Of course, the developer will likely take advantage of Payday 3’s new setting to make the game feel distinct from its predecessors, but it will likely have to do more to make it stand out from the competition. This could include increasing the game’s scale, adding new skills and progression systems, new weapons, and designing missions with entirely new challenges to mix things up. One of the biggest areas Payday 3 could improve on Payday 2 is adding more variety to help the title be even more replayable.
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How Payday 3 Could Add More Variety
While Payday 2 is already a replayable game, Payday 3 could take cues from some recent releases to add more variety to its missions. One example is Back 4 Blood’s corruption cards. At the start of each mission in Back 4 Blood, players get a difficulty-dependant number of cards that modify the mission with a variety of effects. These can include things like adding boss monsters to levels, weather effects, and extra challenges that players can complete for extra rewards. In Payday 3 these cards could include extra security measures, restrictions on what equipment players can use, storms that decrease visibility, or unique police forces to contend with.
Payday 3 should also look towards the Contract missions in the new Hitman games by allowing players to make their own missions as well. Hitman 3 is the best performing title in the series, and the Contracts mechanic has been a big hit with fans. It allows players to set up their own targets, equipment, and objectives on the game’s maps to then challenge other players. Letting players create the challenges themselves could also add more variety to the missions already in the game than just randomizing certain elements by having them be personally constructed.
A third way that the developers could improve the variety in Payday 3 lies in how the developers have described the game’s setting as being living and breathing. With an advanced enough AI system managing the city surrounding each mission it would be possible for citizens and the police to react to the actions of players in a number of ways. This could lead to events like players having to figure out a different escape plan because the police blocked off some of the roads or hostages turning violent as one of them turned out to have a concealed carry permit. It would undoubtedly be difficult to find a balance where the events happen often enough to mix things up without being too annoying as well as not being too repetitive, but it could add a lot to the game if done well. The system could particularly help make stealth more engaging over the systems in Payday 2 that are easily exploited with specific builds by having guards be more reactive to the player’s actions.
It will be very interesting to see exactly how Payday 3 ends up when it is eventually released. Hopefully, it will be able to match up to or surpass the impressive legacy that Payday 2 has left behind. There are still a few years before Payday 3 aims to release, so the developers should have plenty of time to explore different options and iterate on the series in potentially great ways. With how long it is until the game’s release it will likely be some time before fans will start getting any more information from the developers, but one can only hope that it will be worth the wait.
Payday 3 is currently in development with a release window of 2023.
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