If you’ve been playingPayday 3since launch, you haven’t. Within a day,servers buckled under the massive influx of playersas the game proved a far bigger success than Starbreeze expected.Payday 3 is always online, so even if you want to play with bots by yourself, you need an internet connection. More than that, the servers have to be up and running. Since they weren’t for nearly a week, there was no way of getting in.
Before it came out, fans voiced concerns that always online would cause problems, predicting it could lock people out of single-player or, in the long run, make the game inaccessible when support stops. Global brand director Almir Listo was asked directly what would happen when servers go down, but he shrugged it off and laughed, “They won’t.”
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It felt out-of-touch and overly confident. Games always have server issues, support doesn’t go on forever, and the internet is just as fickle. But it’s even more egregious looking back after it took mere hours for that bravado to collapse in on itself. Payday 3 didn’t last a day before servers ran into issues, and it doesn’t inspire hope for its longevity if the only way you can play is to rely on a system that fell apart so quickly.
The first two Payday games already had the solution. You could play offline by yourself, so you could keep heisting even if your internet died. Online, it was peer-to-peer, meaningyouhosted the game. While this means you’re not relying on third-party servers, it isn’t ideal. Hosting yourself usually means other players have poor ping and input lag, but it’s at least a good backup system if all else fails.
Payday 3 has no fail-safes whatsoever. When the servers went down, we had an overly zealous social media account branding itself the “Twitter Man” trying to get down with the kids and guide us through the messy launch. Again, it felt out of touch, another line of communication tainted by unearned ego.
The real solution was being shouted from the rooftops at Starbreeze before Payday 3 launched - don’t make it always online. It was an obvious hurdle that was always likely to trip Starbreeze up one day. It just came far sooner than anyone expected.
Always online is a ticking time bomb. Eventually, the servers will crash, and your community will be locked out. Now that the bomb has detonated, Payday 3 is finally discussing the possibility of an offline mode. Discussing, not implementing. After such a disastrous launch, it should be the priority, not a topic of conversation that may or may not bear fruit. Offline play is the only long-term, sustainable fix.
Starbreeze has servers back online, and they’ve been stable for over 48 hours, but who’s to say when they’ll crash and burn again? DLC, sales, bundles, or whatever else could cause another huge influx of players, never mind that servers are driven by software, which is often held together by wishes and duct tape. Keeping the game always online just means rearming the bomb and resetting the clock- it will go off again eventually. How long will a community who can’t play your game stick around?
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