{"id":34942,"date":"2023-09-12T03:00:06","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T02:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/payday-3-review-in-progress-open-beta-impressions\/"},"modified":"2023-09-12T03:00:06","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T02:00:06","slug":"payday-3-review-in-progress-open-beta-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/payday-3-review-in-progress-open-beta-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"Payday 3 Review in Progress \u2013 Open Beta Impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From the city street shootouts of Heat<\/a> to the creepy clown masks found in The Dark Knight\u2019s<\/a> opening moments, there\u2019s something alarmingly alluring about the Hollywood bank heist fantasy. Fortunately, the excellent Payday series has been letting me live it out for more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet of my own. The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator, Payday 3, recently concluded its open beta before we all get to filch the final version later this month \u2013 and though this early look was only a limited snapshot of what\u2019s to come, it already feels like a significant step up from the lawbreaking of Payday 2<\/a>. After twelve hours of smashing and grabbing, I\u2019ve got a whole lot more left to see in the full game, but so far I\u2019m very excited to come out of retirement and continue my life of crime.<\/p>\n

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Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists. But within seconds of beginning my first run of the introductory bank robbery (the beta\u2019s only available level), the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded. You move faster overall and can now do more modern maneuvers like sliding, which I found useful in combat as well as for stealth. Weapons feel more punchy and satisfying, even if they do have hopelessly small magazines and long reload times before you\u2019ve spent some of your ill-gotten cash on upgrades. You can even use civilian hostages as meat shields now, forcing enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incremental updates to Payday 2, Payday 3 immediately feels like a proper sequel, even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing bags of cash into an unmarked van remains identical.<\/p>\n

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One less exciting adjustment, however, is the new skill tree system, which does away with the complicated buildcrafting found in Payday 2 and replaces it with a loadout system that makes you pick just four perks to take with you on each job. The good news is that the perks you can equip are pretty darn cool (even if many are old abilities making a return), like one that makes you so charming your own hostages will revive you if you get downed in combat and another that lets you slide tackle any silly narcs who get in your way. Building out my character\u2019s tree and making weighty decisions about which role I\u2019d occupy within a crew was such a big part of Payday 2, so this overly simplified and noncommittal replacement feels like a pretty big step backwards from what I\u2019ve seen. Not only did I feel less powerful due to the limited set of perks, but since you can just instantly swap abilities from mission-to-mission, it completely removes any sense of the specialized roles that\u2019s central to the crime genre. They also seem to have done away with Perk Decks in the beta, which allowed you to round out your character with minor perks related to their background \u2013 another concerning sign that things may have been dumbed down here. We\u2019ll see how much of this remains in the full version, but so far I\u2019m not particularly enthused by these meta changes.<\/p>\n

Pulling off a clean heist feels achievable much quicker.<\/section>\n

That said, the revamped progression does help enable some hugely expanded options and mechanics geared towards stealth runs, which are even more significant than the improvements to movement and combat. In Payday 2, only the most committed and elite players really stood a chance of pulling off a totally clean heist, and proper leveling was almost a requirement to unlock things like a silent drill to get through vaults before making an attempt became even remotely viable. In contrast, pulling off a clandestine operation during this beta was almost immediately achievable, even with a randomly matchmade group of players only loosely communicating with one another via text chat. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s also largely owing to clever and fantastic changes to the way missions are designed, in which stealth runs are now given a completely different route to success. For example, the Secure Capital Bank level normally requires you to go the humdrum path of using thermite to burn through the top of the bank vault then dive in from the floor above before making off with the loot, but this series of objectives smartly only triggers as your primary path once you’ve been caught. Before that, your crew can take the much more complex and rewarding route of breaking into various parts of the bank to sabotage electrical systems and deactivate security measures to gain access to the vault without anyone being the wiser, which plays out like an entirely different level if you can pull it off. In Payday 2, that same kind of bank heist required players to follow more or less the exact same path of drilling through the vault no matter your preferred tactic, and to do it stealthily you just had to not get caught.<\/p>\n

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A bunch of new mechanics have been added to support stealth play as well, like the ability to pickpocket security guards to relieve them of their keycards, or use environmental lures that can draw the attention of those lousy coppers and buy you precious time to lockpick a door and slip by unnoticed. You can also deploy hidden cameras to keep tabs on an area or scout ahead without the risk of drawing attention \u2013 stealth play seriously feels like a complete overhaul from its predecessor, and I can\u2019t wait to see what else the full game has to offer for that playstyle.<\/p>\n

But all those new options doesn\u2019t mean pulling off a stealth run is going to be easy, and that\u2019s thanks to enhanced enemy AI across the board. Guards now respond to your actions, breaking free of their usual patrol routes to investigate suspicious activity and doing a whole lot more than drawing their gun and shooting you when you\u2019re spotted. For example, if you\u2019re found in a private but not entirely suspicious area, like the back office at a bank vs. the vault, instead of immediately trying to kill you, they\u2019ll simply escort you to a public area and give you a good tongue lashing, which can be used by cunning players to remove guards from their posts temporarily. That smarter AI extends to combat as well, where the police do a great job of swarming you from all sides instead of standing around as target practice. They can also respond to your actions and try to obstruct your heist, like how they\u2019ll pull the fire alarm when you\u2019ve lit up that thermite, using the sprinkler system to delay your fire\u2019s progress. Likewise, hostages are now much more responsive to your commands and easier to boss around and control as you use them as collateral in combat or negotiation.<\/p>\n