play PD2 Heists so you can enjoy the PD2 heists within the PD3 game/engine and hopefully it would have blended the two games nicely. Porting over heists with better graphics and more things to do in the heists. I know they added 2 PD2 heists of which I only did the cook off heist in PD2. Even if they added in the heists as a DLC with added stuff and better heists, I don't think there would be too much of a cry in the community. I'm all for reinventing the wheel as long as it brings good play-ability and its enjoyable.


Now this is a weird one.

Lets start with PD2, from my memory we just had heists in the form of DLC's and releases, and you just played each difficulty trying to complete it and get your achievements. I don't remember being any sort of story line to it.

In PD3, you now have a storyline. Two short clips and then your heist. The problem I see with this is, how long do you keep the story line going and when does it become stale. Now that I have the mentality of the game being a story line, im just going through the heists to see how the storyline goes more than actually enjoying the heist and thinking of completing it as a puzzle. It seems strange to introduce an visible storyline in PD3 and ironically starts off with their money being stolen by the security company executive. If they wanted a storyline they should have introduced a character storyline that would have been much better.

Something they could have done for PD3 is add in a character heat gauge. Similar from PD2 with the detection gauge where under a certain number it was blue if you was going stealth and if you was going loud it would turn red.

How I imagine it would be like is, if you completed more missions loud your character would have a high heat rating so when you start the next mission you automatically start the mission as loud with swat and everyone in place and would be harder to break it and but shorter mission and tasks and vice-versa with stealth, each route having its pros and cons. Have the ability to change characters with each character bringing something different to the table.

I'm sorry to say, the UI and UX is horrible. The way it is set out just doesn't sit right with me, I don't know what they done, but done fu*ked up.


Now there are some pros and cons with PD3 gameplay.

Overall user gameplay, I have no major qualms with, except when you get arrested you're super glued to the spot xD, how does that make sense, I should be able to move into cover so someone can help me without being spotted.

Team Bots:- Somehow they alerted a guard whilst the they were on a search, wtf. They're poor at following the player, I was doing the nightclub heist and got arrested in the VIP area, I commanded follow and help, nothing, need to be better. When you get arrested by the guard, the bots should be able to help you. I'm just stuck in one spot, especially when I'm doing a solo game, the bots should help you automatically.

Guards:- One massive gripe I have is, when they're alerted to you and start chasing you, they follow you everywhere. I was doing the nightclub heist. The guarded spotted me and started chasing me, I closed two doors on the way and then hid the bathroom stalls, yet the guard came and fu*cked the game up. This should not be a thing, if I run away and break line of sight they should disengage but keep looking until mt heat comes down (introduction of a heat bar should be added for this). I don't know if this was a feature in PD2, but I welcome the addition of being escorted out of the building instead of just alarming and then going loud. Not sure if being arrested on the stop was in PD2, but a welcome addition except with the few gripes above. I like they kept the radio answer feature after killing a guard.

Rag-doll/Bag physics:- This is a personal preference, the bag throwing doesn't go far, and rag-dolls, they just drop right in front of you. I assume this is to imitate real life physics, which I guess is a personal preference that I like my physics a bit more lighter so I can throw things further

Everything else:- I have not gone into full depth of skills and feature and will update when I do. The only thing I can really put here is that there no bagging up bodies, not sure if body bags are a player level feature. Leaving bodies in a random place for someone to find seems like a poor choice.

I do welcome the addition of the lock-picking feature.

Dropped ammo, this is poor. I killed a guard and they've dropped ammo, from probably a full clip of ammo, I only get 3 bullets? That's stupid, they need to update the ammo drop and maybe less ammo drops. IMO that would be better.


It's a shame they don't have local offline for PD3 for times like these when they're doing server maintenance, we would have this hassle with P2P connections, I'm not sure what the reason was behind this, but that's a poor move. You can't just select solo only option, you have to select invite only and wait like 3/4 mins or so before you're in a lobby, which again poor choice probably due to using the studios server I assume.


There's nothing really much to complain about going loud. Stealth however doesn't actually feel like stealth, there's nothing really stealthy about PD3, with PD2 you had the loudness gauge, how your loadout affects the gauge and also skills to compliment it.


Not really explored it too much, except assigning some skill points for the health and that's it, maybe when there's much use for it and I use it then I may update this.


I know there's probably things I have missed and I will probably update when I have played the game more.

I have seen mentions of no safehouse, I rarely used this feature when it was introduced in PD2 so can't comment on it.


That is my review so far of PD3 and I welcome people to comment and add to it.

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If a member of the game studio reads this, make your lobbies P2P, I had the whole day off and now I can't play PD3 until server maintenance. That's a whole-load of BS!
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I will still give this a thumbs up as I am enjoying what I can

This is a really good game, like the concept is good, but the way high levelled people kill lower levelled people for fun is not fun at all, happened to me so many times